The Single Tax v World War One (1) May-June 1909
“I wish I could make the House see it as clearly as I see it.”
David Lloyd-George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Single Taxer.
Origins of War
Michael Davitt started the War, in 1879. Ireland, his home, was again on the verge of famine.
Henry George
… the American writer, declared the War part of a Worldwide War:
“I contend that what has been brought into prominence by Irish distress, and forced into discussion by Irish agitation, is something infinitely more important than any mere local question could be;
it is nothing less than that question of transcendent importance which is everywhere beginning to agitate, and, if not settled, must soon convulse the civilized world.”
“What is involved in this Irish Land Question is not a mere local matter between Irish landlords and Irish tenants, but the great social problem of modern civilisation.”
- Henry George, The Irish Land Question (1881)
George and Davitt became friends and for a time, co-campaigners. Land Leagues formed throughout the world. A new Land Campaign had formed.
David Lloyd George
… joined the Land Campaign as a teenager. He read and was “impressed” by Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. Davitt, the Celtic rebel, was a hero figure.
Lloyd George became a lawyer and fought the landlords of North Wales. He learned to debate. In 1885, aged twenty two, he shared a speaking platform with Davitt. Taxation of ground rents, the Georgist solution to poverty, was in his first manifesto of 1890. It succeded - the first of fourteen consecutive election victories - the radical Liberal became an MP and moved to the capital.
The Land Campaign Lloyd George joined in his youth peaked in 1909. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a government elected by a landslide, he could not have been better placed to start a revolution.
Prerevolutionary situations
Speaking one hundred years after the beginning of the Great War, historian Michael Neiburg, commented on the new books he’d recently read on the causes of the war:
“I’m surprised at how few of them can actually make an argument. They can explain, they can describe, but its really difficult to point at one thing or two things or three things that really lead to the outbreak of this war.”
Something appears to be wrong with the historiography of this period. What might be missing?
One striking but marginal idea is that domestic factors drove the rulers of Europe and its empires towards war. Arno J Mayer, in a tiny essay, argued that the ruling elites, the landed aristocracies, all faced “prerevolutionary situations” in 1914.
And inevitably:
“The specter of revolution precipitated an active counterrevolutionary response among vulnerable status groups”
“During the decade, including the weeks immediately preceding July-August 1914, the European nations experienced more than routine political and social disturbances.”
“Even Britain, that paradigm of ordered change and constitutionalism, was approaching the threshold of civil war.
Judging by the Curragh incident, Carson and the Ulster volunteers had the sympathy if not outright cooperation of influential civil and military leaders in their defiance of Parliament;
and the Triple Alliance of railwaymen, miners, and transport workers, among whom militant syndicalists were ascendant, threatened a paralyzing general strike in case their minimum demands were not met by the fall of 1914.
The resulting polarization, along with the shift from debate in Westminster to direct action in the streets, eroded the vital center so essential for the politics of compromise and accommodation.
Indeed, historians have wondered whether if external war had not come in 1914 England might not have become caught up in civil strife, with fatal damage to her time-honored parliamentary system.”
— Arno J Mayer, Domestic Causes of the First World War (1967)
In these currents and events, where does the Liberal government’s unprecedented Land Campaign fit? Who exactly were the “vulnerable status groups” Mayer alludes to?
The land clauses of Lloyd George’s 1909 Budget drove the Single Tax principle into high politics. If the gradual application of the principle succeeded, if poverty faded away, if the boom-bust cycle disappeared and industrial strife vanished, the entire British Empire - a quarter of the world - would surely follow.
Histories of the pre War period from the 1909 Budget, the controversy it provoked, and the constitutional crisis it lead to, do not place Single Tax politics at the centre of events.
The material presented here does.
Note on source material
Land Values was the newspaper of the United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values. Founded in 1894, the paper was called The Single Tax up to 1902. It is still published as Land and Liberty, who kindly host the archive used here.
The clippings: in general, read from the first full sentence to the last full sentence. However, some clips follow on.
The Single Tax versus World War One
The price: eight Dreadnoughts
David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill traded eight Dreadnoughts for a chance to introduce the Single Tax principle into the law of Great Britain. Some in the Cabinet fought it, with much success, but Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, staunchly supported Lloyd George’s plan to abolish unemployment.
But beyond this utopian prospect loomed the question, how far would the Lords go to stop legislation containing a principle whose consequence was the abolition of their class?
"This is a War Budget … for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.”
-David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 29th April 1909
“We are amazed at these saviours of Britain”
“They terrify the Government by calling their proposals those of Henry George”
“Yet in these days, more than ever, Henry George is being justified”
A complete valuation of the whole of the land in the United Kingdom
“no mystery about the cause of unemployment”
‘Land Values’, the newspaper of the movement.
“a hurricane of opposition in the London Press”
“The Two Georges”
Parliament debates Henry George …
Arthur James Balfour, Conservative: former Prime Minister, leader of the oppostion
“the danger of democracy”
“bitten with certain theories”
Winston Churchill: Land Monopoly - “a wholly sterile operation”
The history of the ur-monopoly
The urban landowner - “mere receiver of rent, of no economic value whatever”
“The capitalist takes great risk … but what does the landowner risk?”
The Parliamentary debate resumed May 5th. Replying to Balfour’s opening address:
Mr P. Snowden: “Henry George proposed nothing of the sort”
Mr Masterman: “Henry George spent the most of his life fighting Socialism”
“academic discussion”
“hunt them down”
Mr J. C. Wedgwood: “the connection between shortage of work and shortage of land”
“I wish I could make the House see it as clearly as I see it.”
Mr Lloyd George: “That is a proper question and I think I ought to answer it.”
“the whole farmyard”
“retributive taxation”
“the crude and revolutionary ideas of Henry George”
“John Stuart Mill, who coined the phrase the unearned increment”
“a precedent for full-blooded Socialism”
“the advisability of effecting a radical change”
The reason for “the absence of a uniform and general tax on land values in the Budget” … is the threat posed by the House of Lords
“the whole principle at stake must be fought out now”
“and must get off these lines as soon as possible”
“brainy”
“the principles of anarchists”
“the thin end of the wedge of Henry Georgism”
“Mr Lloyd George has asked for a decision as to whether private property in land shall or shall not continue to be recognised”
Very impressive work, thank you for taking the time to extract them and post them for all of us to see. It is fascinating how some things change (public discourse used to be more articulate) and some stay the same (special interest groups acting in bad faith just to get their own way).
great collection of clips