Tag Archives: lloyd george

David Lloyd George – the great Liberal Chancellor and Prime Minister of the early 20th Century – is often credited as the ‘founder of the welfare state’. This is entirely fair: he and the Liberal Reformers created the state pension, a scheme for national insurance against sickness and unemployment, and new legal protections for workers. Meanwhile, his controversial People’s Budget established the foundational principle that the wealthiest must fund public services, beginning a constitutional showdown which saw the House of Commons triumph over the conservative House of Lords. 

However, the prevalent view that Lloyd George was simply a ‘first-step’ on the inexorable path to Attlee’s post-war government undermines the profound, independent significance of his liberal reforms. This was not just Labour-lite: the Liberal Reformers had a distinct philosophy, and their policies presented a real alternative both to socialist nationalisation and conservative inaction.

Liberal Democrats should reclaim the record of past Liberal governments on social justice – and challenge the narrative which paints Labour as the sole progenitor of public services.

A People’s Budget

Introducing his ‘People’s Budget’ to the House of Commons, Lloyd George addressed the House:

There are hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in this country now enduring hardships for which the sternest judge would not hold them responsible …

Is it fair, is it just, is it humane, is it honourable, is it safe to subject such a multitude of our poor fellow countrymen and countrywomen to continued endurance of these miseries?…

This is a War Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.

In so committing himself to the cause of social justice, Lloyd George reinvented liberalism for a 20th Century politics, characterised by escalating dissatisfaction with rampant, abject poverty. Cloaking himself in the rhetoric of redistribution, the Chancellor grasps the bellicose mood of the age and marshals it not against some European foe, but against the ‘5 giants’ later identified by William Beveridge: want, squalor, ignorance, idleness, and disease.