The 1909/1910 People's Budget was a proposal of the Liberal government that introduced unprecedented taxes on the lands and incomes of Britain's wealthy to fund new social welfare programmes.

It was championed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, and his young ally Winston Churchill, who was then President of the Board of Trade and a fellow Liberal; called the "Terrible Twins" by certain Conservative contemporaries.

[2] It was a key issue of contention between the Liberal government and the Conservative-dominated House of Lords, leading to two general elections in 1910 and the enactment of the Parliament Act 1911.

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 follows in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests.

[9]The Northcliffe Press (who published both The Times and the Daily Mail) urged rejection of the budget to give tariff reform a chance.

That was the main issue of the general election in January 1910, setting the stage for a tremendous showdown, which Lloyd George relished.

[19] They even threatened to vote down the Budget in the House of Commons (Irish Nationalists favoured tariff reform and abhorred the planned increase in whisky duty[20]) until Asquith pledged to introduce such measures.

Nonetheless, the Lords passed the Parliament Act 1911 when faced with the threat, obtained from a narrowly-convinced new King George V (Edward VII having died on 6 May 1910, seven days after the Budget was passed), that it would be acceptable to flood the House of Lords with hundreds of new Liberal Party peers to give that party a majority or a near-majority there.