TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE OPPOSITION.
WE pointed out last week the very grave situation in which the Government finds itself, and how dark and precarious is its future. We wish most sincerely that it followed from these premises that the con- dition of the Opposition was correspondingly sound and strong. Unfortunately, however, an Opposition is not necessarily powerful when a Government is impotent. The Unionists have a great opportunity undoubtedly, but will they be able to seize it? What we desire and what we believe must be desired by all thinking and prudent men at the present moment is not merely that the present Government should be defeated, but that a wise and stable Unionist Government should be formed with the object of restoring public confidence and, as far as possible, undoing the harm which has been done by the Liberal Administration in the spheres of constitutional and social legislation. What are our prospects here ? That the Government will now go on losing by-elections wherever their majorities are not very large, and will suffer great reductions in their electoral strength in all cases, we do not doubt. At by-elections the electors think much more of the position and the policy of the Government than of the Opposition. When, however, it comes to a General Elec- tion, even though a failure of confidence in the Govern- ment is sure to have a good deal of effect, men begin to think again of the policy of the Opposition and of the kind of Government which will be formed if the Ministry is turned out. If in the electors' opinion there is some serious drawback to the victory of the Opposition, that drawback may do a great deal to check the tide that is flowing against the Administration. As things stand, there is in the eyes of a great body of the electors a strong obstacle to the replacing of a Home Rule Govern- ment by the Unionists. That obstacle is the taxation of food.
So long as men think only of the waste and muddle and financial profligacy of the present Cabinet they will cheerfully vote against them. When, however, they come close to the prospect of taxes on bread and meat, milk and cheese, and all that feeds a poor man's family, they shrink back from the alternative. We ourselves dread so greatly the destruction of the fabric of the Constitution by the introduction of Home Rule and the ruin of our finances by the recklessness and extravagance of our present rulers that we say frankly, we would rather run the risk of food taxes and Tariff Reform than endure any longer the legislative and fiscal enormities of Mr. Lloyd George. The evils of Tariff Reform are to be found not in the name but in the substance. But we have suffered, or are in the process of suffering, as great economic injuries from the present Government as we could get from the Protectionists, and in addition we must suffer at the hands of the Liberals the supreme disaster of the break-up of the United Kingdom. To put it in another way. We realize that food taxes, if they actually came, could be repealed. We know that the Union once destroyed can never be repaired. The ordinary balancing elector, however, the man who must be won to the Unionist Party if that party is to obtain office, for the most part will not see matters in this way. He has come to hate the present Government, and he will vote against it at a by-election; but when once the issue of the taxation of food is raised, his face is set like a flint against the food-taxers. No con- sideration of even greater evils will bring him to change his point of view. This is a situation which we may regret, but it is one which we shall not alter by ignoring it. We would rather incur the risk of being called prophets of evil by a certain section of Unionists than bury our heads in the sand and pretend with ostrich-like fatuity that the battle is won.
The real point that Unionist leaders have got to consider is this. They cannot win unless they get back the balanc- ing elector to support them. They must, that is, withdraw from the Liberal Party a large number of the voters who voted for them at the last three General Elections. A good many of such electors were secured at the first elec- tion in 1910, but not enough. The Opposition want to win back some ten or fifteen per cent. more than they succeeded in winning back in December 1910. In other words, the Unionists want to set free a great many voters to vote for them who, rightly or wrongly, at the present moment do not feel free to do so. The obvious way to accomplish this would of course be for Mr. Bonar Law and his colleagues in the Unionist leadership frankly to drop food taxes and to say that though they maintain their policy of Tariff Reform in other respects they mean to keep bread, butcher's meat, milk, and cheese on the free list, just as they have always intended to keep the flesh of the pig and the food that feeds the pig exempt from all taxation. But though this proposal may commend itself to us as Unionist Free Traders, we fully realize that it presents almost insuperable difficulties to the Tariff Reformers. To them it appears impracticable from the very beginning. It contravenes the maxim, sound per se, that party leaders must think rather of helping and pleasing their own friends than of conciliating out- siders. It is all very well to get external help by making concessions, but such help may be purchased much too dear if it forfeit the confidence of your own supporters. While you gain something with one hand, you may be losing ten times as much with the other. People dwell on the hundreds of Unionist Free Traders and of neutral voters who would be reconciled, but forget the thousands of discouraged and disgusted Tariff Reformers who would be lost through the abandonment of the food taxes— imposts which they sincerely believe to be the foundation- stone of their policy. As an ardent Tariff Reformer might put it : " The policy of knocking the bottom out of a saucepan in order to make it hold more will never prove good business." We need not, however, press the point. We fully admit that, things being as they are, the Unionist leaders cannot come forward and abandon the food taxes, and therefore cannot reasonably be pressed to do so by Unionist Free Traders.
But that being so, is there no other way in which the men who will not now vote for Unionists at General Elections can be set free to do so at the next appeal to the electors ? We believe there is. Let our leaders revive the pledge which Mr. Balfour gave, though unfortunately too late, at the second General Election in 1910, the pledge that food taxes shall not be imposed upon the country without the voters having an opportunity of saying whether they approve of them or not—without recourse, that is, to another General Election after the policy of Tariff Reform has been translated into an actual tariff, or to a Referendum on that tariff on the analogy of the Referendum taken on the Swiss protective tariff. If that pledge were to be revived it is not too much to say that hundreds of men in every constituency, and especially in the places where we most desire to gain strength—in Lancashire and the North—would be set free to do what they are most anxious to do and what they already do at by-elections—vote for the Unionists. "If I could feel that I had not said the final word in regard to food taxes, and so made it certain that my meat, my bread, my milk, and my cheese would be taxed, there could be no objection to my voting Unionist," says the balancine. elector. If, however, he is told that voting Unionist means once and for all the immediate imposition of the taxes just named without any chance of reconsider- ing the matter, he starts back in terror from what appears to him the ruin of his home. But though we feel con- vinced that the way for the Unionists to win is to give a pledge to the elector that he would have a chance of recon- sidering the question of food taxes, and that voting for Unionists at the next General Election and the imposition of those taxes is not synonymous, we are bound to confess that we see little prospect of the Unionist leaders adopting that policy. To do so would require no little boldness and self-confidence on their part, and boldness and self-confidence unfortunately seem just now at a low ebb in both politi- cal parties. Further, the Unionist leaders are perhaps not unnaturally deceived by the unpopularity of the Government, and havejumped to the conclusion that A's unpopularity denotes the popularity of B. They think they can win without giving the Referendumpledge which Mr. Balfour gave unsuccessfully on the eve of the election in 1910, and therefore they not unnaturally shrink from the idea of such a pledge. Party leaders hate tying. their own hands, and value political sea room above all things.
In all human probability. then. when the General Election comes, either this summer or autumn, owing to a breakdown inside the Cabinet over the Government's astonishing way of meeting the woman suffrage question, or earlier over the Home Rule Bill, the Unionists will go to the electors with the burden of the food taxes on their backs. The result must be that instead of securing the large and homogeneous majority, which we feel certain they would secure if they set the balancing electors free to vote for them, what they will accomplish will be some- thing very different and something far less satisfactory from the point of view of those who so ardently desire, as we do, a strong Unionist Government. That they will win seats in con.dderable numbers we of course do not doubt, but they will not win enough to give them more than a very small majority or to produce a balance. We mean by this that the forces of the coalition of Liberal, Labour, and Irish members will be a little less than half the House, and that the Unionist Government will have an unstable foundation and be tempted to prop themselves up either by making ruinous concessions to some detached section of the Labour Party or by equally ruinous concessions to a section of the Nationalists. A Government of this kind. may pick up a, precarious living for a. year or two, but it can hardly expect more, and then will come a General Election fraught with extreme danger for the country. Both of the great political parties will appear to be used up and impotent, and who knows whether the electorate may not in that case take the bit between its teeth in disgust and give us a so-called Labour Ministry—a Ministry of professional politicians such as we occasionally see in the Colonies ? If we were such fanatical Free Traders as to put the interests of Free Trade above those of the Union and all other considerations we might, putting aside the question we have just raised of the General Election after next, be inclined to rejoice in a situation in which both Protection and Home Rule would both become impossible. We say frankly, however, that, considering the record of the present Government, both as regards its treatment of the Constitution and of all economic questions, it is not one which appeals to us. We want, as we have said, not merely to kill such pro- posals as Home Rule and Disestablishment, but to place in power as well as in office a strong Unionist Government. But such a Government we cannot obtain by merely reducing the present Government to a condition of im- potence.
Those who wish to see the present situation as it affects the Unionist Party treated with admirable sincerity and perspicuity cannot do better than read the reprint of a speech which was delivered by Lord George Hamilton at the Acton Priory Constitutional Club on November 21st last. This speech, entitled "Why has the Unionist Party been Heavily Beaten in Three Successive General Elections since 1903 ? " has been reprinted in pamphlet form, a copy of which has lately come into our hands. It bears the imprint, "Ealing, W. Printed at the Times ' Works, 61 Broadway," and no doubt can be obtained at that address. Lord George Hamilton, with inexorable logic, shows that not only has food taxation always been unpopular with the electorate, but that, owing to the fact that prices are now rising and will continue to rise, it is likely to be more and more unpopular :— " In Austria, Germany, and France there have been riotous pro- tests against the rise of the necessities of life. Taking the most favourable outlook for food taxation, many years must elapse before it can receive the support of the majority of the electorate. In the meantime, the political institutions, traditions, and prin- ciples for the maintenance of which we are politically banded together will be overthrown and disappear. The only party who can stop and throw back this revolutionary deluge is powerless because it has tied like a millstone round its neck an unpopular scheme of taxation."
Lord George Hamilton ends the speech with the following eloquent passage, every word of which we desire to endorse and make our own :--
"For forty years previous to 1903, the gravitation of the best elements of Liberalism into the Conservative Party was unbroken and continuous. The proposal to tax food has checked and re- versed this natural movement, and since then secessions, if any, have been from us and not to us. The unconstitutional, extrava- gant, and tyrannical methods of the Government have created well-founded distrust right throughout their supporters, and this apprehension is growing day by day. Food taxation is the barrier that divides them from us. This they will not surmount. Remove
it, and from all sides and quarters we shall receive a stream of fresh help and new recruits."
Previous page
