The Single Tax v World War One (10) August-December 1911
“The triumph of the Liberal movement is complete”
The House of Lords committed political suicide to stop the Single Tax revolution. It remained only to choose the punishment. Either way, it would lose the power to stop another Budget. Legally and constitutionally Lloyd George had opened the door for any government to move towards the Single Tax.
That suicide was chosen so soon reflects the perception of threat. It has been shown in this series that the anti-Georgist reaction began immediately and at full intensity. It was correctly recognised that the Budget of 1909 was a Henry George Budget, the thin end of a Single Tax wedge, and was undoubtedly revolutionary. The Single Tax is a radically different vision of social organisation, it is the prioritisation of labour and capital over state protected monopoly, a moment of great change.
The class of great landowners, the Lords themselves, were impelled to react immediately to this threat. Rejecting the Budget was an extravagant display of rage, whose only practical reward was to buy time.
Winston Churchill, on reading Progress and Poverty, had said there was ‘no answer to it’. The Tories and the Lords confronted the same conclusion: even now from the Empire (notably Canada) came reports of cities running successfully on the Single Tax. Did they think there any kind of answer to it?
These same men, in great numbers, would go to France in 1914 as the officer class. They fought like lords, in their final war.
For the abolition of human slavery America went to war. Dare one posit that for the abolition of industrial slavery the World went to war?
“the triumph of the Liberal movement is complete”
“We doubt if anyone expected that land valuation would have caused anything like the political upheaval which has taken place during the past month. But there it is.”
Neville Arthur Chamberlain (Conservative), future Prime Minister, Single Taxer
On “the necessity of cutting adrift the hoary convention of the supremacy of the House of Commons”
“It may have to be unconstitutional: that only means that it will be modern”
“a stand will have to be made sooner or later, against the pretentions of the proletariat to unchecked power”
Thirty-eight MPs: members of the League for the Taxation of Land Values
“the appointment of the Local Taxation Committee is a definite step towards the Single Tax.”
The real cause of “poverty, unemployment, and low wages … not the foreigner, but our unjust land laws.”
“The abolition of land monopoly means peace between the peoples of the earth - the abolition of war.”
Joseph Fels: “I have made my fortune with the aid of an unjust system, and I am using my wealth to destroy that system.”
“slinking, sulky and pitiless”
“One does not assassinate only with a knife.”
“a slaughter-house economist”
Mr. Lloyd George - “epoch-maker”
The Great Unrest
The now forgotten outbreak of industrial unrest known as the Great Unrest has been completely appropriated by Socialist and Marxist historians, who portray it as just another stage in the war with Capitalism. They can make no mention of Lloyd George’s campaign against Landlordism. This is why we go back to contemporary sources.
“If Labour is stirred, Mr Lloyd George has stirred it.”
Socialism: “Forbid, command, order, classify, and arrange, but on no account set men free.”
“Bureaucratic Collectivists”
Strikes “cannot prevent the inexorable rise of rent.”
“the man who does not own himself must be owned by others”
Aircraft and the rent of air
“The problem of rent is the key to the whole problem of the distribution of wealth.”
The Budget of 1909 lead directly to the Parliament Act 1911
The Age of Reason
“the Lords would stumble on the Land Values hurdle”
“The Lords knew that if land was valued, it would be taxed, and they tried to prevent the one for fear of the other.”
“They wanted to stage a farce”
“an open secret”
The Spectator’s “desire to attribute the downfall of Rome to Land Value Taxation”
“… the work of Satan”
Some leaders of the Single Tax movement:
The Valuation: completion delayed until 1914
An attack on Alexander Ure
“the land question does not affect me”
Strikes - another symptom of land monopoly
Churchill stands with Henry George
Churchill - losing interest?
Valuation forms issued: 10.7 million, forms returned: 9.6 million
People of the abyss
On the origins of the Great Unrest
In "The Sense of an Impending Clash": English Working-Class Unrest before the First World War” (1972), Standish Meacham, a Marxist historian, argues that the unrest was unique in that it was coupled for the first time with a growing consciousness that the root of the labour problem was systemic. Although he gives no attention to it, we have seen that the land issue was undeniably a debate about unemployment as a systemic phenomenon. Thus, Meacham’s analysis is quite compatible with the notion that the Land Campaign played a major part in the Great Unrest of 1911-1914.
Strikes: 500 in 1909, 1500 in 1913
“Nothing quite equalled the summer of 1911”
“a deeper and more widespread discontent”
The origin of the idea of a national or universal strike
“Very suddenly, around 1900, the pattern changed.”
Wage strikes v Money strikes
“All classes now felt threatened”
“Dished by the Liberal whizbangs”
The confusion of tongues
Imagine, in 1909 the government declares that the root cause of unemployment and poverty is known, and can be fixed. But the attempt to implement the reform is resisted from within government itself. Reform is not abandoned but it is diverted towards welfare statism - the very policies rejected in 1909. One can understand the following: