page_title: Bonar Law
section_title: The People's Budget and the House of Lords
hierarchical_section_title: Bonar Law / Tariff reform / In opposition / The People's Budget and the House of Lords
caption_attribution_description: Edward Carson, three-quarter length portrait, seated, facing right.
context_page_description: Andrew Bonar Law was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1922 to 1923.
  Law was born in the British colony of New Brunswick, the first British prime minister to be born outside the British Isles. He was of Scottish and Ulster Scots descent and moved to Scotland in 1870. He left school aged sixteen to work in the iron industry, becoming a wealthy man by the age of thirty. He entered the House of Commons at the 1900 general election, relatively late in life for a front-rank politician, and was made a junior minister, Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade, in 1902. Law joined the Shadow Cabinet in opposition after the 1906 general election. In 1911, he was appointed a Privy Councillor, and stood for the vacant party leadership. Despite never having served in the Cabinet, and despite trailing third after Walter Long and Austen Chamberlain, Law became leader when the two front-runners withdrew rather than risk a draw splitting the party.
  As Leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition, Law focused his attentions in favour of tariff reform and against Irish Home Rule.
context_section_description: Campbell-Bannerman resigned as Prime Minister in April 1908 and was replaced by H. H. Asquith. In 1909, he and his Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George introduced the People's Budget, which sought through increased direct and indirect taxes to redistribute wealth and fund social reform programmes. By parliamentary convention financial and budget bills are not challenged by the House of Lords, but in this case the predominantly Conservative Lords rejected the bill on 30 April, setting off a constitutional crisis.
  The Liberals called a general election for January 1910, and Law spent most of the preceding months campaigning up and down the country for other Conservative candidates and MPs, sure that his Dulwich seat was safe. He obtained an increased majority of 2,418. The overall result was more confused: the Conservatives gained 116 seats, bringing their total to 273, but this was still less than the Liberal caucus, and produced a hung parliament, as neither had a majority of the seats (the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Labour Party and the All-for-Ireland League took more than 120 seats in total). The Liberals remained in office with the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Budget passed through the House of Commons a second time, and – as it now had an electoral mandate – was then approved by the House of Lords without a division.
  However, the crisis over the Budget had highlighted a long-standing constitutional question: should the House of Lords be able to overturn bills passed by the House of Commons? The Liberal government introduced a bill in February 1910 which would prevent the House of Lords vetoing finance bills, and would force them to pass any bill which had been passed by the Commons in three sessions of Parliament.
  This was immediately opposed by the Unionists, and both parties spent the next several months in a running battle over the bill. The Conservatives were led by Arthur Balfour and Lord Lansdowne, who headed the Conservatives in the House of Lords, while Law spent the time concentrating on the continuing problem of tariff reform. The lack of progress had convinced some senior Conservatives that it would be a good idea to scrap tariff reform altogether. Law disagreed, successfully arguing that tariff reform "was the first constructive work of the [Conservative Party]" and that to scrap it would "split the Party from top to bottom".
  With this success, Law returned to the constitutional crisis surrounding the House of Lords. The death of Edward VII on 6 May 1910 prompted the leaders of the major political parties to meet secretly in a "Truce of God" to discuss the Lords. The meetings were kept almost entirely secret: apart from the party representatives, the only people aware were F.E. Smith, J.L. Garvin, Edward Carson and Law. The group met about twenty times at Buckingham Palace between June and November 1910, with the Conservatives represented by Arthur Balfour, Lord Cawdor, Lord Lansdowne and Austen Chamberlain. The proposal presented at the conference by David Lloyd George was a coalition government with members of both major parties in the Cabinet and a programme involving Home Rule, Poor Law reforms, imperial reorganisation and possibly tariff reforms. The Home Rule proposal would have made the United Kingdom a federation, with "Home Rule All Round" for Scotland, Ireland, and England & Wales. In the end the plans fell through: Balfour told Lloyd George on 2 November that the proposal would not work, and the conference was dissolved a few days later.
caption: Edward Carson, who along with Law was one of the few non-representatives to be aware of the "Truce of God"
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