The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [23]
Baldwin had one request for his new Chancellor of the Exchequer: that he rejoin the Conservative Party. Churchill agreed. Henceforth he was to remain in the Conservative Party, to assume its leadership in 1940, and to represent it in Parliament for forty years.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill was once again a central figure in the daily, practical workings of parliamentary democracy. A high point of the British parliamentary year is the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s annual budget. Between 1925 and 1929, Churchill prepared and delivered five budgets, each of considerable stature. In his first, on 28 April 1925, he spoke for two hours and forty minutes. The measures he introduced included pensions for all widows and orphans, of whom 200,000 women and 350,000 children were the immediate beneficiaries. He also introduced a ten percent reduction in income tax for those in the lowest income groups.
Following the nine-day General Strike that began at midnight on 3 May 1926, Churchill took the lead in negotiations with the still-striking coal miners and the mine owners. Throughout the summer he made strenuous efforts to persuade the owners—including his cousin the Marquess of Londonderry—to give the miners a fair settlement. When the owners refused, Churchill wanted to introduce legislation to the House of Commons to force the owners to accept a national minimum wage for the miners. In secret talks at Chartwell with Ramsay MacDonald, and two days later in London with the miners’ leaders, he asked them what would constitute a fair wage; then, in further talks with the owners, he produced that sum as if it were his own suggestion. It was Baldwin, hurrying back from his annual holiday in France, who supported the Cabinet’s rejection of Churchill conciliation. Nor would the Cabinet support Churchill’s suggestion, for which he had obtained the approval of the miners’ leaders, for a compulsory arbitration tribunal.
Churchill introduced his third budget on 11 April 1927, resisting Cabinet pressure to ease the burden of death duties on the rich. A long-time Conservative opponent of Churchill, Lord Winterton, who had listened to the budget debate, wrote to a friend about Churchill’s position in the House: “The remarkable thing about him is the way he has suddenly acquired, quite late in parliamentary life, an immense fund of tact, patience, good humour and banter on all occasions; no one used ‘to suffer fools ungladly’ more than Winston, but now he is friendly and accessible to everyone, both in the House and in the lobbies, with the result that he has become what he never was before the war, very popular in the House generally—a great accretion to his already formidable parliamentary power.”
On 15 April 1929 Churchill introduced his fifth budget. It was a count reached previously only by Walpole, Pitt, Peel and Gladstone, each of whom was, or became, Prime Minister. Churchill spoke for almost three hours, setting out once more a substantial legislative plan. He abolished the duty on tea—a tax that had first been imposed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; removed railway passenger duty; ended the betting tax; reduced the duty on motorcycles and bicycles; imposed new duties on brewers, distillers and tobacco manufacturers; and announced an increase in Government spending on the telephone service, especially in rural areas.
In his diary, the Minister