1Towards the end of a long speech at a mass meeting of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations held to celebrate the victory of the Unionist (or Conservative) party at the 1924 general election, the party leader and prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, declared that:
- 1 Baldwin speech at The Royal Albert Hall, 4 Dec. 1924, Times, 5 December 1924; extract in Stanley Ba (...)
I want to see the spirit of service to the whole nation the birthright of every member of the Unionist Party – Unionist in the sense that we stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago; union among our own people to make one nation of our own people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world.1
- 2 A particular champion of this point has been Alistair Cooke (Lord Lexden), a former director of the (...)
- 3 For comments on these myths, see Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin. Conservative Leadership and Na (...)
2Since the 1990s, writers on British politics have claimed that with this sentence Baldwin invented or coined “one nation” as a tenet of Conservative party politics.2 This is now one of the most frequent statements that is made about Baldwin, almost rivalling the old myths that his politics consisted of “Safety First” inertia, and that he failed to oppose Hitler and to undertake military rearmament.3
- 4 Robert Walsha, ‘The One Nation Group: A Tory Approach to Backbench Politics and Organization, 1950- (...)
- 5 Philip Williamson, ‘Baldwin's Reputation: Politics and History, 1937-1967’, Historical Journal 47 ( (...)
3In contrast to these earlier canards, this new claim has much truth. Not only did he use the term “one nation”, but the theme of national cohesion was central to his politics. Nevertheless, careful definition is needed. It is unlikely that Baldwin thought that he was devising a new phrase or principle. His sentence in December 1924 expressed an obvious conflation of Disraeli’s literary reference to “two nations” in 1845 with the political legend of special sympathy towards the working population that had been created by his later governments, with the passage of electoral reform in 1867 and mild social reforms from 1874 to 1880. This conflation was familiar to Baldwin and other Unionists from their participation in self-consciously “Disraelian” political organisations, the Primrose League of the late Victorian and Edwardian period and the Unionist Reform Committee before the First World War. Yet Baldwin himself was not so impressed by the phrase “one nation” as to use and elaborate it in his subsequent speeches. It was not developed by other Conservative politicians during the interwar years. Nor was Baldwin the source for later uses of the phrase. The adoption of the term “one nation” by a group of Conservative MPs in 1950 – the direct origin for the modern concept of “One Nation Conservatism” – was almost accidental, and its reference was wholly to Disraeli.4 They did not, and could not, declare a descent from Baldwin, given the collapse of his political reputation after 1939.5
- 6 This article draws on the author’s earlier writings on Baldwin to reflect on the recent claims abou (...)
- 7 Parallels were even suggested with a Labour prime minister: David Marquand, ‘Revisiting the Blair P (...)
4The significance attached to Baldwin’s use of the term “one nation” is a recent political construction. It went unremarked by the biographers and historians who from the 1960s to the 1990s established a properly historical understanding of Baldwin and the interwar Conservative party, notably John Barnes, Keith Middlemas, Maurice Cowling, John Ramsden and Stuart Ball, and including the present writer.6 It only began to attract attention in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s prolonged and disruptive premiership from 1979 to 1990. Political commentators sought precedents for a different style of Conservative politics, while more writers in academic political studies became interested in Conservative ideas and began to search for their lineages; and because of the earlier historical work, Baldwin had now become available as a respectable exemplar. With dubious plausibility, John Major and David Cameron have been favourably compared with Baldwin,7 although they themselves did not make this comparison. Apart from the risible self-identifications of Boris Johnson with Churchill and Liz Truss with Thatcher, long historical perspectives have no purchase for contemporary Conservative party leaders.
5If too much can be made of Baldwin’s use of a precise phrase, he did to an unusual degree speak and act in ways that have similarities with what would later be described as “One Nation Conservatism”. He aimed to increase national cohesion and spread Conservative support across a wide range of social groups, and to consolidate an identification of the Conservative Party with national values and with classlessness. But here too, care is needed, in two respects. First, the political and policy contexts of interwar Britain were very different from those which prevailed after the Second World War, a period with a welfare state and extensive state economic management, a clearer system of two dominant political parties and, from the 1960s, the emergence of nationalist parties. Second, “national cohesion” is a political claim, not an objective description. Politics is concerned with division, with the differences of interest, values, ideas and opinion that are inherent in political societies. Political leaders seek – quite often all at once – not only to manage, accommodate and circumvent political divisions, but also to create or exploit political differences, all to the advantage of their own political organisation (government, party or faction) and at the expense of other organisations and groups. While Baldwin at some level promoted the idea of a national consensus, he did so amidst often intense divisions, by a deliberate selection of political enemies, and with the aim of advancing Conservative interests. He was not, as he has sometimes been presented – and as he tended to present himself – an interpreter of public or national opinion (because there are always numerous public opinions and contending conceptions of “the nation”); nor could he simply represent moderate or central opinion (because the character and boundaries of these are defined by political debate). His politics were not passive, responsive and bland, but active and creative. His language of “the nation” and national cohesion was double-edged – usually inclusive and irenic but sometimes polarising and inflexible, and always seeking to isolate and defeat opponents, or more exactly, certain types of ideas and behaviour.
- 8 The best account of the party-political world and the instabilities of the early post-1918 years th (...)
- 9 Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post-First (...)
- 10 David Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism and Class Politics in the 1920s’, English Historical Review 111 (...)
- 11 Philip Williamson and Edward Baldwin (eds), Baldwin Papers. A Conservative Statesman 1908-1947 (Cam (...)
6Baldwin’s appeals to national cohesion and classlessness were the product of particular conditions, and how he chose to present and to react to these conditions. They were a politics for critical times. In large part this was because the period of his political leadership, from 1923 to 1937, really was one of severe difficulties and acute uncertainties for both the nation and the Conservative Party: chronic economic depression and financial pressures, large-scale industrial disputes, mass unemployment, widespread poverty, sharpened social tensions, and new radical ideologies; a transformed political agenda, and entirely new demands on governments; huge increases in the size of the electorate, and a dislocated and volatile party system; the establishment of a powerful labour movement, with trade unions now on a national scale and a Labour Party newly committed to socialism; and, as continental dictatorships threatened another European war from 1933, political parties, civil associations and a public which were strongly attached to the causes of disarmament and peace.8 These conditions were in themselves perilous for a Conservative Party connected with established institutions, vested interests, national defence and imperial power. But the sense of difficulty was amplified by pessimistic Conservative assumptions. In the aftermath of the Great War of 1914–18, it was widely feared that politics had become more prone to violence, to “brutalization”.9 Many Conservatives believed that, with the labouring population now constituting the largest part of the electorate, political allegiances could become so determined by issues of class – a politics of the “poor” many against the “rich” few – that Labour might inexorably become the dominant party.10 To all this, Baldwin added a distinctive emphasis: anxiety that the entire political system was fragile, because of the inexperience of such a large number of new voters, their unrealistic expectations of rapid changes and large material improvements, and a spread of the dangerously extreme ideas of communism, syndicalism and fascism. In 1927 he wrote: “Democracy has arrived at a gallop in England, and I feel all the time that it is a race for life: can we educate them before the crash comes?”. At times he even spoke of the vulnerability of civilisation itself.11 These were not just personal beliefs and fears; public expression of these themes was a leading instrument in his politics.
- 12 Williamson, Baldwin, pp. 169-77.
7Baldwin did not address the difficulties and anxieties primarily by the provision of policies. He himself was responsible for only one major policy initiative, his attempt in 1923 to introduce and win a general election on tariff protection, as a remedy for unemployment and an appeal to working-class voters, as well as a means to assist industrial and agricultural interests. After this was defeated, he gave his support to the social reforms, extension of state pensions, and the house-building and local “derating” programmes which were prepared by Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. He resisted calls from within his own party for cuts in social benefits to allow reductions in personal taxes as “a most one-sided policy” which, as it would seem to be “an attack on the working man”, was hardly “a fine way of combating Socialism”. From 1929 he accepted a renewed commitment to protection, again proffered as an employment as well as a business policy. Following the 1931 financial crisis, he embraced the Labour prime minister’s principle of “equal sacrifices”, by increases of direct taxes in similar percentages to cuts in social expenditure (although in practice these were not comparable). Later, renewed Conservative Party pressures for tax reductions were resisted until after the social service cuts had been cancelled in 1934. During the 1930s, like other Conservative ministers in the National government, he accepted an extension of state economic management and policies to assist the areas suffering the greatest industrial depression, chiefly to rescue the capitalist order from the effects of the world depression, but also to begin a slow recovery in employment.12 All this might be glossed as a tendency towards a “one nation” approach. But the larger reality was the priority given to deflationary “sound finance”, which favoured property-owners, rentiers and direct tax-payers, and the purpose of the policies was defensive, to restore and preserve a degree of economic, social and political stability, rather than to reduce inequalities or, in the language of the 2020s, to “level up” the regions.
- 13 Ibid., p. 148.
- 14 Williamson and Baldwin, Baldwin Papers, p. 365.
8For Baldwin, the problems were deeper than issues of policy: they were a matter of political culture. “What we are at present fighting is not a programme, but an atmosphere, which no amount of promulgation of counter programmes would affect”.13 The supreme task for leadership in post-1918 politics was to dispel this atmosphere – what he regarded as the dangerous ideas and the disruptive attitudes that exploited distress, ignorance and restlessness – and to strengthen ideas, values and political behaviour that were safe, unifying and preservative. As he wrote in 1935, “my job is to try and educate a new democracy in a new world and to try and make them realise their responsibilities in their possession of power, and to keep the eternal verities before them”.14 He conceived this task in the highest terms. This was not, for him, just a party strategy, a means of defeating the labour movement and obtaining success for the Conservative Party; it was a national duty, to save the British nation from disaster. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity. Nevertheless, party interest and what he described as the national interest were interconnected, though not, as we shall see, completely identical.
- 15 For the importance of these associations, see Helen McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations, and (...)
- 16 Philip Williamson, 'The doctrinal politics of Stanley Baldwin', in Michael Bentley (ed.), Public an (...)
9The task was therefore one of persuasion, and persuasion in what Baldwin considered to be the fundamentals of politics, which explains his frequent references to “education”. This was to be achieved chiefly by speeches, and by the projection of a particular public personality. It has often been noted that the Conservative Party during the interwar years produced huge amounts of printed political leaflets and magazines, and that Baldwin was the first Conservative leader to make effective use of radio broadcasts and sound films. Nevertheless, this was still an age in which political leaders made large numbers of often very long speeches, reported verbatim or extensively summarised in national, regional and local newspapers. Most of Baldwin’s speeches, it should be emphasised, were ordinary political speeches, delivered in the House of Commons and at party and election meetings, and consisting chiefly of extended statements on policy issues, on the Conservative Party’s disagreements with the Labour and Liberal parties, and in some periods, on differences among Conservatives themselves. But his political speeches were unusual in often containing passages on general principles and values. Still more distinctive was his delivery of many addresses to a wide range of civil associations, to literary and academic societies, to schools and universities, to religious assemblies and to civic receptions. Although untypical of his general types of public speaking, these addresses are significant and influential for three reasons. The first is the very fact that he took the trouble to speak to such bodies. They show his intention to reach beyond party audiences into the burgeoning associational life of interwar Britain,15 and to communicate with the politically unattached, those without strong commitments to a particular party. Second, these bodies and these addresses were ostensibly “non-political”: his themes were presented as lying outside and reaching deeper than party politics, as concerned with the ideas and values of the nation as a whole. Third, these addresses, together with the general passages in his political speeches, expressed a political doctrine that was both “national” and Conservative.16
- 17 Baldwin, On England, p. 6. Baldwin was in part humouring a particular audience, the Royal Society o (...)
- 18 See especially the well-known cartoon in Punch on his retirement in 1937: https://archive.cartoons. (...)
10It has been unfortunate for Baldwin’s historical reputation that the first published collection of his addresses was entitled On England, and that the first of these addresses contained the phrase “To me, England is the country, and the country is England”.17 His lyrical evocations of both England and the English countryside have been interpreted literally and critically, as indicating the essence of his supposed public personality and perspectives: insular, “bucolic”, backward-looking, and negligent towards the pressing issues of his time. There is no doubt that being English and enjoying the countryside were important to him, and that these were an element in his public image, as is evident in the work of contemporary cartoonists.18 Yet these interpretations are incompatible with his far more common appeals for national cohesion: they cannot be adequate indications of his politics.
- 19 Gabrielle Ward-Smith, ‘Baldwin and Scotland: More than Englishness’, Contemporary British History 1 (...)
11Baldwin was, of course, perfectly aware that the nation was the United Kingdom, not England alone, and that this nation was highly urbanised and industrialised. He himself had been an iron and steel manufacturer and, as he emphasized in numerous further speeches, an employer of an industrial workforce. As other passages in the address on “England” make clear, his references to England and its countryside were intended as moral statements, about character, place and home, about social harmony, and about the presumed native virtues of steadiness, kindness, humanity, individuality and love of justice and truth. Nor did he treat these and similar values as exclusive to England or to the countryside. This will be evident to any reader of the whole of the volume On England, and his three further volumes of selected addresses: all contain addresses in which he spoke as movingly about Scotland, Ireland and Wales as he did about England, and many more in which he spoke of the whole United Kingdom. It should also be noted that like many contemporaries in all political parties – puzzling as this now seems, after the growth of nationalist parties and devolved governments – he sometimes used “England” as a synonym for Britain or the United Kingdom.19
- 20 David Jarvis, ‘“Mrs Maggs and Betty”: the Conservative appeal to women voters in the 1920s’, Twenti (...)
12Baldwin’s party was the Unionist party, in the territorial sense that had been established since the 1880s and which still had real meaning during the interwar years. He gave many political speeches and numerous “non-political” addresses in Wales (where Unionists tried hard to increase their representation), in Northern Ireland (where the Unionists, then still affiliated with the national Unionist Party, held most of the parliamentary seats), and in Scotland (where the Unionists became stronger during the period, winning half the seats at the 1935 election). In each case, he extolled the character, beauties and achievements of their regions, and of their towns as well as their countryside. Baldwin’s emphasis was on places and communities wherever they were in the United Kingdom, because his purpose was to celebrate attachments to community – local, regional and national – which were posited as authentic, enduring and unifying, and to contrast these with appeals to class, which were treated as artificial, superficial and divisive, encouraging “hatred”. He presented social relations as both more complex and more simple than those of class: society was too diverse to be reducible to classes, yet its members were bound together in local communities and the nation. He also shared fully in his party’s particular efforts to appeal to women, as the largest group of new voters in 1918, in effect treating gender as another counter-balance to class;20 indeed, against substantial opposition in his cabinet and party, he had a decisive part in the equalisation of the parliamentary franchise between women and men in 1928, making women more numerous than men in the electorate. Like other Conservatives whose political apprenticeship had included positions in the Primrose League (and as is plain in the opening quotation of this article), he transposed the meaning of Unionist from a territorial into a social sense. The Unionist or Conservative Party was always declared to be the national and patriotic party, representing and defending the interest of all members of the nation, whatever their social position.
13This was, of course, a matter of assertion. The “nation” and “patriotism” have various meanings; they are not the monopoly of a single party. In “objective” terms, Liberals and Labour were also national, unionist and patriotic parties. But by relentless repetition by members of the Unionist Party and its newspaper allies over many decades that it alone upheld national institutions, conventional values, and the empire’s strength in the world, for many voters by the 1920s it had secured the most persuasive claim to be “the national party”. A change in the party’s name to “Conservative and Unionist” from 1924 in England and Wales (though not in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where it remained just the Unionist Party), at some level indicated confidence that voters understood its social Unionism, and that re-adoption of the title “Conservative” would now emphasise its messages of safety and security after the alarms created in much of the political nation during the period of the first Labour government.
- 21 Williamson, Baldwin, pp. 205-12, and see Bill Schwarz, ‘The Language of Constitutionalism: Baldwin (...)
14Baldwin’s main presentations of the nation were constitutional and ethical. His stress on the dangers of a mass electorate, class “hatred” and extreme ideas enabled him to create a new politics of constitutional defence. Unlike the constitutional politics of Conservatives and Unionists before 1914, this was less a defence of particular established institutions in church and state, than a general defence of the principles and procedures of the nation’s whole political system, as expanded in 1918. Far more than any other interwar Conservative, Baldwin spoke about democracy – always the political democracy which all parties were presumed to accept, not Labour conceptions of social democracy. Repeatedly during the 1920s and 1930s, he declared democracy to be a great ideal, but also the most difficult form of government: it was, he would say, balanced on a knife edge or along the circumference of a wheel, all too liable to tip over into either anarchy or despotism. Law and freedom, the precious British combination of ‘ordered liberty’, could be maintained only if all members of the nation accepted the full responsibilities of democratic government. Political leaders must not become “demagogues”, deceiving voters with electoral “stunts”, with empty “vote-catching” programmes, and with “rhetoric” – “one of the greatest dangers of modern civilization”. Voters had to be vigilant against such threats from political leaders and parties, to educate themselves in political issues, and to participate in the democratic processes: they had to be active citizens. The continued well-being of all members of the nation depended on their remaining united in the preservation of constitutional principles, amid the risks as well as the opportunities of political democracy.21
- 22 Baldwin, On England, p. 19.
- 23 Williamson, Baldwin, pp. 212-18, 277-93.
- 24 Stanley Baldwin, Service of Our Lives (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1937), pp. 166-7.
15According to Baldwin, there was a still greater requirement for a united nation and for stable and good government: “moral values are the foundation of a country’s greatness”. There needed to be high standards in all aspects of public life. Political leaders had to be sincere, honest and trustworthy, and voters to place duties towards their communities and the nation before their own rights and interests. Above all, there had to be a spirit of “service”: this was the most important word in Baldwin’s public vocabulary. It was the leading theme in all his volumes of selected addresses: government ministers, party leaders, political activists, civil servants, voluntary workers, voters, and all citizens should be bound together by a spirit of service towards others, towards their communities and towards the nation. Sympathy, understanding, tolerance, discipline, self-sacrifice and care for others would “in the end control the rude forces of disorder, the forces of hate and the forces of destruction between people and between classes”. Commitment to service, far more than any attachment to “Englishness”, was what Baldwin wanted the public to understand about himself: ultimately, he said in 1923, “I have but one idea, … and that is the idea of service – service to the people of this country”.22 It was an ethic which, he declared, was common throughout all groups in the nation, and only needed more encouragement to become pervasive. It was expressed in many ways, through ordinary human kindness, in the work of charitable bodies and voluntary societies, as civic obligation, in public service and in a correct understanding of political careers. He also grounded it in Christian belief and, true to his general approach, in the faith of all the various churches, including not just the established Church of England, with which the Conservative Party was traditionally associated, but also the nonconformist or “free churches”.23 As he stated in one of his last speeches as prime minister, the message he had persistently delivered was “a Christian truth”: the doctrine of both “the essential dignity of the individual human soul” and “the brotherhood of man”.24
16Baldwin’s purpose in speaking of community, nation, constitutionalism, citizenship and service was to encourage greater national cohesion. Yet he also aimed to secure the Conservative Party’s dominance at elections and in government. His themes were chosen to unify but also to create certain types of division: to soothe tensions which threatened general political stability, while re-defining political differences to the advantage of the Conservative Party. Baldwin’s politics operated at two levels, which varied in intensity according to circumstances.
- 25 McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, pp. 270-1, 281-6, 289-93.
- 26 Williamson, Baldwin, p. 150.
17Ross McKibbin has explained the Conservative Party’s interwar dominance as the result of its creation of an ideological concept of “the public” which unified a large part of the electorate (the upper and middle classes, with the un-unionised parts of the working classes) against hostile stereotypes of the organised working class, meaning the labour movement.25 There is much truth in this, but it is not a full explanation, nor does it adequately describe Baldwin’s politics. He certainly aimed to resist Labour, but it was a selective type of resistance. For a pessimistic Conservative, persistent hostility towards the labour movement risked the alienation of many of its members from the norms of British political society, strengthening its radical tendencies and extremist elements; and in the violence of continental socialism, syndicalism and bolshevism there were awful examples of what might ensue. Baldwin is reported as saying in 1924 that his main ambition was “to prevent the class war becoming a reality”.26 For this reason, he aimed to encourage the Labour Party and trade unions to accept constitutional processes: to reject revolutionary methods, and to work through elections, parliament and collective bargaining (not that, as is apparent to historians, they needed much encouragement to do so). All this, he believed, would help to moderate their ambitions, and to make it less difficult for the Conservatives to oppose and defeat them.
- 27 See e.g. Edward Wood (later Lord Halifax), quoted in Jarvis, ‘Class politics’, p. 59.
- 28 Williamson, Baldwin, pp. 235-42, 257-8, 318-19, 352-3.
18Unlike many other Conservatives, Baldwin was not hostile towards the labour movement as such; indeed, he could not be, if his appeals for national cohesion were to be credible. He often presented positive stereotypes of working people and their institutions – friendly societies, co-operative societies and trade unions – as examples of the national characteristics of self-reliance, voluntarism, brotherhood and democracy. He usually treated the Labour Party with respect, as a conventional political party. After Conservatives lost their parliamentary majorities at the general elections in 1923 and 1929, against the pressure of much Conservative opinion he refused to obstruct the formation of Labour governments. His hostility was instead targeted against particular labour attitudes, ideas and behaviour. When he especially wanted defeats for the trade unions or the Labour Party he was as capable as other Conservatives, as members of the self-proclaimed “national party”, of presenting the movement as sectional and sectarian.27 He too could call the Labour Party the “socialist party”, as if it were doctrinaire and somehow unBritish. On occasion he could be brutal: he declared in 1924 that the Labour Party expressed “a fantastic heresy of foreign origin”, in 1926 that the general strike was “a challenge to Parliament and the road to anarchy and ruin”, and in 1933 that the Labour programme was “proletarian Hitlerism”.28
- 29 For the complex political reconstruction of 1931-32, see Philip Williamson, National Crisis and Nat (...)
19To be absolutely sure that the Labour Party could be defeated and that the emergence of still more radical movements, to the political right as well as left, could be prevented, Baldwin wanted the Conservative Party to obtain the widest possible range of support, reaching beyond its existing followers and even its most promising potential recruits, across numerous social groups and across a broad span of political opinions. This was the party-political impetus for his appeals to classlessness and national cohesion. It meant that the Conservatives had to capture support from those with loose or shifting political opinions (the “non-political”), and more particularly from Liberal or ex-Liberal voters. At general elections during the 1920s the Liberal Party and, in 1935, the Liberal-led “Council of Action and Reconstruction” were the most immediate threats to Conservative Party success, because – as was shown at the 1923 and 1929 elections – substantial Liberal recoveries could prevent it from winning an overall electoral majority. This was the main reason for Baldwin’s public hostility towards the most prominent Liberal leader, Lloyd George, though there was also a sharp element of moral disapproval towards his intrigues and prolific “rhetoric”. Baldwin wanted to discredit the Liberal leadership, to widen the Liberal Party’s post-war divisions, and to assist its destruction as an effective electoral force, in order to persuade Liberal politicians to defect to the Conservative Party – Churchill in 1924 was only the most prominent example – and Liberal voters to become Conservative voters. In part, as McKibbin argues, this was achieved by a politics of resistance, by encouraging a polarisation between a Conservative “public” and the Labour Party. But it was achieved also by a politics of attraction, expressed most clearly in Baldwin’s appeals to the liberal and “progressive” principles of democracy, active citizenship, and service; by evocations of the values of the free churches, which had provided a large part of Liberal popular support; and by his government’s effective absorption of “new Liberal” social policies from 1924. Although he had made his political reputation by his part in the destruction of Lloyd George’s coalition government in 1922, he was not opposed to party alliances as such. In many respects, the coalition created during the financial crisis in 1931 – with Liberals shorn of Lloyd George, and with the unexpected addition of the Labour prime minster and several other Labour ministers – was Baldwin’s ideal political arrangement. Collectively, the coalition partners won the general election later that year with over 500 seats more than a demolished Labour opposition, reduced to just 52 MPs. As the Conservatives alone had a majority of 325 seats over all other parties (and after the next election in 1935 would still have an overall majority of 159), they could easily have formed a government of their own at any time during the 1930s. But Baldwin was content that his party had become the controlling element in a cross-party combination which described itself as the National government.29
- 30 Williamson, Baldwin, pp. 231-5.
- 31 Ibid., pp. 153, 218-24.
20Baldwin’s emphasis on national cohesion had considerable implications for Conservatism itself. First, he wanted his party to be as broad-based, as “national” in composition, as possible. All parties are coalitions of interest and opinions, but none has been more so than the Conservative Party of 1924 to 1937, as it steadily attracted new members and supporters: as Baldwin observed, its members stretched from the die-hard right to progressively-minded “liberals”. Second, his steady focus was on his understanding of the national interest and the higher collective purposes of the Conservative Party, not on the causes of backbench parliamentary factions, pressure groups, constituency activists or Conservative newspapers. For him, responsible Conservative leadership as well as the aim of creating and preserving a broad party, included the capacity to ignore or resist sectional forms of Conservatism. This could cause problems. There were numerous party divisions on various issues, rival election campaigns organised by newspapers, a frequent undercurrent of complaints about Baldwin himself, and two serious revolts against his leadership. These, it has been argued, indicate his weaknesses as party leader; but they are better interpreted as evidence of statesmanship. Only under severe duress in 1930–31 did he make gestures towards the most critical newspaper owners, the “press lords” Beaverbrook and Rothermere, before gaining widespread and cross-party admiration by following his own instincts and counter-attacking them on the constitutional principle that there should not be “power without responsibility”.30 Third, he believed that if the Conservative Party was to prevail, it needed to have “a vital, democratic creed”. The idealism that had made the Labour Party attractive to many new voters and to some former Liberals had to be resisted with a superior Conservative idealism. Baldwin wanted to “educate his own party as well as the new electorate, to raise its purposes and tone: to inspire it with “new life, new principles, new aspirations and new ideals”. As has been clear to those who have studied Baldwin’s politics, his emphasis in the now much-cited passage of December 1924 was not “one nation”, but the “spirit of service” which he wanted all members of his party to embrace.31
- 32 Cowling, Impact of Labour, p. 421, and see a formulation in terms of ‘middle-classness’ in McKibbin (...)
- 33 Williamson, Baldwin, p. 356.
- 34 McKibbin, Parties and People, pp. 181-3.
21However defined, and however much the appeal for national cohesion, all forms of “One Nation Conservatism” remain Conservative. Baldwin’s achievement as the party’s leader was to help “tie together the moral, industrial, agrarian, libertarian, Anglican and nonconformist bodies of resistance” to socialism and the Labour movement.32 His party did not focus on gathering together the middle classes alone, in the social explanation of Conservative success proposed by McKibbin. A contemporary party organiser observed that there was “no one half so good” as Baldwin in “getting the middle class and the working class to vote the same way”.33 As McKibbin himself concedes, class was a weak determinant of voting behaviour during the inter-war years, and that “more than the Labour, the Conservative Party in the 1930s was the party of the working class”.34
22Baldwin did not turn “one nation” into a party slogan or a policy tenet, and he was not the source for those later Conservatives who adopted the phrase for their political programmes. Yet he placed much more weight on the shared principles and values of national life than these later “One Nation Conservatives” were to do. This was because the dangers for the nation as well as for Conservatism always seemed so acute during the economic and social dislocations after the First World War, the onset of mass democracy, the arrival of a socialist Labour Party, the financial crisis of 1931, and the ideological and military threats from fascist powers during the mid-1930s. His priority was to entrench a conservative conception of the national politics among the new mass electorate, one which was trusted and upheld by as many members of the nation as possible; only this, he believed, could prevent the Conservative Party and the various Conservative interests from being overwhelmed by the Labour movement.
23Baldwin’s politics were a product of particular conditions, very different from those which have prevailed since 1945. His style of Conservatism has little place in the Conservative politics that have been shaped successively by Thatcher and Brexit, let alone by the huge social, cultural and political changes since 1940. Baldwin aimed to raise the tone of popular politics; he resisted populism. He did not allow Conservative politics to be driven by the party’s activists and right-wing MPs, nor by Conservative newspapers. He tolerated a range of opinions within the party, and absorbed internal criticisms: there was never any question of restricting cabinet membership to his personal followers or acceptance of sectarian interpretations of policy issues, nor of dissentient MPs losing the party whip or suffering de-selection by their constituency parties. He did not regard denigration of the Labour Party and its exclusion from government as the all-consuming purposes for Conservative politics, nor the cutting of taxes and social services as the cardinal aim in Conservative policies. His governments did not generate still greater social inequalities. He conducted a genuinely Unionist politics, for the whole of the United Kingdom, not a xenophobic English politics. He promoted respect for the constitution, national institutions, the law, and parliamentary conventions. He did not treat the House of Commons as if it were an undergraduate debating chamber. He stood for high standards in political life, for integrity, honesty, trust and public service. When Baldwin retired as prime minister and Conservative Party in 1937, it was at a time of his own choosing; and it is a tribute to the success of his appeals to national cohesion and political decency that he left with expressions of respect from members of the Labour and Liberal parties as well as the Conservative Party.