L2 LLCER Anglais- civilisation britannique (TD)- module 3 (commentaire de document)

Devoir n°1 du CC – novembre 2021 – PORION

A RENDRE au plus tard le lundi 28 NOVEMBRE 2022 : dépôt en ligne avant 15h sur Celene

5 Read the document below and answer the following questions:

1) Sum up the document with your own words in no more than 150 words. (4 points)
2) Write an introduction to the document (do not forget to speak about the nature of the
document, the author and his point of view, the main ideas of the document, the goal
10 of the author, the tone of the document and the context, a possible thesis statement
(=problématique) and the outline (=only the title of your main parts)) (8 points)
(maximum 650 words)
3) Explain the title of the article in no more than 60 words. (2 points)
4) After reading the document, what sort of assessment of the Liberal Party is provided
15 by the author? What do you think of the following introduction to the article that
is :“The Liberals may have routed the Tories with a 143-seat majority in 1906, but
their electoral pact sowed the seeds of a future Labour government, writes Ros
Taylor”. Your answer should be about 500-words long. (6 points)

20

Hit for six

The Liberals may have routed the Tories with a 143-seat majority in 1906, but their electoral
25 pact sowed the seeds of a future Labour government, writes Ros Taylor

Ros Taylor, theguardian.com (April 4, 2005),

(https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/apr/04/electionspast.past2)

30 "We have first the Labour vote, and then a large body of Free Churchmen, and next a large
Irish vote ... and they have returned me, I take it, first to uphold free trade, next to deal with
Chinese labour, and after that to support legislation on the lines laid down in the programme
of the Labour party, with which I am heartily in accord."

1
 Did he protest his loyalty to the Labour cause a bit too much? Perhaps. But it was
35 understandable. Mr Horridge was not a Labour MP. He was a Liberal who had ridden the
wave of popular dissatisfaction with Arthur Balfour's Tory government and, largely by
cultivating the Labour vote, helped his party to a 143-seat majority in the 1906 election.
It was, as the paper said, a rout - the Conservatives lost 246 seats - and, although Mr Horridge
did not know it at the time, Henry Campbell-Bannerman's victory ushered in social reforms
40 far more ambitious than his party had anticipated in their manifesto.
The task of keeping Labour sweet had begun a few years before, when the Liberals became
worried by Labour's success in byelections. Herbert Gladstone had signed a pact with the
Labour party secretary, Ramsay Macdonald, in 1903, in which the Liberals agreed not to
waste money fighting seats where Labour was stronger. That worked very much to Labour's
45 advantage, particularly because the agreement was not reciprocal and Labour candidates had
no obligation to stand down in favour of a Liberal.
The row over free trade came to a head in November 1904, when Winston Churchill crossed
the floor in protest at the Tories' protectionist policies. "We say that every Englishman shall
have the right to buy whatever he wants, wherever he chooses, at his own good pleasure,
50 without restriction or discouragement from the state," he told a free trade meeting in
Birmingham in 1904. Liberals opposed trade barriers, not just because of the poverty the
protectionist corn laws had created in the 1840s, but because they regarded free trade between
nations as the best way of preventing war.
Liberal posters took a more forthright approach, warning voters that tariffs would put up the
55 price of food. "Mr Chamberlain proposes to tax your food," warned one. "Balfour and
Chamberlain are linked together against free trade ... Don't be deceived by Tory tricks."
The Conservative government had played on the fear that cheap imports would flood into
Britain and put local manufacturers out of business. In the run-up to the elections, the North
Staffordshire Fiscal Reform Association assembled an exhibition of cheap German pottery in
60 the hope of persuading potteries workers that their jobs were at risk unless tariffs were
imposed.
"Crowds of potters came," reported the Manchester Guardian. But their reaction was not at all
what the organiser, John Ridgway, had expected. "When he produced a piece of cheap pottery
and asked whether it could be produced as cheaply in England there were loud cries of 'Yes',"
65 the paper said. "When he still continued speaking, the meeting developed into a perfect
uproar, and Mr Ridgway was obliged at length to resume his seat."

2
 The Labour leader at the meeting appealed for him to be heard, but to no avail. The unions
were rather sceptical about free trade. In 1903, the Independent Labour party conference
amended a resolution on free trade with the caveat that a "system of preferential tariffs" was
70 the only way to prevent foreigners dumping their surplus on the British market.
But as long as Labour needed the Liberals to advance their interests in parliament, they stuck
to the official line: protection, Labour's manifesto said, was a red herring, designed to distract
workers from the social problems that really concerned them. The party's chief aim was to get
the Taff Vale judgment of 1901 repealed. It had made unions liable for damages inflicted by
75 their officials, and had crippled the Labour movement.
The "Chinese question", as Horridge put it, was another source of the electorate's disgust with
the Balfour government. Nonconformists found the policy of forcing thousands of Chinese
slaves to work in Britain's gold mines in South Africa repugnant: the men were said to be
living on bread and syrup. Labour cried hypocrisy: "Chinese Labour is defended because it
80 enriches the mine owners."
If the Irish in Manchester had hoped the Liberals would bring home rule closer, they were
mistaken. Gladstone had tried to introduce it twice, but both bills were thrown out by the
Lords, and the rest of the Liberal party did not share his enthusiasm. Balfour warned in his
election address that the Liberals would raise home rule again, but it was not until 1910 that
85 they needed the Irish Nationalist party's support badly enough to launch a third bill.
The Liberals did well in cities such as Manchester, but they also made unexpected
breakthroughs in rural constituencies. "Cheshire, it has always been thought, was
Conservative in grain," the Manchester Guardian reported. "No Liberal ever dreamed of a day
when it would give a solid vote for the party of progress." Swathes of Middle England
90 switched allegiance in 1906.
The new prime minister promised "radical" social reform in his victory speech. Yet he all but
acknowledged that his victory owed more to voters' disillusionment with the Tories than a
radical Liberal agenda. There had been, Campbell Bannerman said, "a rising indignation
against their general spirit of flippancy, levity, cynicism and indifference to high principle and
95 treatment of politics as if it were a game like bridge and football."
And while 1906 was a triumph for the Liberals, it was also the first time that Labour gained a
firm foothold in the Commons. The party won 29 seats - still well behind the Irish
Nationalists, with 82 seats, but a growing force. Within a few weeks of the election, the new
MPs formally split from the Liberals and the "Lib-Lab" truce ended.

5 3
100 The Liberals' big majority also turned out to be short-lived. Byelection defeats in 1908 forced
Asquith to shore up public support with a radical People's Budget in 1909. It raised income
tax and introduced an array of indirect and land taxes to pay for pensions for the poor.
"There are so many in the country blessed by providence with great wealth, and if there are
amongst them men who grudge out of their riches a fair contribution towards the less
105 fortunate of their fellow countrymen, they are very shabby rich men," his chancellor, David
Lloyd George, told an audience in Limehouse in 1909.
His speech, with its passionate justification of higher taxation on behalf of the poor, contains
much that would impress Gordon Brown. Manchester East had voted Liberal - but, just as
Horridge had promised, they got the seeds of a Labour government.
110