A POLITICAL FIGURE
LLOYD GEORGE, by Thomas Jones; Oxford University Press. English price, 21/-. \VJHEN Lloyd George entered Parlia-_ ment he found. there Gladstone, | Goschen, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord | Randolph Churchill; by 1908 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer; in 1918
he was known as the British War Prime Minister of ruthless energy; during the "phoney" period of the 1939-45 war, at a small lunch party, the hostess, Lady Astor, .asked him whether he would again accept the office of Prime Minister; in 1945, when he died, he was chiefly known to readers of Picture. Post as the man who grew Cox’s Orange pippins. What kind of a man was this? Haldane described him as "an illiterate with an unbalanced mind"; Lenin regarded him as the greatest political leader Britain had known; Keynes said he was "rooted in nothing . . . void and without content"; the author writes that he was "untroubled by scepticism or selfcriticism, or remorse or conviction of sin," and, speaking as the one-time assistant. secretary to Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, cautiously grants that he was a "significant political innovator who has been much lauded and decried and who has been the subject of violent controversy." From all accounts, as a person, Lloyd George didn’t exist, and all one gets, as Keynes said, is "that flavour of final purposelessness." But the future historian will not be concerned so much with personality, and may agree with Jones that Lloyd George’s achievement by spiking "the Socialist guns with essentially Conservative social measures" : . "anticipated and prevented revolution by successfully attacking the privileged classes and. comforting the poor." The historian will quote the shocking conditions described in the Report on Sweating (1888), give facts on metropolitan misery in Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (18891903), point to the famous Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, 1909, describe the effective and largescale agitation of the Fabians against unemployment and destitution and show how Lloyd George’s Insurance Acts of (continued on next page)
BOOKS
(continued from previous page) over 40 years ago smoothed the path to the welfare state. The book is_ well-compressed, restrained and readable.
W. B.
Sutch
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 666, 10 April 1952, Page 13
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358A POLITICAL FIGURE New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 666, 10 April 1952, Page 13
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