The Politics of the ‘People's Budget’

The view that Lloyd George designed his ‘People's Budget’of 1909–10 so as to invite its rejection by the House of Lords has fallen very largely out of favour with scholars, and it is now generally accepted that he devised his Budget as an alternative to rather than as a means to a battle with the Lords. As argued by Roy Jenkins and others, Lloyd George assumed that the peers would not dare tamper with a finance bill, and he consequently looked to his Budget as a way around the veto of the Lords: by means of it he hoped to attain some radical objectives against the wishes of the Lords.