The Free Breakfast Table was the demand of British working-class Liberalism from the 1860s to the early twentieth-century. It entailed abolishing duties on basic foodstuffs as these were indirect taxes and therefore regressive. It was as a result of the abolition of Protectionism.
The phrase is said to have been coined by the Radical MP John Bright. There was also a campaigning organisation called the Free Breakfast Table Association.
The National Agricultural Labourers Union held the Free Breakfast Table as "an article of faith" and the idea helped to safeguard Liberal Party support in rural areas after the Representation of the People Act 1884.
In 1891 the National Liberal Federation convened in Newcastle and adopted the Newcastle Programme, which included a pledge in favour of the Free Breakfast Table.
In his first Budget, the first Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, claimed the Budget went "far to realize the cherished radical idea of a free breakfast table". Snowden had lowered duties on tea, coffee, cocoa, chicory and sugar. As late as 1938 a Labour MP (George Ridley) was condemning the Conservatives' budget due to its "harsh and inhuman" increase on the tax on tea and thereby betraying the ideal of the free breakfast table.
Famous quotes containing the words free, breakfast and/or table:
“We are no more free agents than the queen of clubs when she victoriously takes prisoner the knave of hearts.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (1689–1762)
“Ever since I was a kid my folks fed me bigotry for breakfast and ignorance for supper. Never, not once did they ever make me feel proud of where I was born. That’s it. That was a cancer they put in me. No knowledge of my country. No pride. Just a hymn of hate.”
—Samuel Fuller (b. 1911)
“For the elemental creatures go
About my table to and fro,
That hurry from unmeasured mind
To rant and rage in flood and wind....
”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)