People's Budget to Eton's Budget

In 1909, the then Chancellor David Lloyd-George said this:

"This is a war budget. It is for raising money to wage an implacable war 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 degredation that always follows in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests."

He was putting forward what is known to historians as 'The People's Budget'. It put forward increases in taxation, including a land tax, to pay for the foundations of what would become the Welfare State: free school meals, the first pensions, Labour exchange and National Insurance.

As usual the Conservative Party fought to have these tax increases thrown out, using their House of Lords majority to hold off the changes. The land tax was dropped (and has never been re-introduced) but after fighting another general election in 1910 and passing the 1911 Parliament Bill - to prevent the House of Lords using its Tory majority to fend off legislation it didn't like - the Budget was passed.

Today, in 2011 Gideon Osborne, heir to the Baronetcy of Ballentaylor, introduced his CSR. With cuts across the board. He claims these cuts are fair but even a brief look at the figures shows that it is the poor - as a % of their income - who will pay the most for these cuts.

Gideon cried crocodile tears about tough decisions but instead has rattled through a series of macho cuts made without any strategic thought. They're cuts for the sake of cutting. They're cuts to appeal to the Murdoch's and the Dacre's. They're cuts that make the poorest in society pay for the genuine creators of this crisis: banks and bankers.

The Conservative Party supported Labour spending plans until 2008. They supported the light regulation of the banking sector (although they like to pretend now that they did neither of these things). Only once the shit hit the fan did they start to flap demanding cuts straight away, which as a lot of economists have suggested, do nothing to help a stumbling economy. They play fast and loose with figures to make the situation look worst than it is and as a result can justify the first real attempts to undo the welfare state.

One of Lloyd-George's great allies in that 1909 Budget was Winston Churchill. He was then a Liberal and President of the Board of Trade. Yes, Winston Churchill. In a letter written in 1899 he had said:

"Capitalism in the form of Trusts has reached a pitch of power which the old economists never contemplated and which excites my most lively terror. Merchant princes are all very well, but if I have anything to say about it, their kingdom should not be of this world...Up to a certain point combination has bought us nothing but good: but we seem to have reached a period where it threatens nothing but evil."

What would Churchill have made of our present situation, where the reckless behaviour of big banks has led to the punishment of the poor, the disabled and the needy? Where Merchant Princes threaten to up sticks and leave the country whenever any kind of tax rises are aimed in their direction and where people like Murdoch can ensure that there is no real effort made to hold people like Osborne to account?

I write this because politicians don't like us to remember history. To be reminder of their past promises, commitments or failures. I write this because it seems to me that Gideon, Dave and Nick have taken the first steps to undo what Lloyd-George and Winston Churchill put together.

Lloyd-George called his budget a 'war budget'. Gideon's is also a war budget but not on the right enemy. He has taken all the weapon's available to him and concentrated his fire on the easy, less mobile enemy: the poor.