Dan Snow's History Hit - Unrest in Parliament: The Hot Summer of 1911

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

The summer of 1911 was a hot one. Massive strikes took place across the country, including seamen, railwaymen, coal miners, women working in food processing and garment-making and even school children. That, combined with record-breaking temperatures made Britain a constitutional, industrial and political tinderbox. It was harder to endure than today: no refrigeration for food, heavy clothing; more manual/outdoor labour, unventilated workplaces, surging food prices, and limited deodorant. All this fuelled industrial militancy, especially in hard, outdoor labour like the docks.It also raised political tempers: 670 MPs in heavy clothing, packed into a steaming Chamber…Dr Robert Saunders, reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London joins Dan on the podcast to take a look at how heat exacerbates social and political unrest and what parallels are to be found between the scorching summer of 1911 and the summer of 2022.This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. There's a heatwave again in the UK. Now for those listeners abroad, the heatwave in the UK is perhaps slightly more generously defined than it might be in your own good countries. But by the time it starts reaching just over 30 degrees centigrade or about 90 Fahrenheit, we move to DEFCON 1. We don't have much truck with the heat. Odd given 19th century British propensity for conquering hot places, but the Brits don't do too well with heat, at least not maybe on home shores. And this hot summer has drawn all our thoughts back, inevitably, to the hot summer of 1911. Arguably, Britain came closer to revolution than any time in its history. In fact,

I'll discuss the exact point of my guest on the podcast today. It's a great pleasure to have this person back on the podcast. He's Dr. Robert Saunders. He's a reader in modern British history at Queen Mary, University of London. You're going to be hearing a lot from Robert, actually, and you'll be very glad you are, because this podcast features him talking to me about the hot summer of 1911, with lots of exciting and interesting modern parallels. Not just the heat, but more, which I'll explain in a second. I talked to him about that. Britain is currently in the process

of choosing a new prime minister. Britain isn't, in fact. The members of the Conservative Party are choosing a new prime minister. All the paid up. If you paid your Jews, you get a vote, which is nice for them. Good luck in that big decision, folks. You hold the rest of our fate in your hands. And because of this prime ministerial shift, we thought we'd repeat last year's episodes on British prime ministers. We went back and we talked about every prime minister from Robert Walpole in the 1720s right up to the present day. 300 years of prime ministers. There's some rogues in there, there's some scoundrels, some legends, some brilliant men and women, and there's some truly useless ones in there as well. So it's worth checking that out. Now, Robert Saunders appears in that episode as well,

talking about the 19th and early 20th century. So that was great fun having him on that. But in this episode, we talk about the hot summer of 1911. We remember in Britain, the Edwardian period, the pre-First World War period, a sort of halcyon Indian summer of British greatness. But in fact, it was far from that. It was a time of crisis. It was a time of political upon Indian summer of British greatness. But in fact, it was far from that. It was a time of crisis. It was a time of political upheaval. It was a time of change. It was a time of enormous concern about the future of the United Kingdom that bordered on open warfare, civil insurrection. And that tumultuous energy reached one of its, well, one of its climaxes in the hot summer of 1911. It was a record hot summer.

It was roasting hot inside the Palace of Westminster, where MPs and peers clashed in one of the greatest constitutional struggles in our history. It was boiling hot outside. It was boiling hot in the docks, in the factories, in the mines, where workers went on strike demanding better conditions, the greatest say in the government of their country. And the heat was an important factor. And there's another modern parallel, not just the heat, but Boris Johnson has floated the idea, we learn apparently, of creating a huge number of peers, of lords, to fill up the second chamber and ease the passage of certain Brexit-related bills and other pieces of Boris Johnson and his successor's agenda through the second chamber.

Now, the idea of creating peers in order to get your way in the second chamber is quite rare, very rare, you might argue. It was floated in 1832 when William IV acknowledged that he would create peers in order to get that reform bill, what became the Reform Act through Parliament in 1832. And also in the hot summer of 1911, Asquith, Low George and other reforming liberals made the new king, very new king, George V. They made him promise that he would create enough peers, he would flood the House of Lords with new lords in order to move gigantically important progressive legislation through the lords against the wishes of the big majority of that upper chamber. In this episode, therefore, we're going to be talking about heat, we're going to be talking about making new peers in the House of Lords, both of which are very much features of our political life today. Like all my favourite episodes, it's the history that illuminates

the present. Here's Dr Robert Saunders. Enjoy. Thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. much for coming back on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Let's just do the big thing first. Is the hot summer of 1911 the closest modern Britain has come to revolution? Not quite. Oh, okay. I think the closest modern Britain has come to revolution is 1914. That's the moment when you have paramilitaries training in Hyde Park. You have the Conservative Party running posters

talking about how every vote for the Liberals is another widow in Ulster. But 1911 is the moment when that political crisis begins that ultimately leads up to that kind of volcanic eruption. And let's talk about why that. We Brits tend to think of the Edwardian summer, we think of the early portion of the 20th century before the kind of catastrophic wars that tear the world apart from 14 to 45. We think of it as rather halcyon, don't we? And yet, when you look under the bonnet, things are rather frantic. So what's going on at the end of the first decade of the 20th century? Well, it's one of those points in time when all the big questions of British

politics, all the kind of explosive gases that have been leaking into the atmosphere for a decade beforehand, suddenly ignite. And when all the big controversial questions of the age suddenly hit detonation point. So at the same moment, you've got a constitutional crisis that's pitting the House of Lords against the House of Commons. You've got an industrial crisis with a wave of strikes on a scale that the country had never really seen before. There's a foreign policy crisis when it looks like Britain might be on the brink of war with Germany. And really contested questions like women's suffrage or like Home Rule for Ireland are pushing into the mainstream of British politics. rule for Ireland are pushing into the mainstream of British politics. And all of that is happening in the hottest summer that anyone living can remember, which I think never encourages people

to approach these questions in a calm frame of mind. 37 degrees, peak temperature, hottest until the 1990s. That heat has more than just a sort of dramatic backdrop for the febrile, the kind of heated events in Parliament. It does seem like that heat that affected people. I mean, if you're in the chambers of the House of Commons, the Lords, it must have been difficult. It's very much part of the crisis. I think weather really matters in politics. It's not an accident, for example, that the winter of discontent happens in the middle of an absolutely ferocious winter. Those famous grave diggers who go on strike in Liverpool are having to dig in frozen ground with implements that are painful to touch. Those rubbish collectors in London who aren't collecting

the bins are working in almost arctic conditions. Now, you don't go on strike because it's a bit cold, but temperature can catalyse things that you're already really upset about. And if we think about the Edwardian period, you've still got a really large section of the public that is working in hot, unventilated factories, that's doing really physical outdoor labour. It's also a generation, it hasn't got the clothing for these kind of conditions. So I'm talking to you today in a rather fetching t-shirt and shorts combo. That isn't an option when you only have your work clothes and your Sunday best. And when clothes

have to last, they've got to be made out of warm, heavy material. So you imagine being packed into a factory, or indeed into the House of Commons. Or you imagine that you're working all day in 37 degrees loading a ship, and you can see how this really feeds into that kind of explosive atmosphere. Let's talk about the high politics first, before we get to the industrial disputes, all linked of course. The Liberal Party come in with a crushing victory on the great electoral transformations in British history after a long period of conservative dominance. A, let's whisper it, a Lib-Lab pact helps to achieve a big parliamentary majority for the Liberal Party, the main opposition party at

the time. And they've got quite a radical agenda. Yes, they come into power in 1906 with one of the great landslides of British history, the problem that they quickly encounter is that almost everything they try to do is simply put into the shredder by the House of Lords, because the House of Lords had become an essentially conservative assembly. And the Conservative Party openly boasted about this. Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader, gave a speech in 1906 in which he said that the Conservative party in or out of office would command the destinies of the empire. So that great landslide majority, by the time it gets to 1908-1909, is really struggling to point to solid achievements because it's got this roadblock in its way. So increasingly, Liberal politicians, Labour

politicians, Irish nationalists are coming to the conclusion that winning general elections isn't enough. If you want to do something really radical, you've got to break the power of the House of Lords. That's interesting. I didn't realise it was that way around. I always assumed that David LaGiorda, the radical Chancellor of the Exchequer, who aimed to increase taxes on the wealthiest and to a certain extent erode or break the power of the aristocracy, was that all in order to provoke a great fight with the lords? Was it actually that way around? It's very difficult to tell. There are all sorts of conspiracies swirling around. I think my own view is that he probably thought that the budget would pass, but that he would not have been distressed that it did not because it gave him an opportunity for this battle. Because there had

been a convention, and it was only a convention convention that the House of Lords didn't interfere with financial policy. So liberals had increasingly tried to use the budget or financial measures to get around the House of Lords and to do radical things in a way that the Lords wouldn't stop. So what are some of the tastiest bits of that budget that are going to provoke the rage of the upper house, the House of Lords? Well, one of the problems here is that the big divide between the two parties in this period was actually tax policy. So the Conservative Party were running hard on the idea of tariff reform. They wanted to raise money by putting import duties on goods coming in from overseas.

Whereas the Liberal Party is increasingly looking to raise taxes on the rich and in particular to raise taxes on property and on the land. So the 1909 budget introduces very significant new taxes on the wealthy and it also sets up a national valuation of all land and it's fairly clear what the point of this is. This isn't an academic exercise. This is being done so that a couple of budgets down the road, you'll know where the money is and you can tax it. So if you believe in free trade as liberals do, this is the budget that's going to make that possible, that's going to pay for social reform without tariffs. If you're a conservative and you want tariffs, this is the budget that's sending you down the wrong path. So there really has to be a political battle over this piece of legislation. And is it fair to say this is the first budget that is openly intended to be redistributive? Yeah, it builds on the budget that precedes it,

but it does represent a new theory of what budgets are there to do. For most of the 19th century, I think if you had asked someone like Mr Gladstone, what is the point of the budget? The point of it is to raise the money that the state needs for its expenses and to do so without disturbing the balance of classes or forces. Whereas by 1909, people are starting to say, actually, you can use the budget as an instrument of social justice. You can use the budget to protect the incomes of the poor and to take money from the rich to pay for things like old age pensions or national insurance or free school meals for children or the sorts of things that a radical liberal government wants to do. So yes, it's a new theory of what the budget is. And so the scene is set for a showdown. For the

Conservatives, this is almost existential. I mean, if you're the Duke of Northumberland and you derive all your income from the land and it's not currently taxed, the idea that Lloyd George is going to get his mitts on that to pay for the urban working class to have their pensions and employment insurance, this is existential. Yes, and Lloyd George very deliberately fights an election campaign in 1910 that pushes that line. He makes a series of extremely funny speeches about dukes and earls. He famously says that a fully equipped duke costs as much to arm as a dreadnought and does twice as much damage. He talks about what are the dukes going to do? Are they going to start dressing themselves and feeding themselves in the morning? So he appears

to be fighting almost a kind of class war style election. But it's existential in another way as well, which is that if there's one big thing that the Conservative Party believes in, it is the union with Ireland. They're calling themselves the Unionist Party at this point. And everyone knows that if you get rid of the veto in the House of Lords,

then the next thing the Liberals are going to do is to allow Ireland's self-government and the creation of its own parliament. So the big thing that your party stands for is also on the line here. Okay, so we've got an election in 1910. These elections, as the British system can often do, they're kind of ambiguous, aren't they? They give everyone a bit of hope. It's an extraordinary pair of results. So you get these two general elections in January and November, and they produce the most hung parliament in British history. So by the time the second election is over, the Liberals and the Conservatives and Unionists have exactly the same number of seats. They've both got 272. It's the only time in British history you get a dead heat between the

big two parties. The Liberals stay in power because they've got an alliance with the Labour Party and the Irish Nationalists, which gives them an effective majority of over 100. But the Conservatives can make the claim that they are the biggest party. They actually win more votes than the Liberals, but they're locked out of power by this kind of corrupt bargain between socialists, Irish nationalists, and radical liberals. A coalition of chaos, some might say, Rob. Absolutely. Or they sometimes at the time call it a log-rolling coalition. And you'll know that log-rolling is a term of American politics. It's about the idea that you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. That if you vote for me on the things I care about, I'll vote for you on the things that you care about. So I think what's happening here is that

the Labour Party will get the things that it wants. It'll get trade union legislation, and in return, it'll sell the union down the river. Meanwhile, the Irish nationalists will vote for things that the Liberals want. And you'll get all these policies for which there isn't actually a public majority, but you can stitch together a kind of corrupt coalition. This is all going to be very important during the next election in the UK, I think, probably, folks. So put a little mental note to remember this episode. So we got the Liberals, 1910, they've gone to the country twice. They then claim there is a mandate to jam this radical budget through. Yes, and the House of Lords actually accepts that. The House of Lords then passes the budget. And in fact, they accept the principle that they should not interfere with

budgets in the future. But the Liberals want to go further. They have just lost two years of a parliament. They've lost that massive majority they won in 1906 because of the obstruction of the House of Lords, which is a barrier that a Conservative government will never face. So they take the view that this cannot happen again, that they've got to put the obstruction of the House of Lords, which is a barrier that a Conservative government will never face. So they take the view that this cannot happen again, that they've got to put the House of Lords back in its box. They can't have every Liberal government simply being ripped apart whenever the Conservative leadership in the Lords chooses to do so. And it's worth saying that if you look at the House of Lords in about 1910, you've got roughly 400 peers on the Conservative and Unionist side, and about 88 on the Liberal side. So there is a huge mismatch here.

If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the hot summer of 1911. It was boiling. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffeeoms coffee plastic surgery warships over on the patented podcast by history hit we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own we uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects we managed to put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately becomes certain. Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her husband disappeared around the same time.

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rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. As the temperature climbs into the spring and the summer, how does that showdown take place? Well, first, you're absolutely right to remind us of the temperature. The House of Commons has 670 members at this point, and it's deliberately built to be too small. It can't seat them all. So whenever there's a big debate, and we see this today, the House of Commons is packed and crowded. Now you imagine 670 people packed into an

unventilated chamber. Everyone's wearing their frock coats and their waistcoats and their hats. Everyone's wearing their frock coats and their waistcoats and their hats. The Thames stinks. Frankly, the members of Parliament stink because nobody's wearing deodorants. And so you get extraordinary parliamentary scenes. There's a point in June where the Prime Minister, Asquith, tries to make a statement to the House and is simply screamed down by Tory MPs who are just yelling traitor, traitor at him. And in the end, he simply has to sit down. And it's the first time in British history that the Prime Minister has stood to

address the House of Commons and has simply not been able to get a hearing. Traitor? Why traitor? Because of Ireland? Or because of his radical social policies? Really for two reasons. So one is Ireland. Everyone knows that the Parliament Act, which is going to strip the House of Lords of its veto, that is going to strip the House of Lords of its veto, that is going to make possible Home Rule in Ireland. So if you believe in the union, this is an act of treason. But also, it's hard, I think, for us to recapture this, but the defenders of the House of Lords really believe that they are fighting for a democratic principle. They believe that the House of Lords is a democratic institution. Because what it does is it says to the House of Commons,

we don't think that there's a public mandate for this. We don't think that the public actually wants the people's budget or Home Rule for Ireland. And of course, in the days of very disciplined parties, and we know this today, you can win a majority in the House of Commons on a minority of the vote after a general election that might be fought on something completely different. And then you can ram through whatever legislation you like. So the House of Lords sees themselves as kind of gatekeepers for the people. And at least the way they phrase it, when a bill is put to them that they don't think there is support for, they say to the government, hold a general election. If you win, we'll pass it.

But we want you to test the will of the people. hold a general election. If you win, we'll pass it. But we want you to test the will of the people. It's just that happens that those guardians of the people are all drawn from an absolutely minute section of said people. We should point out these lords are, in almost all cases, men of enormous wealth and inherited wealth in particular. As people used to talk about unearned income, they inherited assets, they were rent-seeking and often had great land and estates. Right. And with the exception of the bishops and a small number of law lords, these are all hereditary peers. But they argued in some ways that makes them good public representatives because they're not bound to party. Their careers don't depend on what the

party whips want them to do or what the party activists want them to do. They can be independent. And some of them argue that what happens over the people's budget actually vindicates them because they veto the people's budget, there's a general election and the liberals lose their majority. It's actually not clear that there is massive support in the country for the people's budget. But the House of Lords then passes it anyway. They recognise the results of that election. They can say, actually, this has worked. They also look back to the 1890s when the House of Commons passed a home rule bill, the House of Lords chucked it away, and the Liberals didn't fight a general election because they knew they would lose. So they can say, actually, never mind theory. Theory is something that the French worry about. In practice, this House of Lords protects the interests of the people.

So you've got the House of Lords protecting the interests of people in the summer of 1911. They are opposing the Parliament Act at this point. Yes. Some of them want to amend the Parliament Act. So they accept that you might say that the budget, for example, is no longer going to be under the control of the Lords, but that you're going to put in safeguards. So you're going to say things like, you can't change the Protestant succession to the monarchy without the House of Lords permission. Or the thing they really care about, you can't reform the Union without the House of Lords. Some of them also actually want to reform the House of Lords, say keep its current powers but change its composition, maybe have an elected House of Lords, but make sure that you've still got a protection against the tyranny of the House

of Commons. And so the Parliament Act is progressing through Parliament. How does that constitutional debate interact with the 40,000 women that marched through London in the middle of June demanding a right to a vote? Is there just a sense that this is a time of change, time of tumult, and industrial groups, women, feel that they need to get involved now if they're going to put their hand on the scale? I think all of these different things sort of feed a kind of vortex of hysteria because so many different parts of the British political system seem to be in crisis at the same time. So there are plenty of lords who think that votes for women is going to destroy the British Empire.

So the spectacle of 40,000 women marching through London, abusing as they see it the coronation to make a political point is really alarming. We should say that the new king, poor old George V, arguably not a man whose intellect was up to the job of this great point of crisis. To add petrol to everything, he's crowned on the 22nd of June, 1911. It's amazing. Right. So in the middle of this, you've got this new, very inexperienced king.

He's often talked about as a very young king when he's actually, I think, about 46 at the time. But nonetheless... That is very young, Rob. That is young. It is very young. Very young. So he hasn't been on the throne for very long. And ultimately, if the House of Lords refuses to pass the Parliament Bill, then he is going to have to be the deal breaker. The only way you can get something through the House of Lords against its will is if the king will create 500 new peers so this sense that a liberal government is coercing a young and inexperienced king and forcing him to break the constitution is one of the other things that's behind those shouts of traitor traitor in the House of Commons. And then what about industrial actions we've got massive strikes all through this summer. What's causing them? Well, again, the trigger in some ways is the weather. There are some very funny articles in the middle class press that are harrumphing about these strikes that are spreading across

the railway network, the coal industry, the docks, women's factory work, schoolchildren, and so on. And the excuses that they give when they talk to striking workers, they'll say things like, well, I'm not allowed in the refreshment room for a glass of beer, which sounds really trivial if you're writing for the Daily Telegraph. But of course, if you're a railway porter and it's 98 degrees and you're shunting around great heavy suitcases next to steam engines billowing out heat, you can understand why you might want to go and get a drink. So that's a kind of trigger, but it's also building on you've had a long period of rising prices. The hot weather also actually means that food prices go up.

And because you haven't got a refrigerator, your food is going off and rotting more quickly. So everything is getting more expensive. Your wages aren't rising. And this is your chance to mobilize. There's been a big push in the years beforehand to create much bigger trade unions that bring together the various branches, say, of transport workers or railway workers. And that boosts their bargaining power at a moment when their willingness to be patient is starting to snap. And you've got Churchill at this point, everyone might forget, a liberal,

asked with sidekicks. He is part of the team that is sending troops to big population centres, talking about securing the railways from memory, wasn't he? And I think there were battleships sent to big estuaries of rivers around the island. There are some astonishing photographs from this period. Some of them look like pictures of occupied cities during the Second World War. There are pictures from Sheffield and

Liverpool of troops marching through the streets, of kind of early tanks protecting deliveries of coal or deliveries of food. The government sends a warship down the River Mersey to keep the docks open. There is a tremendous fear here of revolution. There's been revolution in Russia in 1905. There's a recognition that some of the people at the top of the trade union movement want to use union power for political purposes. So there's a terrible sense that the constitution is being broken at Westminster at the very moment that it's coming under attack from revolutionary forces in the country. And then let's talk about the Parliament Bill as it's going through. As you said before, it strips the House of Lords for any kind of veto power, any say over money bills.

And then lots of other legislation, I mean, actually that idea of a hard veto, it turns it into a sort of delay, doesn't it? It gives the House of Lords a sort of delaying power. Exactly. It does two big things. So firstly, it simply takes money bills out of the remit of the House of Lords altogether. And then secondly, for every other type of legislation, with one exception, it allows the House of Lords to delay it for two years. So that plays to the idea that this is a scrutiny chamber rather than a full legislative chamber. So it can hold things up, it can test public opinion, but ultimately, if you pass a bill in 1912, it will become law in 1914, no matter what the House of Lords says.

And everyone knows that the first bill introduced in 1912 is going to be Home Rule. And so, let's get to the crisis. This young king does reluctantly agree that if the House of Lords continues to vote against this Parliament Bill, he will make 500 new peers, new hereditary peers, right? Which is an unbelievable, apart from anything else, it's a gigantic threat, I guess,

to the old aristocracy and their class system. I think that's the key point, actually, that the House of Lords could accept an infusion of new members. They're probably going to turn into Conservatives over time anyway, once they're in the House of Lords. It's what it's going to do to the aristocracy that's the really revolutionary element. There are no life peerages in this point, except for the law lords. So these are all hereditary peers. So unless you're really careful about how you do it, you're actually going

to destroy the aristocracy. You're going to turn titles like earls and marquises simply into party badges. And so talk to me about the key votes, talk about the key moments. do this and Asquith announces it to the House of Commons and formally communicates it to the opposition. The Tory forces in the House of Lords split into two camps known as hedgers and ditchers. So hedgers are those who want to hedge their bets. They'll abstain on the key vote. They'll let the Parliament vote go through so they keep their majority and they can use that at least to slow down Home Rule. The second group are the ditchers who want to die in the ditch, who want to vote down the Parliament Bill and force Asquith to do this unconscionable thing, to force the King into this treasonous act, because they think that will

at least awaken the country to the revolutionary nature of what's going on. That'll be the moment that rallies the people of England behind them. And it's really not clear, up to the revolutionary nature of what's going on. That'll be the moment that rallies the people of England behind them. And it's really not clear, up to the key vote, which of these two forces is going to win. People are in their diaries, they're jotting down names, they're doing sums, people are switching from one camp to the other. But ultimately, the hedgers win, and the bill creeps through by a majority of about 30.

On the hottest day of the year exactly screenwriters are having an absolute field day with this story this is sometimes talked about as an example of how the brits although there might be a lot of kicking and screaming the uk has avoided the kind of revolutionary cataclysm that you get in Russia and elsewhere in the 20th centuries because eventually the ruling elites, enough of them were prepared to kind of compromise and messy way forwards were found. Do you have some sympathy for that point of view? Is this an important moment in actually preserving some of the ancient traditions of the British system against a sharper break? I think there's something in that, but I think also we might see this as a moment when an old constitution essentially

ceases to exist. So at the start of the 19th century, the House of Lords and the House of Commons were essentially co-equal. And it was actually a great boast of British constitutionalism that this was a balanced constitution. You couldn't have tyranny because power is divided. There's the House of Lords, the House of Commons, and the monarchy, and at least one of those will always be able to check what another is trying to do. So you couldn't get the kind of despotism that people saw in Europe. The Parliament Act really brings that balanced constitution to an end. The Lords are not wrong to say that this does essentially leave Britain with single chamber government. The King has

already really become a nullity, except in his ability to create peers. The House of Lords now can only delay things for a short period of time. So all power really is now concentrated in the House of Commons. Now, what that means in the years that follow is that if you want to stop Home Rule for Ireland, and it's hard to overstate how passionately lots of people want to stop this, there isn't really a constitutional way you can do it anymore. You can't do this through the House of Lords. You can't force a general election. The only way you can do it is to fight. And so the fact that by 1914, there are Conservative MPs drilling their constituents in the parks, the fact that British officers are resigning from the British Army

to go and work with the Ulster Volunteer Force ready to fight against a Home Rule Parliament is partly a kind of recognition by the Tory party that that constitution has passed, that now it's either surrender or sedition. And that's what creates that incredibly dangerous moment on the eve of the First World War. So the hot summer of 1911 is not a moment of climax. It's actually a moment of escalation. The crisis continues and intensifies until it's overtaken by an even greater outside one. Very much so. One of my favourite Victorian politicians was a very gloomy man called Sir James Graham. And he used to comfort himself when things were difficult by saying,

the crisis of one day is obliterated by the catastrophe of the next. And that really sums up Edwardian politics. Every time you think you've hit the bottom, someone sends for the power drill. And so by the time you get to 1914, when it becomes clear that Britain is going to go to war, it's striking how many senior politicians actually feel a sense of relief there. Not because they're under any illusions about what the war's going to be like, but because they think it has saved Britain from civil war, the worst of all kinds of conflict. Goodness me. Well, Rob, that is as fascinating and brilliant as usual. And you managed to get in a few very, very obscure Victorian politicians, which I always expect from

you when you come on this podcast. Always the goal. Always the goal. Always the goal. As ever, thank you very much. Where should people go to follow your work? You're, as ever, very brilliant on Twitter, where you're the Red Historian. That's right. They can find me on Twitter at Red Historian. Thank you very very much indeed thanks for having me on our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all work on you