Mr Balfour's Poodle(23)

At this stage, however, the supporters of the Government re-took the initiative. On the same day as the City meeting, a meeting in the House of Commons set up the Budget League, with Mr. Churchill as president, to conduct a vigorous campaign in the constituencies; and on the following day Lloyd George delivered a sharp riposte to the businessmen. ‘We are having too much Lord Rothschild,’ he said. ‘Some countries would not have their politics dictated by great financiers, and this country would join them.’1

Thereafter there was a spate of Liberal oratory. Mr. Churchill was perhaps the most indefatigable (and certainly one of the most violent) speakers in support of the Budget, but the Prime Minister did at least his fair share of campaigning, even braving a Cannon Street Hotel audience in July. The Chancellor himself, either by design or because he was fully occupied in the House, was very quiet. Apart from the speech in which he replied to Rothschild and one delivered at the Bankers’ Dinner on July 16, in which, perhaps wisely but certainly unusually, he confined himself to a few technical revenue points, he made no public appearance until the end of July. Then, on the thirtieth of the month, he went to Limehouse and addressed an audience of 4,000 people at the ‘Edinburgh Castle’. It was his first full-scale defence of his Budget before a popular audience, and he did not neglect the opportunity. He justified the land taxes by quoting instances of extortionate profiteering by landlords—and he carefully chose his examples from amongst the dukes. He resisted the charge that these taxes would be a burden upon industry.

‘We are placing the burdens on the broadest shoulders,’ he said. ‘Why should I put burdens on the people? I am one of the children of the people. I was brought up amongst them, I know their trials, and God forbid that I should add one grain of trouble to the anxieties which they bear with such patience and fortitude. When the Prime Minister did me the honour of inviting me to take charge of the National Exchequer at a time of great difficulty, I made up my mind that, in framing my Budget, no cupboard should be barer, no lot should be harder to bear. By that test, I challenge them to judge the Budget.’m

The speech produced sharp reactions. It provoked tumultuous applause from the audience, the most widespread and detailed attention in the newspapers, a letter of rebuke from the King, a howl of execration from some landowners, and an even more unfortunate attempt at reasoned reply from some others. Lord Lansdowne described the Chancellor as ‘a robber gull’, the Duke of Beaufort said that he would ‘like to see Winston Churchill and Lloyd George in the middle of twenty couple of dog hounds’, and the Duke of Rutland described the whole Liberal Party as a crew of ‘piratical tatterdemalions’. The Duke of Portland, on the other hand, took up the point about ‘bared cupboards’, and attempted to show that a great many people’s cupboards would in fact be bared as a result of the reduction in staff which great landowners would be obliged to undertake. The Duke of Buccleuch gave practical shape to this principle by refusing a guinea to a Dumfriesshire football club because of the Budget proposals.1 But neither this nor the Duke of Somerset’s statement that he would have to discharge his own estate hands and reduce his gifts to charity were very well received by the public. People were getting a little tired of the troubles of the dukes and their excessively personal view of politics.2 They were doing the Chancellor’s propaganda for him even better than he could do it himself. This was widely felt, and a Conservative member of Parliament3 went so far as to attack them very bitterly in a public speech:

‘He only wished the Dukes had held their tongues, every one of them.… It would have been a good deal better for the Conservative Party if, before the Budget was introduced, every Duke had been locked up and kept locked up until the Budget was over.… These men who are going about squealing and say they are going to reduce their subscriptions to charities and football clubs because they were being unduly taxed ought to be ashamed of themselves, Dukes or no Dukes.’n

Whether because of Lloyd George’s Limehouse speech and the replies which it provoked or for more general causes, there was a very widespread impression at the beginning of August that the tide had turned in favour of the Government. The Times of August 4 said that the fate of the Budget had ceased to be precarious, and on the following day the Daily Mail (which was also owned by Lord Northcliffe) announced that outside the City the campaign of the Budget Protest League had fallen flat. Apparently its promoters had sometimes met the humiliating fate of having their resolutions defeated at their own meetings.o