The "Slimehouse Speech"

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, famously delivered the most incendiary political speech of his life to an overflow audience of 4,000 at Limehouse, one of the poorest areas of the East End of London, attacking the House of Lords for its opposition to his "People's Budget" of 1909.

It is rather a shame for a rich country like ours probably the richest in the world, if not the richest the world has ever seen, that it should allow those who have toiled all their days to end in penury and possibly starvation. It is rather hard that an old workman should have to find his way to the gates of the tomb, bleeding and footsore, through the brambles and thorns of poverty. We cut a new path for him, an easier one, a pleasanter one, through fields of waving corn...

The landlord is a gentleman - I have not a word to say about him in his personal capacity - who does not earn his wealth. He does not even take the trouble to receive his wealth. He has a host of agents and clerks to receive it for him. He does not even take the trouble to spend his wealth. He has a host of people around him to do the actual spending for him. He never sees it until he comes to enjoy it. His sole function, his chief pride, is stately consumption of wealth produced by others...

The landlords are receiving eight millions a year by way of royalties. What for? They never deposited the coal there. It was not they who planted these great granite rocks in Wales, who laid the foundations of the mountains...And yet he, by some divine right, demands as his toll for merely the right for men to risk their lives in hewing these rocks eight millions a year...These capitalists put their money in, and I said: When the cash failed what did the landlord put in? The capitalist risks, at any rate, the whole of his money; the engineer puts his brains in; the miner risks his life....

And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords, and say to them: Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Wont you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse? they scowl at us, and we say: Only a hapenny, just a copper. They say: You thieves! and they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning. If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who at the risk of life create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand.

The speech was well received but provoked wrathful protests from powerful quarters of the country, most especially from the British Opposition and the Ruling Establishment. Three days later Prime Minister Asquith found King Edward in a state of great agitation in consequence of Lloyd George's Limehouse speech. The elderly King had never been more irritated and annoyed, or more difficult to appease.

The ominous sounding "People's Budget" was indeed a revolutionary concept, because it was the first budget in British history to introduce the Welfare State with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth to the British public. Its rejection by the House of Lords led to a constitutional crisis and two general elections in 1910, including the subsequent enactment of the Parliament Act of 1911, which forever removed the veto of the House of Lords on money bills. The era of the gentleman aristocrat was over, the age of the ambitious politician had begun.