I recently noticed the usual source for most pre-2005 Manifestos is noticeably missing the 1906 Liberal Manifesto; a speech delivered by Henry Campbell-Bannerman to his Constituents at Stirling Burghs ahead of the General Election and published in type form alongside other pamphlets relevant to the issues of the election.
This is an important Manifesto in many ways, as it preceded the final Majority Liberal Government and cautiously outlines some of the tenents of 'New Liberalism' - better known today as Social Liberalism - which rejected the Classical Liberal ideas of Limited Government and instead argued that safeguarding freedoms required an active role from the Government to prevent them from being threatened by poor circumstance or oppression from other sources.
Despite this, Campbell-Bannerman himself would not be responsible for many of these reforms, as though there was popular support for them within the Party, he was in many ways stuck in the ways of Victorian Era Gladstonian Liberalism, to the point the Neoliberal Economist Friedrich Hayek would remark "Perhaps the government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman ... should be regarded as the last Liberal government of the [Classical] type."
By 1907 Campbell-Bannerman becoming increasingly ill, dying during his residence at 10 Downing Street in April 1908. His successor, H. H. Asquith, would then begin many of the reforms stated here in earnest.
As of now this Manifesto seems to be completely unavailable for free on the internet, and as such I have gone out of my way to source a copy for republishing, as it currently sits in the Public Domain. The following is the contents:
Liberal Party General
Election Manifesto 1906
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's election address
The dissolution of Parliament imposes upon you the duty of returning a representative to the new House of Commons, and I respectfully place my services at your disposal. I do so with confidence, bearing in mind the eight successive Parliaments through which our relations have been unbroken, and having a vivid sense of the kind indulgence which during that long time you have uniformly extended to me.
I make this appeal, however, not merely as your Member in past Parliaments, but as the head of the Administration recently appointed by His Majesty the King; and I am confident that in undertaking those duties I had your approval.
After ten years of Unionist rule, the country has now an opportunity of saying whether it desires a further period of government at the same hands, or whether the Administration which has been called on to fill the gap created by Mr Balfour’s unexpected resignation shall be confirmed in office.
In coming to a decision, the electors will, I imagine, be largely guided by the consideration, in the first place, of the record of the late Government; and, secondly, of the policy which the leaders of the Unionist party are now submitting to them for their judgement.
With respect to their record, it will hardly be disputed that they had advantages such as few Governments in recent times have enjoyed. For ten years they have been supported by an immense majority in the House of Commons; and throughout this period the House of Lords, by its docility, has done its part to facilitate their task. But, as if these advantages were not enough, they have further, by an unprecedented use of restrictive powers, curtailed the freedom of discussion in the House of Commons, and impaired its authority, reducing the Legislature, so far as was in their power, to a machine for registering the decrees of the Executive.
Of the opportunities so secured we have to ask ourselves what use have they made? What have they accomplished for the benefit of the country and the Empire? What claim can they establish on the strength of their performances to the confidence of the electors which they are about to solicit?
The period over which we are looking back presents itself to me, I confess, as a well-nigh unbroken expanse of mismanagement; of legislation conducted for the benefit of privileged classes and powerful interests; of wars and adventures abroad hastily embarked upon and recklessly pursued. The legacy which they have bequeathed to their successors – and I say it in no partisan spirit, but under a full sense of responsibility – is in the main a legacy of embarrassment, an accumulation of public mischief and confusion absolutely appalling in its extent and its ramifications.
The last general election was fought on the single issue of the situation created by the war in South Africa. The Government of the day asked for, and obtained, a mandate for concluding the war, and for settling our newly acquired territories. So far as that settlement has proceeded, I ask you whether it has been conducted in such a manner as to justify the confidence then reposed in them. It seems enough to remind you that the late Prime Minister now declares to us that, as the result of a policy which involved such sacrifices on the part of the people of this country, South Africa has been reduced to a condition in which loss of prosperity, nay, even ruin, can only be avoided by the use of servile labour imported in unlimited quantities from China.
Ten years ago, the incoming Conservative Government found the national finances in good order. The public debt was being steadily reduced, the burden of taxation was moderate. The coffers of the Exchequer were made to overflow year after year, by the operation of the Estate Duty Act, which had been carried in the teeth of their violent opposition. What do we find today? Expenditure and indebtedness have been piled up, the income-tax stands at a shilling, war taxes are continued in peace time, the national credit is impaired, and a heavy depreciation has taken place in securities of every description. You have only to look around to see the result. Industry is burdened, enterprise is restricted, workmen are thrown out of employment, and the poorer classes are straitened still further in their circumstances. Again, I ask whether by their conduct of affairs in this province of administration alone they do not stand condemned as unfit to administer the business of a great commercial State. I confess I am astonished when I find the very men who have so conducted their stewardship appealing for a new lease of power, in order that they may assume a still closer control of our industries, and exercise a free hand on the imposition of yet further taxes.
One word more on this question of expenditure. If the amount of money expended be a criterion of effective administration, then the defences of the country and the Empire should be secure indeed; but let me remind you that our predecessors when they left office, after four years spent in a series of costly and confused experiments upon the Army and the Volunteers, were still engaged in groping after the true principles of Army reform, still speculating and debating as to the objects for which an Army was required at all. These proceedings have had a demoralising and disheartening effect upon our Regular and Volunteer forces, and the country has just cause for indignation at the levity with which they have been carried out.
If we look back on the field of domestic legislation, the retrospect is no less gloomy. Whether we have regard to their treatment of the supreme national interest of education, or to the licensing question, or to the rating system, we find them approaching and dealing with these matters animated more by a desire to propitiate their powerful friends in the country than to settle problems of national consequence with due regard to the needs, the sentiments, and the convictions of all concerned. Of their failure to deal in a serious spirit with the social questions of which so much was heard at the general election of 1895, I say nothing. The constructive social programme served its purpose at the polls; little has been heard of its promises during the ten years that have supervened; and to-day its promoters seem to have forgotten that such a promise ever existed.
So much for the record, the authors of which appear before you to-day burning with indignation at the iniquities of a Government that has been in office for just a month, and evidently very well satisfied with their own handiwork. Assuredly the terms on which they propose that you should recall them to power betray neither signs of repentance nor promise of amendment. The policy which they offer for your acceptance appears to me indeed to embody the most mischievous characteristics of their past. The thing which they describe as Fiscal Reform, what is it, after all, but another and a larger item in that series of reforms in which the Unionist party have proved themselves adepts – reforms introduced for the benefit of minorities, classes, interests? This policy – and I shall take the liberty of describing it as Protection – which they will consummate if you allow them, I hold to be fraught with incalculable mischief to the nation and the Empire, and I will endeavour briefly to state the grounds of my conviction
We are Free-traders because we believe that under Free Trade our people and our industries stand to derive greater benefit than under any other system known to mankind up to the present time; and in this belief we are confirmed by the teachings of our own experience – the safest guide that I know of for a nation to follow. Similarly our fathers abandoned Protection because they found it to be a bad system under which to live and labour. But we are told that conditions have changed since then, and that, inasmuch as certain great industrial States are thriving or expanding under Protection, we should hasten to resume our cast-off garments, with such alterations in their style as modern Tariff fashions may dictate.
I cannot follow the argument. Nothing in the experience afforded by these countries leads me to suppose that the factors in the case have altered, or that what was profoundly injurious half a century ago has become vital to our prosperity to-day. Nothing in their experience leads me to suppose that by limiting our imports we shall increase our exports, that by raising prices, no matter by what kind of tariff expedients, we shall assist in equalising the conditions of international competition, or in enlarging the area of employment. Still less am I persuaded by the experience of those countries that the taxation of food conduces to the welfare of the people. Heartily as I should welcome the adhesion of other States to Free Trade, I am not prepared to sacrifice conditions which I believe to be indispensable to our social welfare, and our industrial greatness and expansion, because individual industries, here and there, are hampered and obstructed by foreign tariffs.
I hold that Protection is not only bad economy, but that it is an agency at once immoral and oppressive, based as it is, and must be, on the exploitation of the community in the interests of favoured trades and financial groups. I hold it to be a corrupting system, because honesty and purity of administration must be driven to the wall, if once the principle of taxes for revenue be departed from in favour of the other principle, which 1 conceive to be of the essence of Protection – that, namely, of taxes for private beneficiaries. I hold that a method, which, even if it be not deliberately contrived to secure the public endowment of such beneficiaries, including trusts and monopolies, must inevitably operate in that direction, is a most grave menace to freedom and progress, and an outrage on the democratic principle. Last, but not least, in order of importance, I hold that any attempt to rivet together the component parts of the Empire with bonds so forged, or to involve it with us in a Fiscal war against the world, is not, and cannot come to, good. An empire ‘united’ on a basis of food taxes would be an empire with a disruptive force at its centre, and that is a prospect with the realisation of which, both in the interests of the Colonies and the mother-country, I can have nothing to do.
Let me only add, in case I am told that it is unfair to identify the late Prime Minister, chief of the party of Tariff reform, with the extreme proposals of his leading colleague, that I understand Mr Balfour to be agreed in principle with Mr Chamberlain, and also that the Unionist party is committed to the programme of tariffs and preferences put forward by Mr Chamberlain. This being so, I conceive that the minor Fiscal Policy indicated by Mr Balfour occupies, in the estimation at any rate of the majority of our opponents, little more than a nominal place in the contest in which we shall shortly be engaged. It is the larger policy, therefore, with which we are confronted, and which we are called upon to fight. Our concern in any case is with the results that must flow from the adoption of either of those policies, and not with the question of whether Mr Balfour conceives himself to be a Free-trader, or a Protectionist, or both, or neither.
I am well aware that our opponents claim to be in a position to establish some kind of indeterminate fiscal limbo, in which the advantages of Free Trade and Protection are to be combined with the disadvantages of neither – a Fiscal paradise, perhaps I ought to call it, where tariffs will bless consumer and producer in equal measure, where the workman will find employment by the exclusion of foreign commodities, and the taxpayer will be relieved by the golden stream of tribute with which the foreigner will still – I know not how – continue to provide him. These fairy stories will be dismissed by serious men, and so, I hope, will be the illusory assurances that the protection imposed will be of such a moderate description that nobody will be any the worse for it. The man who sets a stone rolling down a steep place may intend that it shall fall slowly, and stop before it reaches the foot of the slope, but the stone follows its own course. In the same Way, the forces that will determine the course and momentum of the tariff movement, once it is started on its way, are beyond the control of the Tariff propagandists; and we shall do well to remember that every country which started on the Protectionist path set out in a gradual and tentative way, and with the declared intention of executing a strictly moderate tariff policy.
Neither in their past record, nor in their present policy, is there anything to entitle the late Government to a vote of confidence from the country.
One word in conclusion. Our own policy is well known to you, and I need not here repeat the terms of the public declaration which it fell to me to make shortly after assuming office. Should we be confirmed in office it will be our duty, whilst holding fast to the time-honoured principles of Liberalism – the principles of peace, economy, self-government, and civil and religious liberty – and whilst resisting with all our strength the attack upon Free Trade, to repair, so far as lies in our power, the mischief wrought in recent years, and, by a course of strenuous legislation and administration, to secure those social and economic reforms which have been too long delayed.
As to the spirit in which foreign affairs will be conducted, it is satisfactory to be able to say that, by renouncing those undesirable characteristics which we formerly detected in their foreign policy, the Unionist party have made it possible for us to pursue a substantial continuity of policy without departing from the friendly and unprovocative methods which, under Liberal Governments in the past, have determined the relations of Great Britain with her neighbours.
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