'Beerage', a
portmanteau word combining
beer and
peerage, was coined about 1880. The term carried connotations of political funding by brewers, and reciprocal favourable treatment of the brewing industry. In the late 19th century, there were a large number of brewers as Members of Parliament in the
House of Commons and several of these were elevated to the peerage or awarded other honours. The link between political donations and the honours system, though criticised, was then more prevalent. The 19th-century
Liberals included a strong contingent of
temperance campaigners which created tensions with the brewing faction within the party. It has been noted that following
Gladstone's
Licensing Act 1872 "the beerage swung from the Liberal party to the Conservative party". By the early 1900s, the Conservative Benches in the House of Lords were known collectively as the "Beerage" and
Winston Churchill had accused the Conservative Party of "drawing a brewer's dray across the road of progress". These references were used in 2005 to set the historical context in the course of debates in the House of Lords on a motion to withdraw the
Licensing Act 2003. In 1931 the term was used in the Commons during a "hotly debated" ==Modern use==