Victorian Britain 703lower food prices. Unable to resolve the split within his party, Balfour
resigned in December 1905, and the Liberals swept to victory the following
year. Promising to repeal the Taff Vale decision, they garnered many
working-class votes. The Labour Party, which had managed to win only one
seat in 1900, now sent twenty-nine MPs to the House of Commons. Under
the Liberal government, Parliament reversed the Taff Vale decision with the
Trade Disputes Act of 1906, which legalized picketing and relieved unions
of the legal responsibility for financial losses caused by strikes.
In 1908, Herbert Asquith (1852—1928) became Liberal prime minister.
Like the Conservatives, he supported British imperial causes. But the
dynamic, ambitious, and charismatic Welshman David Lloyd George (1863—
1945) was the rising star of the Liberals. A man of modest origins who pre
ferred to speak his native Welsh than English, Lloyd George had come into
the public eye for his opposition to the Boer War (see Chapter 21), although
in general he supported the empire. While crusading against the Conserva
tive Party, Lloyd George worked to continue the Gladstonian reformist tradi
tion. He wanted to counter the drift of union members toward the Labour
Party by bringing workers, middle-class men, and businessmen into an
alliance that would support Liberal social and political reforms. The Liberal
government established local boards to set minimum industrial wages, involv
ing the British government in bargaining between employers and workers to
an extent hitherto unseen.
In 1909, Lloyd George (who was chancellor of the exchequer) proposed
a budget that called for increased public benefits to be partially funded by
taxes on inheritance and on unearned income and uncultivated land.
These “supertaxes” (which were in fact quite small) would fall on the rich
est families of the nation. He compared the costs of maintaining “a fully
equipped duke” to that of a new battleship, depicting the aristocratic families
as parasitical leeches maintained at public expense.
In the Osborne judgment of 1909, the House of Lords had ruled in favor
of a railway worker who had sued his union with the goal of keeping union
funds from being used to support Labour candidates for the House of
Commons or to pay them while they served. (MPs began to receive salaries
several years later.) Like the Taff Vale case, the Osborne judgment struck a
damaging blow against the unions. In a climate of social confrontation,
the House of Lords then provocatively vetoed the 1909 budget, which it
viewed as an attack on the wealthy, thus exercising a right that it had not
used for decades. Asquith called the House of Lords veto a “break with the
constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons.” He dissolved
Parliament, confident of winning the new elections.
The Liberals did indeed return to power early the next year with the help
of Irish nationalists and the Labour Party. Asquith’s Parliament Act of 1911
proposed to eliminate the right of the House of Lords to veto any financial
bill. Many Britons viewed the passage of such a bill as a final blow to noble
privilege. The act also specified that any bill that the House of Lords did