PLAIN MAN BALDWIN

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 129, 28 November 1923, Page 9

PLAIN MAN BALDWIN

"OF THE COMMON PEOPLE"

FATHER OF A LABOUR ORATOR.

The number of voters in the United Kingdom was nearly doubled by the franchise concessions in the Representation of the People Act, 1918; and perhaps that is one reason why the Conservative Party prefers to-day a leader who describes himself as "a plain man. of the common people." One could hardly imagine either Lord Salisbury or Lord Balfour speaking in that way. The Hotel Cecil, if it leads, now leads from behind. The big electoral roll has worked some changes. "Good man, Stanley!" when addressed to the British Stanley (not the Australian one) sounds a bit odd. But "Good man, Arthur," addressed to Lord Balfour in a hail-fellow-well-met telegram (paid for with a bet) would be almost sacrilege. The proletarian turn that has been imparted to Conservative political pleas is interesting to students of electionology and perhaps still more to students of psychology. Even .the younger Baldwin, as a Labour platform speaker, seems to be a. distinct Conservative asset. TORY SCHISM: TEACHING THE PARROT. The Conservative Party includes some free-traders and many free-fooders and it is not to be assumed that, even If the biggest electorate confirms the present absolute majority of the Conservatives, Mr. Baldwin will be able to enforce protection. But the Conservative Party is not openly divided in the fiscal issue as it wa3 twenty years ago. At that time it was the ordeal of Mr. (now Lord) Balfour to find political generalisations that would be a successful compromise between the fears of Conservative free-traders, and the anxiety of the tariffite Conservatives to secure specific adherence to tariff reform Mr. J. Chamberlain's attempts to pin his leader, Mr. Balfour, down to something definite were sometimes pathetic or amusing—according to the point of view. The fighting man of the Liberals, Mr. Asquith, was able to make great fun out of the Balfour-Chamberlain duel, and out of the Conservative embarrassment arising from a party leader whom his lieutenant was trying to coerce or cajole into a forward step. Mr. Asquith compared the Chamberlain tutorship with teaching a parrot to talk. The parrot (Mr. Balfour) showed a marvellous mastery of all sorts of words, except the light words—"and in my opinion, added Mr. Asquith, "the bird has the best of it!" The Conservative debacle of 1906 is generally blamed to tariff reform, but it is pointed out that the Conservatives at that time were hastening to the close of their cycle of political prosperity, and by-elections and all other evidence prior to 1906 showed that "even, in the absence of the new issue (tariff reform), defeat was foredoomed for Mr. Balfour's Administration by the ordinary course of political events." TARIFF THE "FIRST PLANK." Following the Liberal victory, Mr. Balfour • composed a mew formula in which he admitted the necessity of making fiscal reform the first plank in the party platform, and accepted a genera) tariff on manufactured goods and a small duty on foreign corn as "not in principle objectionable." And now, nearly two decades later, another Conservative leader, announcing himseK as "a plain man of the common people, 'has picked up that fiscal reform plank, and is gambling an absolute majority, in Parliament in the hope that the enlarged electorate, groaning under unemployment, will restore his party to power on a tariff programme not including the largest articles of food. To-day there is no visible cleavage in the ranks of any of the three parties—no such cleavage as the. Liberals suffered from in the November election last year, no such outward ..division of opinion as cleft the Conservatives twenty years ago. But to say that the Conservatives present in the election a united front is not to-say that their solidarity on the tariff issue is as deep as it is wide.