Free Breakfast Table

The Free Breakfast Table was the demand of British working-class Liberalism from the 1860s to the early twentieth-century. It entailed abolishing duties on basic foodstuffs as these were indirect taxes and therefore regressive.

The phrase is said to have been coined by the Radical MP John Bright. [ [http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/John_Bright John Bright - LoveToKnow 1911 ] ] There was also a campaigning organisation called the Free Breakfast Table Association. [E. F. Biagini, "Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880" (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 102.]

The National Agricultural Labourers Union held the Free Breakfast Table as "an article of faith" and the idea helped to safeguard Liberal Party support in rural areas after the Representation of the People Act 1884. [Frank Trentman, 'Political culture and political economy: interest, ideology and free trade', "Review of International Political Economy 5:2 Summer 1998", p. 230.]

In 1891 the National Liberal Federation convened in Newcastle and adopted the Newcastle Programme, which included a pledge in favour of the Free Breakfast Table. [ [http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_single.php?item_id=30&item=history&PHPSESSID=32f74420ec33... The Newcastle Programme] ]

In his first Budget, the first Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, claimed the Budget went "far to realize the cherished radical idea of a free breakfast table". [ [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,718325-1,00.html "Time", Labor's Budget, May 12, 1924] ] Snowden had lowered duties on tea, coffee, cocoa, chicory and sugar. [A. J. P. Taylor, "English History, 1914-1945" (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 212.]

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