When Did Britain's Decline Become Terminal?

Neither 1914 Nor 1939

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! This week’s article is on a similar matter to the recent story on how Britain became a hellhole, and is about a closely related subject I mentioned therein: the consequences of the 1911 Parliament Bill. Both in the comments and privately, subscribers asked me to build on that by doing an article on here about it, so I have done so. I hope you get something out of it, and as always, please tap the heart icon to “like” this article, as that is how the algorithm knows how to promote it!

When did Britain’s decline go from being simply a matter of bad policy, to a case of a terminal cancer that has eaten away at that ancient land and turned all its accomplishments to dust?

It was not the answers conventionally given: World War I or World War II. Nor was it either the “Great” Reform Act of 1832 or the eventually economically and socially problematic¹ Repeal of the Corn Laws.

No, though all those events were problematic in large ways, what sowed the seeds of Britain’s destruction was the Parliament Bill of 1911.

Before that horrid bill, Britain was much the same as it had always been. Merry Old England was a hierarchical land driven by the spirit of expansion, and full of a people animated by the idea of rising up the social ladder rather than destroying it wholesale in the manner of the Bolsheviks or Jacobins.

After Churchill and his friend Lloyd George rammed through their politics of envy-driven bills, the British lost their great national spirit and decayed into the disastrous realm of the politics of envy and policies of self-immolation it wrought.

Listen to the audio version of this episode here:

[AUDIO] How the Parliament Bill Destroyed England

When Churchill Helped Destroy Britain

Ever since MartyrMade went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast and declared Winston Churchill a chief villain of World War II, his legacy—particularly the post-war collapse of the British Empire—has been vociferously and publicly debated.

But it should be remembered that the leading men of Britain despised Churchill not because of World War II (even the unenthusiastic ones like Bend’or Grosvenor saw the point of the war, at some level²) but because of his early career, during which he created the conditions that led to the demise of the British landed elite and, ultimately, Britain. It was his People’s Budget, the fight over which spawned the Parliament Bill, that led to precipitous peacetime hikes in death taxes and led to the Duke of Beaufort saying, to many nods of approval from the right, that Winston should be fed to the foxhounds.³

The People’s Budget

While death taxes had been instituted before during wartime—such as during the Napoleonic Wars—it was not until the 1890s that the British government again seriously considered reinstituting them. They were too hated, too onerous to collect, and too destructive of the great families that stood as guardians over Britain’s heritage and traditions.

But, as the expenses of empire rose in the late 19th century, a small death tax of 8%, at the maximum, was instituted to pay for the burden of government.⁴ While some of Britain’s leading men were horrified, few much cared; it was money raised for a purpose they agreed with, wasn’t unduly burdensome, and was created as part of the typical governmental process rather than as some Ragnarok-style class warfare showdown. Further, most realized that they could avoid much of it so long as they had a good lawyer on the payroll.⁵

That all changed in 1909, thanks to Winston Churchill. After switching to the Liberal Party because he failed as a Conservative candidate, he tried to burnish his Parliamentary reputation as a good Liberal by working with middle-class radical Lloyd George to pass what they called The People’s Budget.

This bill was different from past tax packages. Instead of just raising taxes to fund needed imperial projects or military buildouts, its purpose was to rally the support of the impoverished to the Liberal Party by engaging in class warfare through onerous and punitive taxation.

Its purpose, as articulated by Churchill and Lloyd George, was to tax the landed elite into oblivion, claiming that those who had property had “unfairly” profited from it rising in value and from the labor of others. To punish holders of capital—particularly the rooted and landed elite—the bill created a new tax on land, raised death duties dramatically, and increased the income tax dramatically.

While the 1894 death taxes could be tolerated without much of a fight, The People’s Budget could not be. In the eyes of both its proponents and opponents, it was not just a budget but rather a referendum on private property and the politics of envy. Though nominally justified as being needed to pay for the new Dreadnaught-class ships constructed as part of the naval arms race with Germany, Churchill and Lloyd George both framed it as an attack on the owners of capital, noting that it would redistribute the wealth of the land to fund socialistic welfare programs.

In conception and practice, it was a bill rooted in envy that would break the financial back of the old, landed elite of Britain—and thus the political power of that body as well.

The landed elite—the men who had ruled England for most of her period of immense prosperity and world dominance—could not accept this bill. It went too far. It was the first overtly socialist law to come to Merry Old England, and indeed was entirely unprecedented (and is known today as a "revolutionary concept") because it was expressly crafted to redistribute wealth.

From the start, whatever the mumbling about the need for new Dreadnaughts, its purpose was taxing landed wealth and income to fund welfare programs. That was unacceptable. Socialism and riotous class warfare of the sort Churchill was pushing— despite being the cousin of a duke—could not be meekly acceded to.

And so the Lords responded by throwing out the People’s Budget, using their veto power to reject it. That presented a constitutional and spiritual problem: could the hereditary House of Lords veto financial legislation? (Yes, though the power had long lain dormant) If so, the public asked, why were the Lords—in their position thanks only to “accident” of birth—able to retard “democracy” by vetoing legislation the Commons thought necessary?

The answer, of course, is that the aristocratic branch of government has been recognized since ancient times as a key ingredient in not letting democracy destroy itself; the lengthy time horizons and rooted, localist perspective of the landed interests constrain the democratic elements from going overboard and bringing about disastrous change. Their purpose is to ensure Chesterton’s fence isn’t demolished.

But that answer was unacceptable to those like Lloyd George whom Churchill had helped empower. They were out for blood, and wanted to use the furor to break the Lords for good, all in the name of envy and class warfare.

The People’s Budget

It was at this point that Lloyd George took over, leading the class warfare charge. Churchill was, as could be expected, getting cold feet. While he had supported the People’s Budget and gotten caught up in the excitement of the moment (a perennial problem for him), he eventually realized that he didn’t want to destroy his class.

Lloyd George, however, had no such compunctions. Welsh-born and self-made, he was much flintier and made a much more likely enemy of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, which he set out to destroy with the Parliament Bill.

Under it, the Lords’ veto was severely limited. In non-financial matters, they could only exercise it for two years, after which the Commons could pass the bill despite their objections. In the case of taxation bills, they could only exercise the veto for a month, effectively ending that aspect of their veto power for good. In effect, this meant they would be defenseless against the envy-driven exactions of an increasingly hostile and envious “democracy”.

Some of the Lords tried resisting. Led by Lord Willoughby de Broke, whose family had existed since the 13th century, and the 2nd Duke of Westminster, a member of the ancient Grosvenor family that “came across with William” during the 1066 Conquest, the “Diehards” were the last stand for privilege against the rising tide of democracy.

But their king—George V—betrayed them, choosing to support unfettered democracy rather than his lords by threatening to create hundreds of new, Liberal peers who would be installed in the Lords and pass the Parliament Bill unless the Lords passed it on their own first.⁶ Over the objections of Lord de Broke and the Duke of Westminster, enough members of the chamber were worried by that threat to their social standing to pass the Parliament Bill, and their power fell away forever.

The Ravages of Unfettered Democracy

Since then, the attacks have not stopped. The remaining veto powers of the Upper Chamber of Parliament have been slowly whittled away as the chamber has been flooded with “life peers” who have few accomplishments and little honor; it’s now no longer the august body of better days.

Further, its demolition empowered the socialists to further weaponize the politics of envy against the wealthy, particularly the old landed elite, using every justification under the sun to confiscate and redistribute their assets with death taxes that have reached over 90%, similarly high income taxes, fines and fees that force giving up the land, reglaltions compelling landlords to sell their property to tenants, and even outright nationalization and confiscation of homes and industrial enterprises.⁷

None of that could have happened before the fight spawned by the People’s Budget and the Parliament Bill to which that fight led.

The Empire’s Spiritual Turning Point

But why the Parliament Bill matters is not just that it was unjust, or that the taxation and government-led confiscation of assets spawned by it have chased immense amounts of capital out of the country and thus been a major economic problem for Britain.

What really matters is that it marks the spiritual turning point in the course of the British Empire.

Before Winston Churchill and Lloyd George declared economic and political war on the leading families of their nation, Britain was still marked by the economic prosperity and preeminence for which it was known in the Georgian, Victorian, and particularly Edwardian Eras. Yes, there had been chinks in the armor. The consequences of free trade were increasingly weighing on the British industrial and agricultural sectors,⁸ the Boer War had been a debacle, the Navy was nearly too expensive, and the Americans and Germans were no longer insignificant economic and military competitors.⁹

But Britain was still Britain. It was still a land marked by tradition, economic and political liberty, worldwide dynamism and economic power, and the little touches of class and taste that mark the high-water mark of civilization, and the landed elite generally did its duty in setting a good example that encouraged that to continue.¹⁰

Proof of this is seen in how the classes behaved: though there had been many tense political moments before the Parliament Bill, the desire of nearly everyone had been to move up the socio-economic ladder rather than destroy it. The working-class men wore classic suits on their days off to show their refinement and upward mobility, and their wives aspired to middle-class domesticity. The middle classes did their best to emulate the aristocracy in taste and manners, while adding heavier doses of thrift and respectability.¹¹

To encourage as much, the upper classes self-consciously tried to behave admirably in military and public service so as to set a good example and be admired and emulated rather than mocked and scorned.¹² So, as countless observers noted, as late as the early 20th century, the non-aristocratic classes of England desired to be aristocrats rather than destroy the aristocracy.

Domestically, this meant a host of pro-social virtues, from high savings rates to general avoidance of out-of-wedlock births, were encouraged, and the avoidance of domestic chaos like the French Revolution or German revolts of 1848. Externally, it was the wish of the non-aristocrats to become elites that led to the building and expansion of the empire. Agricultural settlements in Rhodesia and Canada, mines in South Africa, administration in India, and even the conquest of Sarawak¹³ were built and effected by those who wished to rise in the ranks. Without that desire, the empire probably wouldn’t have happened, at least in the magnificent way it did.

The class war sparked by the People’s Budget destroyed all of that. If the result of rising to the pinnacle was being spurned and hated, who wanted to do it?

If the end result was just onerous taxation, what new man wanted to spend the huge lumps of capital to buy, reinvigorate, and make profitable a country estate of under-invested in farms to become a country gentleman? Would it not be better to just park that capital offshore, away from the tax assessors?

If the end result of becoming a noble was to be taxed, attacked, and deprived of all political power by a spiteful, envy-driven democratic mob, what was the point? Would it not be better to remain under the radar and use an industrial fortune to live a life of luxury rather than duty…?

Who would do all it took to invest in and maintain an agricultural estate and manor home that tied not only the current generation but the heirs forevermore to that particular patch of soil and those on it? That rootedness and sense of local responsibility had built England,¹⁴ but it was so much easier to just sell it all off and live off the dividends of stocks…

On and on the calculus went. Instead of focusing on rising in the ranks, the lower classes used their newfound political power to attack those social ranks in an attempt to destroy them, and ended up destroying most of the bases of their nation’s prosperity and glory as a result.

The empire became seen as expensive and tedious rather than a glorious and exciting way to build commercial wealth.¹⁵ Land ownership became an onerous burden rather than a basis of political, social, and economic standing. Tradition was left in the dust as those who had championed it went to work in a law office or the banking sector instead.

All in all, that was a mortal blow to what Britain had been, and served as the basis for what we now know it as.

In the days of gentlemanly rule by local men of note, regulation and taxes were kept as limited as possible.¹⁶ Who, after all, would vote to place restrictions on his own conduct or taxes on his own wealth and income unless there was a pressing need for doing so? Very few men. And so Britain remained free of the confiscatory taxation, crackdowns on business activity, outlawry of basic speech, and all the other horrors for which it is known today. Those making the rules had no wish to be burdened by such horrors, and so they kept them far away. That applied not only at the local level but, thanks to the Lords, at the national level as well.

Not so in the bureaucratic system that rose out of the death of the gentleman. Once those who had administered the nation and empire out of a sense of duty were bankrupted and chased away by ruinous taxation, they were replaced by bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats don’t pay the high-level income taxes or death taxes, nor do they do anything productive that’s regulated. To them, taxation and regulation are means of securing residual power within the system and effecting desired social change on behalf of the left. This is what has happened in Britain since the Parliament Bill, with “government power” invariably meaning “bureaucratic power,” and that invariably meaning more regulation, more taxation, and less liberty.¹⁷

Now, it’s not just private property that’s under attack…that war was won by the socialists decades ago. Now, even private thoughts and opinions are under attack as the regulation-prone, anti-heritage bureaucrats justify expanding their power yet further by cracking down on thought criminals.¹⁸

And, when pressed on why such tyrannical horrors are ongoing, the answer given always relates to the egalitarian mode of anti-hierarchical thinking that was legitimized by the Parliament Bill. “Anti-racism” and attacks on “the rich” are the most typical of these, for racial and economic equality are the most obvious means of effecting general societal “equity.”¹⁹

All of that was born out of the Parliament Bill. Before its passage, Merry Old England was limited by the sort of men who reveled in British history and heritage, and wanted to protect it while building a prosperous world from which they and those who relied on them could profit. They lived in a tradition of duty and service, created an empire that supplied the nation with vast export markets and natural resource reserves, and used their position to push society in a positive, upward-focused direction. Then that was killed in the name of envy, and the benefits of the old order died with its structure.

Now, Britain is defined by Grooming Gangs kept in the country for reasons of racial equality, business-destroying regulations that have wrecked its private economic sector, and high taxes that make almost anywhere else in the world a far more desirable alternative for the wealthy and productive,²⁰ drawing immense amounts of capital out of the country. Little to none of that would be the case had the old order kept its position, or at least its veto power.

But that was lost as a consequence of the fight spawned by Churchill’s People’s Budget, and so now Britain is a backwater. Americans must remember this, for the same sort of politics of envy-driven attitude could doom us to similar impoverishment and irrelevance.

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1.

2. This is covered well in Bendor: The Golden Duke of Westminster by Leslie Fields

3. This entertaining anecdote is recorded in a fabulous book called The Dukes by historian Brian Masters

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_inheritance_taxes_in_the_United_Kingdom#Estate_duty_framework_(1894-1949)

5. This is covered well in Aristocrats by Robert Lacy

6. While multiple sources cover this, the best context on why George V chose to do as he did comes in Aristocrats by Robert Lacy

7. Tinniswood covers this well in Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the English Country House After World War II

I also wrote about it here:

8.

9. Emmerson covers these issues well in the first and last chapters of his fabulous 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War

10. The self-conscious nature of their doing so is noted well in Aristocrats by Robert Lacy

11. This is covered best in The Aristocracy in England, 1660-1914 by Beckett

12. This is covered well in well in Aristocrats by Robert Lacy

13.

14. Covered here:

15. This is even seen in the case of the White Rajahs and their tragic end:

16.

17. Covered here:

18. My friend Andy notes this here:

When the Wolves Roam Free

19. I cover this here:

20. https://www.businessinsider.com/rich-used-to-flock-to-the-uk-now-theyre-fleeing-2025-6