Budget League November, it staged 3,564 meetings with a total registered attendance of 1,436,827 people (approximately 1 in 5 of the registered electorate in Great Britain). Budget League The Budget League was a British pressure group formed in 1909 by Winston Churchill to publicly campaign in favour of David Lloyd George's People's Budget in reaction to the activities of the Budget Protest League. The foundation of the League had not been discussed in the Cabinet and when Sir Henry Norman requested Cabinet ministers to speak at its meetings, nearly all of them refused to participate. However, after Jack Pease issued a circular
David Lloyd George traditional Liberal programmes such as licensing law reforms—his first major trial in this role was over the 1908–1909 Naval Estimates. The Liberal manifesto at the 1906 general election included a commitment to reduce military expenditure. Lloyd George strongly supported this, writing to Reginald McKenna, First Lord of the Admiralty, "the emphatic pledges given by all of us at the last general election to reduce the gigantic expenditure on armaments built up by the recklessness of our predecessors." He then proposed the programme be reduced from six to four dreadnoughts. This was adopted by the government, but there was a public