Mansion House speech
A traditional address given by the incumbent Chancellor of the Exchequer , the British finance minister, is referred to as a mansion house speech or "Mansion House Speech" (English: "Mansion House Speech" or "Mansion House Address") . The speech is given once a year either in the second half of June or in July during the so-called “Banker's Dinner”. The “Banker's Dinner” is an evening banquet (“Lord Mayor Dinner”), which is organized annually by the Mayor of the City of London ( Lord Mayor of London ) in his residence, the Mansion House . He holds the dinner in honor of the Chancellor himself, as well as in honor of the director of the Bank of England and various important bankers and merchants resident in the city.
The purpose of the Mansion House speech is, according to a popular phrase, to serve the great and good of the most important financial institutions of the City of London and thus the community itself and the whole country. Naturally, this takes place in that the leading British tax officer assesses the positive development of economic life or at least tries to suggest the most positive development possible to the greats of the British financial world gathered at the table. It aims, within the limited scope of a speech, to generate an optimistic future expectation among those present and thus to make a small contribution to the maintenance or restoration of a prosperous economic climate.
Other annual speeches at the Mansion House include the UK Foreign Secretary's Easter Address and the Prime Minister's Keynote Address at the Lord Mayor's Banquet , the annual inaugural dinner of the Lord Mayor of the City of London. In substance, these speeches are also "mansion house speeches". However, this name is usually not applied to them - or at least only in a general sense, but not as a terminus fixus, as a fixed proper name of the speech presented.
Lloyd Georges Mansion House speech from 1911
By far the best known and most powerful Mansion House speech is certainly the short address given by David Lloyd George during the Banker's Dinner on the evening of July 21, 1911. Accordingly, the term “mansion house speech”, which originally referred to the institution of the annual finance ministerial lecture as such, is often aimed at Lloyd George's speech in particular. Consequently, when "the" Mansion House speech is mentioned in the historical literature in the margins of a discussion without further explaining which Mansion House speech is meant, Lloyd George's speech is almost always referred to as "the" Mansion House speech in general. For most authors, this reference is so self-evident that a monosemic addition such as "from 1911" is often not considered necessary and consequently is not included.
Lloyd George gave his address against the background of the so-called Second Moroccan Crisis . This represented a situation of far-reaching foreign policy tensions between the major European powers in 1911. The crisis was triggered by a colonial political dispute between the German Empire and the French Republic over hegemony over large parts of north-west Africa. Lloyd George referred to precisely these arguments in the final section of his otherwise hardly remarkable speech. He did this by issuing a barely concealed warning in the direction of the Reich leadership in only poorly diplomatic phrases and to the applause of the financial leaders present: The United Kingdom would be a one-sided expansion of the German Empire, an excessive weakening of France and the exclusion of the United Kingdom Do not sit idly by the then imminent negotiations on the status of Morocco and the Congo , which were important for both Europe and prestige politics.
The immediate reason for Lloyd George's statement was the non-response of the German Reich government to a request by British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Gray on July 4th. In this, Gray had asked the German statesmen to disclose their intentions and claims with regard to Morocco and the Congo, so that a mutually agreeable solution could be negotiated. The German failure to respond to this request was seen as offensive by the British. In response to the German omission, Gray intended, as he opened the Cabinet at its July 21 session, to express his displeasure with the German conduct to the German ambassador, Count Paul von Metternich . Immediately afterwards, during a visit to the State Department, Lloyd George offered to supplement this reprimand a privatissime with a public statement as part of his upcoming Mansion House speech. On the afternoon of July 21, Lloyd George and Gray went through a text he had drafted, which he intended to append to the existing manuscript for his speech, and made minor changes to it. It is not entirely clear whether Prime Minister Asquith was also present on this occasion.
Until his speech, Lloyd George had always been assigned to the radical pacifist wing of his party. In the Mansion House speech he eventually distanced himself first verbally from this principled political stance, and positioned itself novel in that it war as an instrument of politics, at least as a last resort, did not want to exclude: in barely concealed manner warned in rank second Provide a man in the cabinet of the German Reich that the United Kingdom would not refuse to take part in a war wherever its honor and interests are affected, regardless of which party is currently in power. One is prepared to make great sacrifices to maintain the peace and would nevertheless only consider war as a means of politics because of grave national interests, but if a situation were forced upon it (the United Kingdom) in which peace only through the Surrender of national interests could be preserved, and if it were treated by other nations as if his voice no longer counted in the concert of the great powers, then "peace at this price is a humiliation that cannot be accepted" ("[I] say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure. "). Lloyd George concluded in a confessional manner with the statement, which was very unusual for a Liberal Party politician at the time, that national honor and the security of British world trade were not party issues.
Because of the reprint of the Mansion House speech in the Times and other daily newspapers the following morning, it was rapidly spread to the British public and subsequently to the public in other countries. In France and the German Reich in particular, it provoked violent positive and negative reactions. For example, in an interview with British Foreign Minister Edward Gray, the German ambassador in London, Paul Graf von Metternich, accused Lloyd George of having made a war between the two countries more likely instead of reducing the risk of war. According to Metternich, the latter would actually have been his duty. Lloyd George's close friend Winston Churchill drew, after the diplomatic waves of the Moroccan crisis and in particular the German resentment over Lloyd George's speech had subsided, in a letter to his wife the satisfied resume: They sent their Panther to Agadir we sent our little Panther to the Mansion House: with the best results. Lloyd George also, in a letter to his wife, voiced the suspicion that the German government would endeavor to force his resignation, as it had done in 1906 during the First Moroccan Crisis in the case of French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé . Today, Lloyd George's Mansion House speech is a much-cited milestone in research into the prehistory of the First World War , especially with regard to the “block formation” in the run-up to the war, which is mostly regarded as fatal.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Klaus Larres: Churchill's Cold War. The Politics of Personal Diplomacy. New Haven 2002, p. 11.
literature
- Barraclouth, Geoffrey: “From Agadir to Armageddon. Anatomy of a crisis ”, London 1982.
- British Documents on the Origin of the War, 1898-1914, London 1927-38.
- Fry, Michael G .: “Lloyd George and foreign policy”, 2 vols., Montreal 1977.
- Gray, Edward: “Twenty-five years”, 3 vols., London 1928.
- Stamm, Christoph: "Lloyd George between domestic and foreign policy", Cologne 1977.