David Lloyd George

David Lloyd George: The Welsh Wizard Who Taxed the Dukes

It took 72 days of parliamentary debate and 554 divisions. When it was finally over, the House of Lords rejected the budget anyway, and Britain had a constitutional crisis on its hands. The Chancellor who provoked it called his 1909 measure "a war budget, designed to raise money to fight against poverty and squalor" — and he meant the declaration of war on the landed aristocracy quite as literally as the war on want. He was a solicitor from a Caernarfonshire village, and before he was finished he had built the foundations of the British welfare state and run the country through the worst war it had ever fought.

The Cottage-Bred Solicitor

He was born in Manchester on 17 January 1863 and taken to Wales as an infant, raised in his uncle's household. It was a chapel-going, Welsh-speaking, radical world, and it gave him everything: his hostility to landlords and the established Church, his suspicion of the English governing class, and an oratorical style formed in the Nonconformist pulpit.

He had no university education. He qualified as a solicitor, made a local name in Welsh Liberal politics, and in 1890 won the seat of Caernarvon Boroughs, which he then held for more than half a century. He married Margaret Owen in 1888. Two of his four children would follow him into the Commons.

The People's Budget

Asquith's government brought him into the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade in 1905, and in April 1908 made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Old age pensions arrived that year. Then came 1909.

The People's Budget proposed to fund social provision by taxing wealth — land above all — and it was designed to be unacceptable to the peers who owned the land. They duly rejected it, in defiance of a convention centuries old that the Lords did not touch finance bills. Lloyd George forced the matter to a general election, won it, and got his budget through in April 1910. The confrontation ended with Parliament asserting the supremacy of the elected chamber over the hereditary one, a change to the British constitution that has never been reversed. He had, in effect, used a tax bill as a battering ram against the aristocracy, and it worked.

Insurance, and the Fight for It

The 1911 National Insurance Act followed, introducing compulsory health and unemployment insurance — the true beginning of the modern British welfare state. It was fought with an intensity that reads oddly now. Opponents packed the Albert Hall for a "Mistresses and Maids" rally against the requirement that employers contribute for domestic servants. Lloyd George pushed it through regardless. The National Health Service of 1948 is a descendant of this act, not an invention out of nothing.

The Man Who Won the War

The war exposed the limits of Asquith's administration and made Lloyd George's reputation. As Minister of Munitions he reorganised British armaments production; he moved to the War Office; and in December 1916 he replaced Asquith as Prime Minister, dominating the British scene for the rest of the conflict.

His contribution was not battlefield genius but institutional force. He drove the Admiralty, against its own settled opinion, into adopting the convoy system that broke the U-boat campaign and kept Britain fed. He pressed relentlessly for unified Allied command, which was finally achieved in 1918. He ran the war through a small war cabinet rather than a conventional one. And he was, throughout, in conflict with his own generals — a quarrel historians have been re-fighting ever since.

Versailles and Ireland

He went to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as one of the Big Three, positioned between Woodrow Wilson's idealism and Georges Clemenceau's demand for a crushed Germany, and spent the conference brokering between them — an intermediate settlement that satisfied nobody and has been blamed by everybody.

In 1921 he negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty, ending the war in Ireland and creating the Irish Free State. It was an extraordinary act of political engineering and it partitioned the island; both halves of that sentence are still live in Irish politics.

The Fall

His coalition government collapsed in October 1922, in the aftermath of the Chanak crisis, when Conservative backbenchers withdrew their support. He never held office again — and he had another twenty-three years to live. He took the leadership of a shrunken Liberal Party in 1926 and slid into irrelevance through the 1930s. In 1936 he visited Germany and came away briefly impressed by Hitler, a judgement he later corrected but never lived down. He married Frances Stevenson in 1943, accepted an earldom in 1945, and died in Wales on 26 March 1945, aged eighty-two.

Why David Is Called a Genius

Winston Churchill, who worked with him and later fought him, called him "the greatest Welshman which that unconquerable race has produced since the age of the Tudors" — and Churchill was not generous about rivals. The specific quality was executive imagination: Lloyd George could see a machine that did not yet exist and then build it, at speed, against opposition. National Insurance, the convoy system, the Ministry of Munitions, the war cabinet, the Irish settlement — each was a piece of institutional invention rather than a policy adjustment, and each was pushed through by a man with no university education, no party machine of his own at the start, and no aristocratic connections in a system still run by aristocrats.

He also possessed a rarer thing: a strategic sense of how to convert a fight into a structural change. The People's Budget was not really about revenue. He engineered a confrontation his opponents could not win, and came out of it with the power of the House of Lords permanently reduced and the principle established that the state would tax wealth to relieve poverty. Very few politicians in any country have redesigned their constitution and their social contract in the same term of office.

The counter-case is not small. He was slippery — allies and opponents alike found his word unreliable, and his coalition politics were transactional to a degree that shocked contemporaries. He fought a destructive feud with Asquith that split the Liberal Party, and no Liberal has led a British government since; the party that carried out the greatest reforms of the century was ruined partly by the man who made them. His conduct of relations with his generals remains contested, and the Versailles settlement he helped broker contributed to the peace that failed. The 1936 admiration for Hitler was a serious misjudgement by a man who should have known better. And the last twenty-three years of his life produced nothing at all — the case for him rests entirely on the fourteen years between 1908 and 1922.

Legacy

Those fourteen years are enough. Pensions in 1908, the People's Budget in 1909, National Insurance in 1911, the Parliament that stripped the Lords of their veto, the convoy that kept Britain fed, the Irish Free State: it is one of the densest concentrations of consequential change in British history, and it was assembled by a Welsh-speaking solicitor who never went to university and never stopped frightening the people who ran the country.

Achievements

• Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1916–1922)
• leader of the Liberal Party (1926–1931)
• Secretary of State for War (1916–1916)
• Minister of Munitions (1915–1916)
• Order of Merit