Constituency : East Aberdeenshire 1906-10
We now move on to the by-election victors of the 1906-10 Parliament. It was a turbulent one. Balfour somehow persuaded himself that the Liberal victory was illegitimate and it was right to use the overwhelming Unionist majority in the Lords since 1886 to thwart government legislation. Thus the Lords destroyed Birrell's Education Bill and measures on licensing and plural voting in the first two years. Towards the end of 1907, Campbell-Bannerman's health declined and he was replaced by Asquith just before his death in 1908. The counter-attack was launched by Lloyd George whose Peoples' Budget of 1909 was calculated to provoke the Lords into rejecting a finance bill and thus create a constitutional crisis. This was the ground on which the January 1910 election was fought. The Liberal Unionists suffered another body blow later in 1906 when Joseph Chamberlain was incapacitated by a stroke, putting tariff reform on the backburner and making them even more of an irrelevance.
Just 16 days after the election, the MP for East Aberdeenshire , James Annand died and this James was elected unopposed in his place.
James was the son of a farmer . He was a great art collector and chair of the Aberdeen Art Gallery Committee from 1901 to 1928.
James was a supporter of the crofter's cause and most of his parliamentary contributions were to the debates on the Small Landholders ( Scotland ) Bill in 1907-08.
James stood down in January 1910.
James was knighted in 1915.
He died in 1933 aged 82.
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