The passing of a capitalist “Great Man”

The about 15 years, including the period of the first World War, Lloyd George served the purposes of the capitalist class in various ministerial offices. Then, his hold over the electorate diminished and his usefulness as a Cabinet Minister exhausted, he spent nearly a quarter of a century outside the charmed circle, making ceaseless, but ineffectual attempts to demonstrate that he was still indispensable

But when he died, on March 26th, his erstwhile opponents, who had many of them denounced him in times gone by, united in the discovery of his greatness. Here are some of the verdicts pronounced in the House of Commons on March 29th :—

“The greatest Welshman …. since the days of the Tudors,” “He was the champion of the weak and poor,” “ . . . . those who came after would find pillars of his life’s toil upstanding, massive and indestructible.”—(Mr. Winston Churchill).
Mr. Arthur Greenwood, speaking for the Labour Party, endorsed everything that Mr. Churchill said : “We mourn the passing of a great Parliamentarian and I am certain my Right Hon. Friend has expressed, irrespective of party, the views held by the House about the great Mr. Lloyd George. … He was the friend of the oppressed.” Mr. Aneurin Bevan, concurred—“We have lost our most distinguished member, and Wales her greatest son.” . . . He was first and last a democrat.”

Then Mr. Gallacher, the Communist M.P. had his say about this astute defender of the capitalist system. He quoted Lenin as having said that Lloyd George “was the greatest political leader this country had known ” and confessed that Lenin advised him to study Lloyd George. (This may explain many things about Mr. Gallacher). Like the other speakers, Gallacher found that Lloyd George was a friend of the “common people.” “. . . . he played many parts, great parts, always with the fervour and intensity of a son of the people, for it was the common people that bore him. It was the suffering of the common people that called him forth to battle against poverty and neglect.”

The Press followed the same line. To the “Daily Herald” (March 27th), Lloyd George in the first World War was a giant, the nation is eternally in his debt and his qualities “at his finest were the great qualities of our Democracy : he was fearless, he was tireless, he was ablaze with the spirit of liberty, equality and fraternity.”

Mr. R. Page Arnot in the Daily Worker (March 27th), gave a less unbalanced, but still lopsided account of Lloyd George’s career. He accepts the popular view of Lloyd George in pre-1914 days as waging war on the capitalist class. (“The City and the propertied classes were cast into frenzy”), yet a moment’s thought would recall that Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Liberal Capitalist Government, backed by his Liberal colleagues and by the majority of the party, a party which whole-heartedly represented the interests of the manufacturing section of the propertied class: It was merely the quarrel of that section against landed and financial interests. Page Arnot, like Gallacher, quotes Lenin on Lloyd George, but more to the point:—“a first class bourgeois business man and master of political cunning, a popular orator, able to make any kind of speech, even r-r-revolutionary speeches before Labour audiences.”

The fact that a man is dead does not sanctify him, and what we said of him living we continue to say after his death; but now let us recall what others were saying of Lloyd George when he was in active politics. In 1922 the leader of the Labour Party, the late J. R. MacDonald, far from finding Lloyd George a “giant” in the war accurately summed him up as follows:—“His great contribution to the war was an unequalled genius for placing false and flashy issues with much fervour before the country.” (“Labour Magazine,” November, 1922). His “greatness” in MacDonald’s eyes was that his four years as Prime Minister in the Coalition Government, 1918-1922 were a “great failure.” MacDonald went on to describe him as a rhetorical demagogue, and an adept at “nimble-witted trickery.” This, of course, was the way all the Labour Party and Trade Union spokesmen were describing him after the last war. Have the workers forgotten his dragooning of the trade unions during and after the war, his trickery of the miners over the Sankey Report on Nationalisation of the Mines, which led Mr. Hartshorn, Miners Leader, to declare, “We have been deceived, betrayed, duped.”—(Labour Party Speaker’s Handbook, 1922. P.48). Was Lloyd George “first and last a democrat”? What of his part in the trickery which foisted conscription and defence of the realm acts on the workers in the last War, and the way he intrigued Asquith out of the Premiership and himself in? In the House on March 28th, 1945, Mr. Churchill described it as “Presently Lloyd George seized the main power in the State and the headship of the Government”; and he reiterated the word “seized” when interrupted. In 1922, the Communist Party were denouncing Lloyd George as the friend of Italian Fascism, preparing to instal Fascism here. The break up of the Coalition Government in 1922 was, according to the “Communist” (November 4th, 1922), a “swindle to demoralise the workers ” and leave them “defenceless before the oncoming of the Iron Heel of the new plutocratic Dictatorship.” Lloyd George, they said, was “a party to the conspiracy.” The Communists too used to be fond of recalling that Lloyd George “was responsible for the black and tan regime in Ireland.” (“Class against Class,” C.P.G.B., 1921), p. 8.)

Lloyd George was throughout his life an upholder of the capitalist system. His niggling reforms were designed to help British capitalism meet its overseas trade rivals and to allay some working class discontent which had reached a bitterness that might be dangerous to capitalism. Even in that field he was largely a borrower from others (“Lloyd George, on going to the Treasury, found an Old Age Pensions Bill already drafted by his predecessor, and after he had carried this through he turned his thought towards schemes of national insurance against sickness and unemployment, and visited Germany in the autumn of 1908 to study the German insurance system”—Times, March 27th, 1945.)

As for being a friend of the oppressed, his life work was devoted to preventing capitalism from being overthrown. Here we have some of his own admissions. On January 21st, 1922, he was pleading for continued Liberal-Tory unity. “What is there to quarrel about? Private enterprise, the resistance to the revolutionary policy to overthrow the individual enterprise that has made this country—what is the difference between Liberals and Conservatives? They are both supporting the same cause …. We are fighting to defend the same fortress. Let’s combine forces.” (Labour Speakers Handbook, 1929. P.141).

On October 25th, 1924, in a speech at Cardiff he was again telling the Tories that if they destroyed the Liberal Party they ran the risk of aiding Socialism. “Are you going to destroy a party which does not agree with you . . . but which is just as firmly rooted as you in the existing order”? (“Daily News”, October 26th, 1924).

In the “Socialist Standard,” (December, 1918), we said this of Lloyd George.

“Behind this mountebank marionette stands the Imperialist section of the capitalist class, composed of both Liberals and Tories, who are striving to extend their dominion and power of robbing the working class, over larger areas of the globe. It was to protect their interests that this country entered into the War. When two years ago the military situation looked serious for the Allies this section looked for a more pliant tool to take charge of the Government. One was at hand possessing a glib tongue. always ready with large and extravagant promises quite unscrupulous, and able to sway crowds with his clap-trap. A dirty political shuffle took place and Lloyd George became Prime Minister.”

There is no reason to modify that statement.

(Editorial, Socialist Standard, May. 1945)