I’m reading a book about British history, and I came across the following quotation from a speech Lloyd George gave as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1909:
I know that Lloyd George drafted the “people’s budget” at the time, aiming at redistributing wealth in Britain in favor of the poor. But what exactly does Lloyd George want to say with this sentence?
Is he just making a humorous point without any specific meaning? Seems so, but I think he’s addressing too many questions of political importance to his contemporaries to dismiss the phrase as a mere joke.
Is he arguing against the peerage as an institution, citing the costs of maintaining the nobility? Then again, British peers cover their living expenses themselves, for example from revenues generated by their personal property; they don’t receive money from the public treasury and as such do not matter to the Exchequer.
Is he making a point for disarmament and cutting the naval budget by pointing at the uselessness of battleships? That would contradict the line followed by the cabinet of which Lloyd George was a member, since Britain was, at the time, involved in a naval arms race with other European powers.
The quotation is included in many online collections, and I like it, but I don’t fully get what it is really intended to say.
You’re right, but that doesn’t stop people from making the comparison. I once heard the space program defended as a relatively trivial government expenditure, on the ground that “we spend more on chewing gum than we do on the space program.” Of course, the money spent on chewing gum is private and the space program is public. But still, people make the comparison, even if it’s silly.
In the case of the dukes, their fortunes usually derived from long-ago grants of land and privilege by the monarch, and they didn’t pay a lot in taxes, so in a sense they were living off of the state, even though there was no line item in the budget for “upkeep of the dukes”.
No, but the dreadnoughts were a convenient metaphor for something big and expensive, like an aircraft carrier today. If I said today that some guy’s wardrobe cost as much as an aircraft carrier, I wouldn’t necessarily be slamming aircraft carriers, but making the point loud and clear that the guy was a clothes horse.
There is another version of this quote, something to the effect of “A duke in full sail is cheaper than a dreadnaught, and much more effective”. I don’t know which version was the original, and which was the response.
Upon further reflection, I think Lloyd George was complaining about the Royal Dukes on the Civil List.
The monarch’s sons traditionally recieve dukedoms. The husbands of the monarch’s daughters traditionally recieve earldoms. In days of yore, these represented actual pieces of real estate, the rent from which would support the aristocrat who held the title.
In the 18th Century, King George III turned over most of the Crown Lands to Parliament. In exchange, the royal family was to recieve tax exemptions and financial support from the Civil List.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bred like rabbits. So, by the time Lloyd George became Prime Minister, there were a whole lot of royal cousins, who paid no income tax, but recieved government paychecks.
Just like today, junior royals often made the newspapers with scandals. With medical advances, the more distant relatives lived far longer than the 18th Century prime ministers would have believed possible.
After the fire at Windsor Castle, Queen Elizabeth II gave up the tax exemptions, and the number of royals on the Civil List was pruned drastically. I don’t know if she got any of the Crown Lands back.
That’s the original version, as quoted by the Times in its report on 11 October 1909 of the speech Lloyd George had given at a public meeting two days earlier in Newcastle.
The context was that he was defending his ‘People’s Budget’ against the accusations that it was an attack on property and would damage industry. The implication is that this criticism was being made by dukes who were themselves a drain on the economy. Hence the quip about the cost of dukes. He then went on to develop the claim that the Liberals were the party of those who actually worked. So the dukes were being used as the extreme example of landlords living off unearned incomes. Their cost was the rents their tenants had to pay.
Interestingly, the Times reporter claimed that this particular line was ‘the most gently delivered portion of the speech’, spoken ‘in the tone of one who is proposing a complimentary toast’.
It’s interesting that a Radical like Lloyd George wound up a wealthy member of the peerage (he was named 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor a year before he died, and left a sizable estate).
That’s just like the present generation of Labour politicians. Once they leave their cabinet posts they all seem to get very lucrative directorships or jobs as consultants. This includes Tony Blair who is being paid millions by various multinational corporations. Talk about poacher turning game-keeper.
Some of the founding-fathers of the Labour Party must be turning in their graves.