The Passage of the Welsh Church Bill under the 1911 Parliament Act and the Impact of War

Abstract

AbstractIn 1910, David Lloyd George, who was serving as chancellor of the exchequer in the Liberal government, opined that: ‘Wales had been solid for disestablishment for 40 years’ (The Times, 18 Jan. 1910, p.12). According to Lloyd George, this aspiration had been thwarted by the political reality that: ‘if a Bill went up to the House of Lords it would not have the slightest chance of getting through’. At its core, the quest for the disestablishment of the Anglican church in Wales was viewed as an unprecedented constitutional and political change. It threatened to dismember one of the pillars of the English state and thereby sever a church/state relationship which, it was argued, predated parliament itself. This article will address the democratic deficit in Wales where the desire of the electorate had been repeatedly frustrated over decades, and the way disestablishment legislation would eventually be enacted through the provisions of the Parliament Act 1911. The final ignominy was that the delay inherent in the new parliamentary process would jeopardise the disestablishment that it had enabled, and this was evident in the first years of the Great War.