ABSTRACT
Neville Chamberlain’s commitment to social reform was lifelong and sincere. In his own terms, it was also privately passionate. Undoubtedly, the austere persona suggested little love for his fellow man and Chamberlain’s reforms were often couched in the language of the bureaucratic rationaliser seemingly more concerned with efficiency than the relief of human suffering – and many at the time (and ever since) have taken him at face value. Yet beneath the harsh exterior, Chamberlain was his father’s son; a late-Victorian reformer motivated by genuine humanitarian impulses and within whom individualism and collectivism were in a state of continuous creative interaction. Such sympathies had drawn him into association with the Unionist Social Reform Committee before the Great War and they provided the moving spirit behind his social programme during the inter-war period. Deeply touched by a tribute to his many achievements in this field a month before his death, Chamberlain declared that ‘it was the hope of doing something to improve the conditions of life for the poorer people that brought me at past middle life into politics, and it is some satisfaction to me that I was able to carry out some part of my ambition’.1 It was undoubtedly the happiest and most fulfilling period of his ministerial career and the culmination of everything for which he had previously striven. Although the decision to sacrifice his claim to the most important ministerial portfolio in the Cabinet for a far less important office appears to be a noble and quixotic gesture, it never caused Chamberlain a moment’s regret. It is true that the Ministry of Health had experienced a rather chequered history since its establishment in 1919 – not least because it had six ministers in only five years before Chamberlain’s return in November 1924. It is equally true that Chamberlain had initially been deeply sceptical about the need for such a new department when the idea was first mooted late in 1917.2 By 1924, however, Chamberlain recognised better than anyone else, the Ministry’s vast potential
as an agency for radical reform. Moreover, it needs to be remembered that the Ministry of Health in the 1920s was a very different and far more broad-ranging department than its modern namesake. Indeed, in some respects it was the first modern ‘super-ministry’ long before Edward Heath conceived the notion in the early 1970s. The department which Chamberlain inherited thus encompassed not just every aspect of health, hospitals, sanitation, welfare and nursing but also old age pensions, health insurance, roads, housing and town planning along with the vast apparatus of the Poor Law and local government. It was a massive responsibility and during the 1920s Neville Chamberlain was perhaps uniquely qualified to make the most of the opportunities it offered. Soon after the Conservative 1924 election landslide Lord Beaverbrook claimed that ‘Britain has at last attained Bonar Law’s ideal of tranquillity – under Baldwin. As long as the Conservative Government do nothing, they can go on for a very long time.’3 Yet the idea that ‘tranquillity’ could be equated with legislative inertia had no part in Chamberlain’s vision. At the Hotel Cecil meeting in February 1924, Baldwin had declared the Conservatives were ‘not going to beat Labour on a policy of tranquillity, negation or sitting still. There is vitality in Labour … and unless we can share a vitality of that kind we shall be unable to conquer.’4 Chamberlain was determined to provide much of the dynamic legislative force needed to make this a reality. Within two weeks of his appointment, he had presented a provisional programme to the Cabinet outlining 25 measures covering everything from reform of pensions, housing, rent restrictions, rating, the Poor Law and local government to legislation dealing with milk hygiene, the control of therapeutic substances, smoke abatement, the regulation of maternity homes and the registration of births, marriages and deaths.5 By the time the second Baldwin government left office in May 1929 no fewer than 21 of these proposals had been passed. On these legislative foundations, Chamberlain rightly deserves his reputation as ‘the most effective social reformer of the interwar years’.6 As his private secretary later recalled, while Chamberlain actually did nothing that ‘was not … in the stocks already’, only his skill, determination and coherent vision of the larger picture enabled them to ‘weld the whole lot of things together into a policy’ capable of being carried in such a short time and with such far-reaching effects.7 Perhaps the most immediately popular of Chamberlain’s social reforms was introduced during his first parliamentary session in the shape of the Widows’, Orphans’ and Old Age Contributory Pensions Act of 1925. Against a background of mounting pressure for some form of unified social insurance scheme, shortly before leaving office the first Baldwin government had established a committee of senior civil servants under Sir John Anderson to consider the options, including the idea of an ‘all-in’ scheme under which a flat-rate national insurance contribution covered not merely sickness and unemployment but old age, industrial accidents and support for widows and orphans. Their report in July 1924, dismissed ideas of ‘all-in’ insurance and a non-contributory scheme as too costly, but it proposed a less ambitious scheme of compulsory contributory pensions to cover widows, orphans and old age to which the State should be
the principal contributor.8 By this stage, however, in Opposition Chamberlain had already reached a similar conclusion as chairman of a party sub-committee on social insurance. Indeed, as early as March 1924 he argued there were ‘four essentials for a satisfactory scheme. (1) It must be contributory (2) it must be compulsory (3) it must cover the 4 main needs for security, unemployment, sickness, old age & death leaving widows & dependents (4) the provision for old age must offer sufficient to induce the old men to retire.’ Moreover, while he recognised the scheme ‘bristles with difficulties’, he was confident of its electoral potential and hoped that his draft for Baldwin’s speech at Edinburgh on 24 March would at least ‘peg out our claim to the ground before the others have had time to get in’.9 Although the actuarial provisions still remained unresolved, therefore, in their October 1924 manifesto the Conservatives were committed to a contributory scheme integrating pensions for old age, widows and orphans ‘as a right, for which payment has been made, instead of as a dole or a charity’.10 Within a fortnight of entering office, Chamberlain had obtained Cabinet approval to translate his work in Opposition into an outline scheme. Although Chamberlain had initially scheduled pension reform for 1926, at Churchill’s instigation the measure was moved forward to 1925 on the grounds that it was ‘a fence to jump at a gallop’.11 In part, this was because it appeared to be a popular measure with the working class, capable of balancing the income tax cuts for the middle class planned for Churchill’s first Budget. Yet pensions also satisfied Churchill’s more fundamental desire for the government to leave behind it a number of ‘big landmarks’; a priority which required it to ‘concentrate on a few great issues in the social sphere … rather than fritter away our resources on a variety of services which, though possibly good in themselves, were not of vital national importance’. As he had to finance the scheme, within three weeks of coming to office he thus confidentially approached Chamberlain to ‘enter partnership & work the plan with him’. In return, he promised to ‘scratch & scrape & claw up everything he could in the way of money to help’. For the first, but by no means the last time, Chamberlain submitted to Churchill’s implied blackmail in order to ease the passage of the measure. But as a worrying foretaste of future complications, Chamberlain also noted:
It was curious how all through he showed how he was thinking of personal credit & it seemed plain to me that he regretted still that he was not Minister of Health. He spoke of the position. ‘You are in the van. You can raise a monument. You can have a name in history etc …’ A man of tremendous drive & vivid imagination but obsessed with the glory of doing something spectacular which should erect monuments to him.12
