"...though broadly lumped in with the general run of malaise and mediocrity that effected British politics sandwiched between Chamberlain the Father and Chamberlain the Son, it is no doubt that Cecil's ministry was the one most consumed by events rather than dictating them itself but also the one perhaps most temperamentally and ideologically ill-suited to address those events. The Cecil era is defined most broadly by the twin crises in Ireland and India, but a third "I" belongs alongside them - inflation, or in the parlance of the day, "insecurity."
This word was not used by the government but rather by the opposition leader Austen Chamberlain, who in the year since Haldane's government ended in tears had at last begun to find his stride and the confidence of his Liberal Party behind him. Chamberlain's similarities to his father largely began and ended with his partisan affiliation and their remarkable physical likeness. Where Joseph had been a dominant, aggressively ambitious figure, Austen's political life had been defined by his reluctance to take the mantle of leadership; his father had governed by attempting, with varying degrees of success, to impose his will and views on his party by using the NLF as his hammer, whereas Austen prided himself on being an urbane and gentlemanly figure who sought to lead by consensus. Joseph had represented, at least early on in his career, the sharpest leading edge of late 19th century radicalism; Austen by contrast was by the standards of 1915 a moderate if not genuinely instinctively conservative figure within the Liberal Party, embodied most clearly in his patronage of and friendship with Sir John Simon as his closest confidant. But in opposition to the Cecil years, at least, Austen revealed some of that Chamberlain doggedness and aggressiveness, while never quite the pugilistic bulldog orator that his father had been nonetheless firm in his condemnation of the National government. "In the past year," he declared to the Commons on May 20th, 1915, "the price of beef in Britain has increased by six times over; the price of pork has gone up four times, and the price of a loaf of bread three. In that same time, wages have stagnated, and even an honest working man who has received annual raises finds himself a great deal poorer in real terms than he would have but five years ago, in the midst of depression. The British worker today finds himself hounded not just by the specter of war in Ireland and unrest in India, but by a tremendous deal of insecurity of economy here at home. It must be the agenda of this government to fight not just for peace in Ireland and India but for security on British shores, or I would suggest the government do the honorable thing and resign!"
Austen Chamberlain was not wrong in the speech that suggested, for the first time since his father's stroke in 1906, that a figure possibly meeting the moment of crisis in Britain had arrived, though in fairness to the Cecil government there were a great deal of factors that made the price crisis of 1914-16 difficult to contain purely from Westminster. The crux of the problem was that the grain and meat imports from the Americas, in large part from the United States, Brazil and Argentina, had evaporated since the beginning of 1914. The Cecil government, while a great deal more sympathetic to the Confederate States than its predecessor had been, had nevertheless pursued the policy outlined in Lord Crewe's famous note to the belligerents making plain that Britain would react with extreme prejudice against any attempt to forestall neutral shipping across the Atlantic, but the needs of grain and meat at home for the bellies of hungry soldiers had slashed trans-Atlantic foodstuffs exports from countries fighting in the war by close to ninety-five percent. The skyrocketing prices of food in Britain since the start of hostilities in 1913 was on top of the sharp jump in the price of meat, fruit and bread beginning in early 1912 when Haldane had implemented the Imperial Preference tariff area, which had made Canadian and British farmers extraordinarily wealthy (indeed, the Canadian economy was in the midst of an unprecedented boom) but triggered a brief trade war with the United States and doubled prices from the 1910-11 level as it was.
The British economy in 1915, then, was in a strange flux. Britain was richer, fatter and better educated than ever before - her citizens had never enjoyed higher wages, better labor protections at work, and more plentiful goods to buy as tens of thousands entered the aspirational middle class. However, at the same time, the undergirding of the Empire seemed to be coming apart at the seams, and food, manufactured goods and housing had never been more expensive. The Cecil government made no moves to unwind the modest Liberal reforms of the late Chamberlain or Haldane eras, viewing such as political suicide, but yet also made no moves to directly alleviate the remarkable frustrations of the British working class even just a few years after the Great Unrest of 1911-13. Part of the issue was that Cecil himself was, as any of his biographers would attest, an opportunist. His opposition to Chamberlain's tariff reform in 1903 had not been based out of any commitment to free trade but rather opposition to Joseph Chamberlain, the man. Now with import preference for the Empire in place, Cecil found it more expedient to pander to the farm lobby, of both aristocratic estates overrepresented in the Lords and small freeholders, than challenge the status quo; he noted in his diaries that eliminating import preference would be unlikely to solve the matter of the escalating price issues since it was plain the issue was the war in the Americas.
So in the meantime, Britons bought food from continental Europe and Canada at considerably higher prices. Germany's heavily-subsidized and protected agricultural sector filled in some of the gap, but was quite expensive due to the price supports via tariffs that Berlin imposed to protect the wealthy nobility of the East Elbian estates. Russian grain flowed more freely but the inefficiency of Russian transport systems and the difficulty of feeding even Russian peasants meant that it was more of a trickle. Britons found that North Sea cod and other fish was a perfectly adequate temporary substitute for high quality red meat, importing in particular canned fish from Norway, but the lean years of the mid-1910s certainly emphasized the exposure which Britain had to the vagaries of global agricultural markets and the sensitivity the British diet had to food scarcity as a net importer of foodstuffs.
The British body politic, then, was exposed to fluctuating prices that were not easily addressed thanks in part to the growing Tory farm lobby and a smaller but no less potent lobby in Irish farmers who finally seemed to be reaping the rewards of land reform and whom both major parties, what with the war on in Ireland, seemed keen to appease. The incoherence of British tariff policy was ad hoc depending not on who was in power but on what the monthly prices seemed to be, and whether it was Cecil or Chamberlain ascendant one thing seemed clear - the free trade consensus was over, and a strange, difficult new time beckoned as food was not entirely scarce but also not particularly cheap for the otherwise increasingly comfortable British laborer..." [1]
- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924
[1] We'll be covering the impacts of this in Canada and Ireland soon
