On This Day
29 April 1909
Lloyd George presents the ‘People’s Budget’ to the House of Commons
He began his speech at 3.15pm and, apart from a 30 minute break, spoke until just after 8pm. It was the longest budget speech since Gladstone’s first budget of 1853. In his speech Lloyd George declared, ‘This is a war budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away, we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time when poverty and the wretchedness and human degradation which always follow in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests’.