Chancellor of the Exchequer his duty to distribute as fairly as he can." The chancellor has considerable control over other departments as it is the Treasury which sets Departmental Expenditure Limits. The amount of power this gives to an individual chancellor depends on his personal forcefulness, his status within his party and his relationship with the prime minister. Gordon Brown, who became chancellor when Labour came into Government in 1997, had a large personal power base in the party. Perhaps as a result, Tony Blair chose to keep him in the same position throughout his ten years as prime minister; making Brown an unusually
History of the British peerage much more common. The peerage ceased to be associated with wealth or land ownership. At the beginning of the century, however, such associations remained for some time. In 1909, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George proposed the introduction of a land tax, which the landowning peers opposed. The House of Lords rejected the budget. After the general election of January 1910, the returned government introduced the Parliament Bill, which sought to curtail the powers of the Lords. When the Lords attempted to block the bill, the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, threatened to have the king create two hundred