“Justice is a name to which every knee will bow, equality is a word which many fear and detest.”
The above quote, from Hobhouse, in many ways aptly characterises the political struggles, societal fears and cultural tensions that marked the United Kingdom in the two decades that led on from the end of the Great War. This period was defined in many ways by one question for the British political system and the numerous assumptions it rested on: on what terms could the working classes be integrated into stable social and political settlement? The “labouring classes” as they were often termed in pamphlets of the day, constituted an overwhelming, but severely disadvantaged, majority of the British population in this period, one whose industrial strength and political power were increasing. Some seventy percent of the British workforce were drawn from the working classes, a proportion gradually tapped into by the expanding union movement, which after decades of quiet quiescence had begun to recognise the power of this potential support. Gradual reform of the franchise, and its extension to certain segments of working class men, also meant that the working classes were for the first time theoretically equal with others within the civic realm, though as numerous historiographical debates in the field have demonstrated, controversy over the extent of the effects of this upon both the party system and the politics it represented remains unabated.
These tensions, described by some Marxist historians as an “undeclared class war” dominated the political agenda of the pre-war years, were further exacerbated in the war years, as the nation’s unprecedented collective mobilisation created starkly opposed perceptions of a fairly distributed sacrifice. The old assumptions that underpinned the Edwardian social and political order were displaced by the perceived need to create a new union between institutions, those who governed them and those who were governed, particularly in the aftermath of several bloody revolutions in Europe which presented the more alarmist sections of the upper classes an unappetising picture of the most extreme resolutions to the spectre of class conflict and societal inequality. The need for reform, was thus both pressing in the wartime coalition which governed under Lloyd George, and in the wider body of political thought written before, during and after the conflict. Several reforms under the man “who could be dictator for life if he so wishes” were enacted, the most striking to Britain’s electoral system as property qualifications for men were abolished, while women over the age of thirty were granted the right to vote, while the electoral system was reformed from First Past the Post to a pluralist model of Single Transferrable Vote, which broadly intimated that coalition governments of various respective parties were to become the new model for British governance.
The latter reform, has often been the most contested, yet some seventy years after it’s introduction, British politics remains governed by this pluralist, consensus driven model of politics. This work is not an old rerun of previous debates or arguments surrounding the respective merits of voting systems, nor is it a study in psephology. In many ways, the electoral reforms of Lloyd George are a secondary element in this work, despite the impact they had on the politics that emerged in the aftermath of the war and the period studied. Rather this is a work that focuses on the societal changes, political reforms, governments and cultural developments that emerged within the two decades that marked the end of one period of mechanised slaughter before the start of another. Numerous works, many excellent, have been written on the interwar period, hundreds of biographies and studies of its leading figures, and the suddenly unstable world of British politics they seemed to inhabit. This study is not aimed at cataloguing the triumphs and failures of the personalities of this period, nor will it fall into the pitfalls of assuming that a dominant (or as some have suggested) hegemonic political consensus emerged in this period.
This is instead a study, of numerous developments in Britain during this period as politics, culture and the societal demands which underpinned them evolved and fragmented in the aftermath of a war of unprecedented slaughter. This is a period of profound displacement, fragmentation and structural rebuilding, one which in many ways continues to underpin the assumptions and democratic possibilities which govern our present, and one which has been largely left behind in academic study. This is a study of a period, which in so many ways, continues to define the Britain we now live in.
R.H.D. Thomson
University of Sheffield
February 26, 1994