The People's Budget (1909)
The Liberal reforms were funded by David Lloyd George passing his Finance Bill (that he called "the People's Budget") which taxed the "rich" in order to subsidize "working" citizens and the ill and injured.
Lloyd George argued that his budget would eliminate poverty, and commended the budget thus:
| “ | This is a war Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away, we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time, when poverty, and the wretchedness and human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests". | ” |
The budget met opposition in the House of Lords and, contrary to British constitutional convention, the Conservatives used their large majority in the Lords to vote down the Budget. In response, the Liberals turned to (what they believed to be) the widespread unpopularity of the Lords to make reducing the power of the Lords an important issue of the January 1910 general election.
The Liberals returned in a hung parliament after the election: The Liberals formed a minority government with the support of the Labour and Irish nationalist MPs. The Lords subsequently accepted the Budget when the land tax proposal was dropped. However, as a result of the dispute over the Budget, the new government introduced resolutions (that would later form the Parliament Bill) to limit the power of the Lords. The Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, asked Edward VII to create sufficient new Liberal peers to pass the Bill if the Lords rejected it. The King assented, provided that Asquith went back to the polls to obtain an explicit mandate for the constitutional change.
The Lords voted this 1910 Parliament Bill down, so Asquith called a second general election in December 1910, and again formed a minority government. Edward VII had died in May 1910, but George V agreed that, if necessary, he would create hundreds of new Liberal peers to neutralise the Conservative majority in the Lords. The Conservative Lords then backed down, and on 10 August 1911, the House of Lords passed the Parliament Act 1911 by a narrow 131–114 vote.
In his War Memoirs, Lloyd George said of this time, "the partisan warfare that raged around these topics was so fierce that by 1913, this country was brought to the verge of civil war."
Read more about this topic: Liberal Welfare Reforms
Famous quotes containing the words people and/or budget:
“That is what we must make people feel... the catch in the throat, the wrench to steady the nerves, the determination to carry on.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)