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VII. The Impact of Financial Policy on English Party Politics before 1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

H. V. Emy
H. V. Emy
Affiliation:
Monash University
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Extract

Critical research into the motivation and content of Liberal social policies before 1914 has qualified much of the credit the party's accomplishments originally received. Yet such qualifications may go too far and in the struggle to do justice to all the facts, historical accuracy may suffer both from tendencies to look for dominant motifs or patterns, and from the temptation to emphasize the ‘real’ empirical nature of politics, so losing sight of all purposes and patterns – especially value-patterns. For example, the emphasis upon nineteenth century administrative development may certainly correct the previously overdrawn distinction between, firstly, individualism and the negative state, and secondly, collectivism and the positive state, but if such emphasis is carried too far it may appear that the social reforms passed after 1906 were no more than the logical continuation of a legislative trend already well-established. It may appear through the simple cataloguing of administrative growth, in conjunction with the attention focused on the rise of the Labour movement and the ensuing attempt to place both in a long-term historical perspective, that the Liberal party was largely the passive instrument of movements and ideas which passed around and about the party, rather than through and within it; and, this being so, that interpretations such as those of Laski, dating the emergence of ‘fundamental’ party divisions from post-1914, may be too easily accepted.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 103 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

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39 One aspect of this process of debt reduction which caused confusion, especially to the Labour Party after 1906, was the distinction between the realized surplus of the past financial year, which by law went into the sinking fund to pay off interest on the debt, and the estimated surplus of the coming financial year. In 1907, Asquith had to point out that he had no choice in the allocation of a realized surplus, and it could not therefore be devoted to old age pensions. Equally, it was an orthodox maxim that a Chancellor should be chary of anticipating a trade surplus, because any shortfall in his budgeted revenue would leave him no option but to borrow in the capital market – which was to be avoided.

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41 Hirst, F. W., ‘National Credit and the Sinking Fund (London, 1905).Google Scholar A Gladstonian Liberal and free-trader who believed firmly in limited Government, Hirst's opinions after 1906, as expressed in The Economist, grew increasingly gloomy over the implications of Liberal financial ‘extravagance’.

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59 Original emphasis.

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101 Property: Its Rights and Duties, with an introduction by Bishop Gore (1914), Preface and Introduction.