World History

2.

Annual Register,

1909, p. 181. [Mr. Lloyd George at Limehouse, July 30th.]

The city, he said, had demanded further expenditure on the navy; but while the workmen in Derbyshire, Cleveland, and Dumfries had shown themselves willing to pay, there was a howl from Bel-gravia. . . . The Budget was raising money to provide against poverty, unemployment, and sickness; for widows and orphans, and for the development of our own land. The land taxes, especially, were being attacked with ferocity. But land near the London docks, formerly rented at £2 or £3 an acre, had sold at £6,000 or £8,000 an acre. A piece of land at Golders Green, near Hampstead, had risen in value from £160 to £2,100 through the making of the tube railway. The Duke of Northumberland had asked £900 an acre for a piece of land wanted for a school and rated at 30s. an acre. . . . As one of the children of the people, he had made up his mind in framing the Budget that no cupboard should be bared, no lot should be harder to bear.

3.

Annual Register,

1909, p. 209. [Mr. Asquith at Birmingham, Sept. 17th.]

As to the Tariff Reform alternative, Mr. Asquith challenged Mr. Balfour to give a dear answer in his coming speech. What would the peers do? Mutilation or rejection would be the most formidable revolution since the days of the Long Parliament. Every bill granting taxes stated in its preamble that the taxes were granted by the Commons. Mention of the Lords had been expressly omitted in 1628 on the report of a committee including Coke and Selden, and the principle had been confirmed by the celebrated resolutions of 1672 and 1678.¹ It had been affirmed, as he showed by quotations, by the elder Pitt, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Rosebery himself, Lord Salisbury, and Mr. Balfour. . . . In matters of finance the Lords were impotent, the Commons supreme. Amendment and rejection by the Lords were equally out of the question. "That way revolution lies"; it would involve issues far wider and deeper than the right of the Lords to meddle with finance. The Liberal party were not only ready, but anxious and eager to take up the challenge.

4.

Annual Register,

1909, p. 231.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer [Mr. Lloyd George] described "the issues of the Budget" in the Nation [England] of October 30. He rejoiced that one of the greatest struggles in Great Britain for upwards of 250 years should arise over a measure decisively raising some of the most important issues between Liberalism and Toryism—Free Trade or Protection; the taxation of necessaries or of superfluities and monopolies; the avoidance, at national cost, of unmerited poverty and distress; the responsibility of the State for the organized development of the neglected wealth of the land. The Budget, he regarded as part of a comprehensive scheme of fiscal and social reform, including unemployment and sickness insurance and rural development. . . . He aimed at raising an increasing revenue to be earmarked for the Government schemes of social reform and national development. . . . The Budget was only a beginning of needed land reform.

[On Nov. 8, 1909, The Finance Bill or Budget, having been passed in the Commons, was introduced in the Lords.]

5.

Annual Register,

1909, p. 244.

On November 16th, the Marquess of Lansdowne gave notice that on the second reading of the Finance Bill he would move "That this House is not justified in giving its assent to the Bill, until it has been submitted to the judgment of the country."

pp. 247, 248.

The Marquess of Lansdowne, moving his resolution, claimed that the House’s right to reject a Money Bill was expressly recorded in the Commons’ argument of 1689;¹ but it required reassertion, because the Commons’ privileges were now interpreted strictly, and "tacking" had increased, culminating in the Finance Bill of 1894.¹ Thus the Lords were thrown back on rejection, a right asserted—as he showed by quotations—by Earl Spencer and the Marquess of Ripon. The Scottish Valuation Bill and the Licensing Bill had been rejected, and might be rejected when grafted on a Finance Bill. Why should not a Home Rule Bill be similarly grafted? The question was not whether they could, but whether they ought to reject the Bill. This was admittedly not an ordinary budget, and so it ought to be referred to the electors.

¹ The Commons Resolution of 1678 was: "That all Aids and Supplies, and Aids to his Majesty in Parliament, are the sole Gift of the Commons, and all Bills for the Granting of any such Aids and Supplies ought to begin with the Commons. And that it is the undoubted and sole right of the Commons to direct, limit, and appoint in such Bill the Ends, Purposes, Considerations, Conditions, Limitations, and Qualifications of such Grants, which ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords."

¹ Here Lord Lansdowne quoted: "And the Lords are not to alter such gift, grant, limitation, appointment, or modification by the Commons in any part or circumstance, or otherwise interpose in such Bill than to pass or reject the same for the whole, without any alteration or amendment."

¹ Lord Lansdowne’s exact words on this point were: "But another practice has grown up . . . I mean the practice of grouping together under one Bill a large number of measures dealing with different taxes. That is a recent practice and it never assumed its present proportions until the year 1894. . . . And this change was made with the obvious intention of embarrassing your Lordships in the exercise of your undoubted rights."