Reform and crisis

This did not mean that the Liberal government did not tackle political reform before 1914. The House of Lords had not really been touched by the reform acts of the 19th century and increasingly behaved as a Conservative opposition when the Liberals were in power.

In 1909, the Lords vetoed the budget, a package of tax proposals which Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George had adroitly presented as designed to finance welfare reforms, when in reality they were driven as much by the requirements of defence.

The ensuing crisis, which spanned two general elections, culminated with the Lords losing their power of veto and becoming a revising chamber only.

Incipient domestic breakdown was usurped by international crisis.

The other great constitutional issue remained unionism. By 1912 - 1913 Ireland was threatening to break the Liberal party once again. The 1910 elections left the Liberals without an overall majority and dependent on the Irish nationalists, the price of whose support was Irish 'home rule'.

In Ireland itself, the Ulster Protestants refused to be separated from Britain and in March 1914 elements of the army made clear that they would not force them, even if ordered to do so by the elected government of the day.

Thus the political ramifications extended beyond debates within Westminster to include the power of extra-parliamentary actors, and even the danger of civil war in Ireland.

For those anxious to generate a sense of crisis there were other straws blowing in the same wind. Strikes by the major trade unions between 1912 and 1914 and the militancy of the women's suffrage movement suggested that defining government in terms solely of parliamentary sovereignty could be self-defeating.

In the event, the sense of incipient domestic breakdown, as intense in July 1914 as in any of the immediately preceding summers, was usurped by international crisis.