THE LORD CHANCELLOR AND HIS NEW PARTY.
IN strong and significant contrast to Lord Salisbury's letter is the article a h:ch the Lord Chancellor published in the Weekly Dispatch of last Sunday. Lord Birkenhead apparently has made up his mind that there is to be a political crisis, and is determined that it shall not take place without his participation on as impressive a scale as can possibly be managed. In spite of the fact that Lord Chancellors do not generally play first-fiddle in the full party orchestra, and further that it is not usual for a member of the inner ring of a Cabinet publicly to denounce the Administration to which he still belongs, Lord Birkenhead tells us that the present Coalition is " an invertebrate and undefined body," and goes on to declare that " the early formation of a National Party is indis- pensable." Here is a passage from Lord Birkenhead's article :- " Spen Valley has many messages which are not encouraging to those who wish well to the Coalition ; but it brings a knell
of despair to those who dreamed that a future in English political life still awaited Mr. Asquith and his followers. To-day this simple truth is unchallengeable. For a year after the election which swept them away not a single one of the leaders of that party can offer himself for election to one constituency in these islands with the faintest prospect of success. One and all, they must either join the Labour Party or join Mr. Lloyd George. Some will do one, some will do the other, but in any event, the result of Spen Valley may be expected to give ground for hesitation to those Coalition Liberals in the House of Commons who were faltering in their allegiance to the Prime Minister. They may think that his umbrella is leaky, but they will not fail to observe that its shelter is drier than the shower which is in progress without."
The Lord Chancellor proceeds to discuss the future of the Labour Party and its prospects of reaching office. After stating his grounds for believing that at present the Labour Party cannot and ought not to be installed in office, he continues :— " These esnsiderations will be 'wird upon the electors of these islands, and will certainly be considered by them before the day arrives in which we shall salute Mr. Robert Williams upon the Treasury Bench. But they cannot; in my judgment. be successfully urged by an invertebrate and undefined body such as the present Coalition. That instrument was of admirable value during the war. It has passed successfully through many great crises in the twelve months that followed the Armistice. But it is as ineffective an instrument for the purpose of fighting our English Communists as it was an effective instru- ment for fighting the Germans. The task of meeting the new party in the political arena cannot be effectively discharged except by a single party emerging with definite purposes and under one banner. For such a task the formation of a National Party is, in my judgment, indispensable. Nor do I think it can be long delayed."
The meaning of all this is clear. Lord Birkenhead and Mr. Winston Churchill are in lively collaboration. Lord Birkenhead is certainly not acting by himself. He is no doubt in close liaison with his old friendly opponent, or rather partner, in the great party game. These two have apparently come to the conclusion that the ground is slipping away from under their feet, and also from under the feet of their present chief, Mr. Lloyd George. The safest plan, they argue, for politicians in such a quandary is to form a new party, and to do it as quickly as possible. To put the matter quite plainly, Mr. Winston Churchill and Lord Birkenhead—we can hardly doubt with the leave, express or implied, of the Prime Minister—realize that there is going to be a Unionist revolt, or perhaps we should go further and say a revolt of all the moderate elements in the country, who see with dismay the hopeless muddle and inefficiency which reign in the Administration. Unless such new political arrangements can be made, this revolt would mean the ruin of Mr. Lloyd George and of those whom we have described as his House earls. The essential thing about Mr. Lloyd George and these persons is that they constitute the paper currency of present politics. They have got no reserve of political gold behind them. They are based merely on a kind of Parliamentary and party credit, and that credit is getting daily less and less substantial and less able to command value in the public markets. They are therefore looking about for means to renew their face-value and to prevent their complete depreciation. They think that they can do this best by the formation and organization of a new party. Remember, if they were simply to go out of office and wait it would at once be discovered that they have no real following in the country, or even in Parliament, and that they stand almost entirely alone. This is a discovery which they most naturally dare not allow to be made if it can possibly be avoided. They intend, then, " as at present advised," to appeal to the nation—we do not mean at a General Election—with the cry that they and the new party which they propose to create—probably Lloyd- Georgite in its leadership—are the only peoplewho can stand up to the " English Communists," as Lord Birkenhead calls them, and so save us from revolution. If that is the game, as we are convinced it is, it is a very dangerous one, and one which moderate men of all kinds will be very foolish to allow. The new party, which will really mean, if it means anything, the present Coalition with all the better and saner part of the Unionists either banished from it or else made to toe the L.G. line, will be merely a group, and a very unstable group. Instead of being able to resist Labour, it will be far more likely to play the old and dan- gerous game of letting itself be blackmailed and forced to pay Danegeld. In this respect it may even surpass the present Coalition, colossal as their performances in this respect have been. If then the official Unionist Party, and the moderate men of the nation generally, Unionist er Liberal, are wise, they will have nothing to do with Lord Birkenhead's new party, or with this new way to pay old debts, political or other. What they should do is to maintain the Unionist Party as it is, at the same time opening the gates of that party wide to all men of moderate views, either temporarily as a reformed Coalition, or permanently as the party of common-sense. There is nothing in the present Unionist Party of which moderate Liberals or moderate non-party men need be afraid. Lord Northcliffe's papers and other personal organs of restless- less and passion are fond of talking about " Tories," but in the true sense there are no Tories now, or at any rate none in the Unionist Party. If there are any, they lie sequestered in the bosom of the I.L.P. The Unionist Party is quite as ilernocratic, quite as liberal in its views, and quite as progressive as any other party in the State : witness Lord Robert Cecil, or, for the matter of that, Mr. Balfour, Lord Curzon, Lord Milner, or Mr. Austen Chamberlain.
But it may be asked : Why is it better to have the old Unionist Party thus reinforced than a new party f Our answer is that the very last things we want at the present time are new parties or new groups. We have too many already. Again, the Unionist Party is a thing which the English people understand. The new Lloyd George or Winston Churchill party would mean nothing to them. The Unionist Party is no doubt gradually losing its hold upon the country owing to the vagaries of Mr. Lloyd George, but it still has a certain amount of prestige, and its prestige might be completely restored if it were to shake itself free from its present undesirable associates. The policy which the Unionist Party will have to introduce will be a policy of strict retrenchment and progressive reconstruction. Its guiding principle must be, while protecting the essential interests of the country, to secure the execution of the will of the majority. In praotice this means that the party must say : " We will not do what we think to be wrong in the vain hope that thereby good may come. We will not pass communistic measures, at the bidding of Communists, when we clearly know these measures to be injurious. That way lie madness and death for the nation. As long as we have the support of the majority, we will ad minister the country's affairs fairly and squarely. When we cease to enjoy the confidence of the country, we must of course make room for people who, whether right or wrong in the abstract, at any rate really believe in their programme. The notion that if we, not they, are allowed the privilege of running the ship on the rocks we shall be able to save a little from the wreck is a delusion with which we will have nothing to do. If we are to have the Labour programme, let us have it warm from the hands of men who believe in it, and not cold and clammy from men who know that they are offering us pooisoned food."
No doubt a certain number of Unionists will say : " What place is there for Mr. Lloyd George in your forecast ? Suppose things happened as you would like, Mr. Lloyd George would be left out in the cold. Would he not become at once a terrible danger I Determined not to lose power and place, and in a hurry and a rage, he would go straight over to the Labour Party. But by doing so he might just turn the scale, and so bring them into office and power."
Without stopping to point out what an extremely poor compliment it is to Mr. Lloyd George to imagine that because he could not or would not be head of a moderate party he would revenge himself by becoming head of an immoderate one, we feel sure that there is little or nothing in the plea thus made. Mr. Lloyd George is too much hated and distrusted by the Labour Party to make it possible for them to unite in adopting him as their leader. No doubt the middle-class intellectuals who so largely con- trol the Labour Party would be rather proud of doing a Machiavellian " deal " of this kind ; but if they did do it they would certainly shatter their party from top to bottom. Mr. Lloyd George has gone too far towards the right to be able to make such a huge swerve to the left. But even if this were not true of Mr. Lloyd George, and if the Labour I Party were to welcome to their bosom the champion Vampire of Politics, it is certainly true of Mr. Winston Churchill and his group. They could not be taken on in any case by the Labour Party. But from them Mr. Lloyd George could hardly dare to separate himself finally. Each subsection of the present Lloyd George-Churchill-Birken- head amalgamation would be terrified at the isolation in which it would find itself. A quarrel in such ranks would raise a crowd of ghosts and hauntings, too many and too fierce for endurance.
The moral of all this is that the Unionist Party, still sea-worthy, though still needing to have the barnacles removed, have the destiny of the country in their hands. They can do what they will, and need not fear Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Winston Churchill, Lord Birkenhead, or any of the other political bravoes of the hour. Whether our leaders will in fact have the courage to take action of the kind foreshadowed in Lord Salisbury's letter is of course quite another matter. We can only say that if they have not the requisite courage, they may easily drift into worse things even than those which now confront us, and vas may in the end find this country in the hands of a Government far more dangerous and more difficult to get rid of than a Labour Government. A Coalesced Newspaper Administration under Labour dictation is not a nightmare but a possibility if the Unionist leaders fail in their duty.
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