The Liberal Party was one of the two
major
Major (commandant in certain jurisdictions) is a military rank of commissioned officer status, with corresponding ranks existing in many military forces throughout the world. When used unhyphenated and in conjunction with no other indicators ...
political parties
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or pol ...
in the United Kingdom, along with the
Conservative Party
The Conservative Party is a name used by many political parties around the world. These political parties are generally right-wing though their exact ideologies can range from center-right to far-right.
Political parties called The Conservative P ...
, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Beginning as an alliance of
Whigs,
free trade
Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports. It can also be understood as the free market idea applied to international trade. In government, free trade is predominantly advocated by political parties that hold econo ...
–supporting
Peelite
The Peelites were a breakaway dissident political faction of the British Conservative Party from 1846 to 1859. Initially led by Robert Peel, the former Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader in 1846, the Peelites supported free trade whilst ...
s and reformist
Radicals
Radical may refer to:
Politics and ideology Politics
*Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change
*Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe and ...
in the 1850s, by the end of the 19th century it had formed four governments under
William Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone ( ; 29 December 1809 – 19 May 1898) was a British statesman and Liberal politician. In a career lasting over 60 years, he served for 12 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, spread over four non-conse ...
. Despite being divided over the issue of
Irish Home Rule
The Irish Home Rule movement was a movement that campaigned for Devolution, self-government (or "home rule") for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1 ...
, the party returned to government in 1905 and won a landslide victory in the
1906 general election
The following elections occurred in the year 1906.
Asia
* 1906 Persian legislative election
Europe
* 1906 Belgian general election
* 1906 Croatian parliamentary election
* Denmark
** 1906 Danish Folketing election
** 1906 Danish Landsting ele ...
.
Under
prime ministers Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905–1908) and
H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928), generally known as H. H. Asquith, was a British statesman and Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom f ...
(1908–1916), the Liberal Party passed
reforms
Reform ( lat, reformo) means the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, etc. The use of the word in this way emerges in the late 18th century and is believed to originate from Christopher Wyvill's Association movement ...
that created a basic
welfare state
A welfare state is a form of government in which the state (or a well-established network of social institutions) protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens, based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitabl ...
. Although Asquith was the
party leader
In a governmental system, a party leader acts as the official representative of their political party, either to a legislature or to the electorate. Depending on the country, the individual colloquially referred to as the "leader" of a political ...
, its dominant figure was
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. He was a Liberal Party politician from Wales, known for leading the United Kingdom during t ...
. Asquith was overwhelmed by the
wartime role of
coalition
A coalition is a group formed when two or more people or groups temporarily work together to achieve a common goal. The term is most frequently used to denote a formation of power in political or economical spaces.
Formation
According to ''A Gui ...
prime minister and Lloyd George replaced him in late 1916, but Asquith remained as Liberal Party leader. The split between
Lloyd George's breakaway faction and Asquith's official Liberal Party badly weakened the party.
The
coalition government of Lloyd George was increasingly dominated by the Conservative Party, which finally deposed him in 1922. By the end of the 1920s, the
Labour Party had replaced the Liberals as the Conservatives' main rival. The Liberal Party went into decline after 1918 and by the 1950s won as few as six seats at general elections. Apart from notable
by-election
A by-election, also known as a special election in the United States and the Philippines, a bye-election in Ireland, a bypoll in India, or a Zimni election (Urdu: ضمنی انتخاب, supplementary election) in Pakistan, is an election used to f ...
victories, its fortunes did not improve significantly until it formed the
SDP–Liberal Alliance
The SDP–Liberal Alliance was a centrist and social liberal political and electoral alliance in the United Kingdom.
Formed by the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the Liberal Party, the SDP–Liberal Alliance was established in 1981, contestin ...
with the newly formed
Social Democratic Party
The name Social Democratic Party or Social Democrats has been used by many political parties in various countries around the world. Such parties are most commonly aligned to social democracy as their political ideology.
Active parties
For ...
(SDP) in 1981. At the
1983 general election, the Alliance won over a quarter of the vote, but only 23 of the 650 seats it contested. At the
1987 general election, its share of the vote fell below 23% and the Liberals and the SDP merged in 1988 to form the Social and Liberal Democrats (SLD), who the following year were renamed the
Liberal Democrats. A splinter group reconstituted the
Liberal Party in 1989.
Prominent intellectuals associated with the Liberal Party include the philosopher
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, Member of Parliament (MP) and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to ...
, the economist
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in ...
and social planner
William Beveridge
William Henry Beveridge, 1st Baron Beveridge, (5 March 1879 – 16 March 1963) was a British economist and Liberal politician who was a progressive and social reformer who played a central role in designing the British welfare state. His 194 ...
.
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...
authored ''Liberalism and the Social Problem'' (1909), praised by
Henry William Massingham
Henry William Massingham (25 May 1860 – 27 August 1924) was an English journalist, editor of ''The Nation and Athenaeum, The Nation'' from 1907 to 1923. In his time it was considered the leading British Radical weekly.
Life
He j ...
as "an impressive and convincing argument" and widely considered as the movement’s bible.
History
Origins
![palmerston](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Palmerston.jpg)
The Liberal Party grew out of the
Whigs, who had their origins in an
aristocratic faction in the reign of
Charles II and the early 19th century
Radicals
Radical may refer to:
Politics and ideology Politics
*Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change
*Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe and ...
. The Whigs were in favour of reducing the power of the Crown and increasing the power of
Parliament
In modern politics, and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government. Generally, a modern parliament has three functions: Representation (politics), representing the Election#Suffrage, electorate, making laws, and overseeing ...
. Although their motives in this were originally to gain more power for themselves, the more idealistic Whigs gradually came to support an expansion of
democracy
Democracy (From grc, δημοκρατία, dēmokratía, ''dēmos'' 'people' and ''kratos'' 'rule') is a form of government in which the people have the authority to deliberate and decide legislation (" direct democracy"), or to choose gov ...
for its own sake. The great figures of reformist
Whiggery were
Charles James Fox
Charles James Fox (24 January 1749 – 13 September 1806), styled ''The Honourable'' from 1762, was a prominent British Whig statesman whose parliamentary career spanned 38 years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was the arch-riv ...
(died 1806) and his disciple and successor
Earl Grey. After decades in opposition, the Whigs returned to power under Grey in 1830 and carried the
First Reform Act in 1832.
The Reform Act was the climax of Whiggism, but it also brought about the Whigs' demise. The admission of the
middle class
The middle class refers to a class of people in the middle of a social hierarchy, often defined by occupation, income, education, or social status. The term has historically been associated with modernity, capitalism and political debate. Commo ...
es to the franchise and to the
House of Commons led eventually to the development of a systematic middle class liberalism and the end of Whiggery, although for many years reforming aristocrats held senior positions in the party. In the years after Grey's retirement, the party was led first by
Lord Melbourne
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, (15 March 177924 November 1848), in some sources called Henry William Lamb, was a British Whig politician who served as Home Secretary (1830–1834) and Prime Minister (1834 and 1835–1841). His first pre ...
, a fairly traditional Whig, and then by
Lord John Russell, the son of a Duke but a crusading radical, and by
Lord Palmerston, a renegade Irish
Tory
A Tory () is a person who holds a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalism and conservatism, which upholds the supremacy of social order as it has evolved in the English culture throughout history. Th ...
and essentially a
conservative, although capable of radical gestures.
As early as 1839, Russell had adopted the name of "Liberals", but in reality his party was a loose coalition of Whigs in the
House of Lords
The House of Lords, also known as the House of Peers, is the Bicameralism, upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Membership is by Life peer, appointment, Hereditary peer, heredity or Lords Spiritual, official function. Like the ...
and Radicals in the Commons. The leading Radicals were
John Bright and
Richard Cobden, who represented the manufacturing towns which had gained representation under the Reform Act. They favoured social reform, personal liberty, reducing the powers of the Crown and the
Church of England
The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...
(many Liberals were
Nonconformists), avoidance of war and foreign alliances (which were bad for business) and above all
free trade
Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports. It can also be understood as the free market idea applied to international trade. In government, free trade is predominantly advocated by political parties that hold econo ...
. For a century, free trade remained the one cause which could unite all Liberals.
In 1841, the Liberals lost office to the
Conservatives under
Sir Robert Peel, but their period in
opposition
Opposition may refer to:
Arts and media
* ''Opposition'' (Altars EP), 2011 EP by Christian metalcore band Altars
* The Opposition (band), a London post-punk band
* ''The Opposition with Jordan Klepper'', a late-night television series on Comed ...
was short because the Conservatives split over the repeal of the
Corn Laws, a free trade issue; and a faction known as the
Peelite
The Peelites were a breakaway dissident political faction of the British Conservative Party from 1846 to 1859. Initially led by Robert Peel, the former Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader in 1846, the Peelites supported free trade whilst ...
s (but not Peel himself, who died soon after) defected to the Liberal side. This allowed ministries led by Russell, Palmerston and the Peelite
Lord Aberdeen
George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, (28 January 178414 December 1860), styled Lord Haddo from 1791 to 1801, was a British statesman, diplomat and landowner, successively a Tory, Conservative and Peelite politician and specialist in ...
to hold office for most of the 1850s and 1860s. A leading Peelite was William Gladstone, who was a reforming
Chancellor of the Exchequer
The chancellor of the Exchequer, often abbreviated to chancellor, is a senior minister of the Crown within the Government of the United Kingdom, and head of His Majesty's Treasury. As one of the four Great Offices of State, the Chancellor is ...
in most of these governments. The formal foundation of the Liberal Party is traditionally traced to 1859 and the formation of Palmerston's second government.
However, the Whig-Radical amalgam could not become a true modern political party while it was dominated by aristocrats and it was not until the departure of the "Two Terrible Old Men", Russell and Palmerston, that Gladstone could become the first leader of the modern Liberal Party. This was brought about by Palmerston's death in 1865 and Russell's retirement in 1868. After a brief Conservative government (during which the
Second Reform Act
The Representation of the People Act 1867, 30 & 31 Vict. c. 102 (known as the Reform Act 1867 or the Second Reform Act) was a piece of British legislation that enfranchised part of the urban male working class in England and Wales for the first ...
was passed by agreement between the parties), Gladstone won a huge victory at the 1868 election and formed the first Liberal government. The establishment of the party as a national membership organisation came with the foundation of the
National Liberal Federation
The National Liberal Federation (1877–1936) was the union of all English and Welsh (but not Scottish) Liberal Associations. It held an annual conference which was regarded as being representative of the opinion of the party's rank and file and ...
in 1877. The philosopher
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, Member of Parliament (MP) and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to ...
was also a Liberal MP from 1865 to 1868.
Gladstone era
![Acgladstone2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/36/Acgladstone2.jpg)
For the next thirty years Gladstone and Liberalism were synonymous. William Gladstone served as prime minister four times (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, and 1892–94). His financial policies, based on the notion of
balanced budget
A balanced budget (particularly that of a government) is a budget in which revenues are equal to expenditures. Thus, neither a budget deficit nor a budget surplus exists (the accounts "balance"). More generally, it is a budget that has no budge ...
s, low taxes and ''
laissez-faire
''Laissez-faire'' ( ; from french: laissez faire , ) is an economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies) deriving from special interest groups. ...
'', were suited to a developing capitalist society, but they could not respond effectively as economic and social conditions changed. Called the "Grand Old Man" later in life, Gladstone was always a dynamic popular orator who appealed strongly to the
working class
The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations (see also " Designation of workers by collar colou ...
and to the lower middle class. Deeply religious, Gladstone brought a new moral tone to politics, with his evangelical sensibility and his opposition to aristocracy. His moralism often angered his upper-class opponents (including
Queen Victoria
Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until Death and state funeral of Queen Victoria, her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 21 ...
), and his heavy-handed control split the Liberal Party.
In foreign policy, Gladstone was in general against foreign entanglements, but he did not resist the realities of imperialism. For example, he ordered the
occupation of Egypt by British forces in the 1882
Anglo-Egyptian War. His goal was to create a European order based on co-operation rather than conflict and on mutual trust instead of rivalry and suspicion; the
rule of law
The rule of law is the political philosophy that all citizens and institutions within a country, state, or community are accountable to the same laws, including lawmakers and leaders. The rule of law is defined in the ''Encyclopedia Britannica ...
was to supplant the reign of force and self-interest. This Gladstonian concept of a harmonious
Concert of Europe was opposed to and ultimately defeated by a
Bismarckian
Otto, Prince of Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg (, ; 1 April 1815 – 30 July 1898), born Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, was a conservative German statesman and diplomat. From his origins in the upper class of J ...
system of manipulated alliances and antagonisms.
As prime minister from 1868 to 1874, Gladstone headed a Liberal Party which was a coalition of Peelites like himself, Whigs and Radicals. He was now a spokesman for "peace, economy and reform". One major achievement was the
Elementary Education Act of 1870, which provided England with an adequate system of elementary schools for the first time. He also secured the abolition of the
purchase of commissions in the British Army and of religious tests for admission to
Oxford
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...
and
Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
; the introduction of the
secret ballot
The secret ballot, also known as the Australian ballot, is a voting method in which a voter's identity in an election or a referendum is anonymous. This forestalls attempts to influence the voter by intimidation, blackmailing, and potential vote ...
in elections; the legalization of
trade unions
A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and Employee ben ...
; and the reorganization of the
judiciary
The judiciary (also known as the judicial system, judicature, judicial branch, judiciative branch, and court or judiciary system) is the system of courts that adjudicates legal disputes/disagreements and interprets, defends, and applies the law ...
in the
Judicature Act
Judicature Act is a term which was used in the United Kingdom for legislation which related to the Supreme Court of Judicature.
List United Kingdom
:The Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873 (36 & 37 Vict. c.66)
:The Supreme Court of Judicature Ac ...
.
Regarding Ireland, the major Liberal achievements were land reform, where he
ended centuries of landlord oppression, and the
disestablishment
The separation of church and state is a philosophical and jurisprudential concept for defining political distance in the relationship between religious organizations and the state. Conceptually, the term refers to the creation of a secular stat ...
of the (Anglican)
Church of Ireland
The Church of Ireland ( ga, Eaglais na hÉireann, ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Kirk o Airlann, ) is a Christian church in Ireland and an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion. It is organised on an all-Ireland basis and is the second ...
through the
Irish Church Act 1869.
In the
1874 general election Gladstone was defeated by the Conservatives under
Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British statesman and Conservative politician who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a central role in the creation o ...
during a sharp economic recession. He formally resigned as Liberal leader and was succeeded by the
Marquess of Hartington
A marquess (; french: marquis ), es, marqués, pt, marquês. is a nobleman of high hereditary rank in various European peerages and in those of some of their former colonies. The German language equivalent is Markgraf (margrave). A woman wi ...
, but he soon changed his mind and returned to active politics. He strongly disagreed with Disraeli's pro-
Ottoman foreign policy and in 1880 he conducted the first outdoor mass-election campaign in Britain, known as the
Midlothian campaign. The Liberals won a large majority in the
1880 election. Hartington ceded his place and Gladstone resumed office.
Ireland and Home Rule
Among the consequences of the
Third Reform Act
In the United Kingdom under the premiership of William Gladstone, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (48 & 49 Vict. c. 3, also known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution Act of the following year were laws which ...
(1884) was the giving of the vote to many
Irish Catholics
Irish Catholics are an ethnoreligious group native to Ireland whose members are both Catholic and Irish. They have a large diaspora, which includes over 36 million American citizens and over 14 million British citizens (a quarter of the British ...
. In the
1885 general election the
Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power in the House of Commons, and demanded
Irish Home Rule
The Irish Home Rule movement was a movement that campaigned for Devolution, self-government (or "home rule") for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1 ...
as the price of support for a continued Gladstone ministry. Gladstone personally supported Home Rule, but a strong
Liberal Unionist faction led by
Joseph Chamberlain, along with the last of the Whigs, Hartington, opposed it. The Irish Home Rule bill proposed to offer all owners of Irish land a chance to sell to the state at a price equal to 20 years' purchase of the rents and allowing tenants to purchase the land.
Irish nationalist reaction was mixed, Unionist opinion was hostile, and the election addresses during the
1886 election revealed English radicals to be against the bill also. Among the Liberal rank and file, several Gladstonian candidates disowned the bill, reflecting fears at the constituency level that the interests of the working people were being sacrificed to finance a costly rescue operation for the landed élite. Further, Home Rule had not been promised in the Liberals' election manifesto, and so the impression was given that Gladstone was buying Irish support in a rather desperate manner to hold on to power.
The result was a catastrophic split in the Liberal Party, and heavy defeat in the
1886 election at the hands of
Lord Salisbury
Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (; 3 February 183022 August 1903) was a British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times for a total of over thirteen y ...
, who was supported by the breakaway
Liberal Unionist Party
The Liberal Unionist Party was a British political party that was formed in 1886 by a faction that broke away from the Liberal Party. Led by Lord Hartington (later the Duke of Devonshire) and Joseph Chamberlain, the party established a political ...
. There was a final weak Gladstone ministry in 1892, but it also was dependent on Irish support and failed to get Irish Home Rule through the House of Lords.
Newcastle Programme
Historically, the aristocracy was divided between Conservatives and Liberals. However, when Gladstone committed to home rule for Ireland, Britain's upper classes largely abandoned the Liberal party, giving the Conservatives a large permanent majority in the House of Lords. Following the Queen, High Society in London largely ostracized home rulers and Liberal clubs were badly split.
Joseph Chamberlain took a major element of upper-class supporters out of the Party and into a third party called
Liberal Unionism on the Irish issue. It collaborated with and eventually merged into the Conservative party. The Gladstonian liberals in 1891 adopted
The Newcastle Programme The Newcastle Programme was a statement of policies passed by the representatives of the English and Welsh Liberal Associations meeting at the annual conference of the National Liberal Federation (NLF) in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1891. The centrepie ...
that included home rule for Ireland,
disestablishment
The separation of church and state is a philosophical and jurisprudential concept for defining political distance in the relationship between religious organizations and the state. Conceptually, the term refers to the creation of a secular stat ...
of the
Church of England in Wales,
tighter controls on the sale of liquor, major extension of factory regulation and various democratic political reforms. The Programme had a strong appeal to the nonconformist middle-class Liberal element, which felt liberated by the departure of the aristocracy.
Relations with trade unions
A major long-term consequence of the Third Reform Act was the rise of
Lib-Lab
The Liberal–Labour movement refers to the practice of local Liberal associations accepting and supporting candidates who were financially maintained by trade unions. These candidates stood for the British Parliament with the aim of representing ...
candidates. The Act split all
county constituencies (which were represented by multiple MPs) into
single-member constituencies, roughly corresponding to population patterns. With the foundation of the
Labour Party not to come till 1906, many trade unions allied themselves with the Liberals. In areas with working class majorities, in particular
coal-mining areas, Lib-Lab candidates were popular, and they received sponsorship and endorsement from
trade union
A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and benefits ( ...
s. In the first election after the Act was passed (1885), thirteen were elected, up from two in 1874. The Third Reform Act also facilitated the demise of the Whig old guard; in two-member constituencies, it was common to pair a Whig and a radical under the Liberal banner. After the Third Reform Act, fewer former Whigs were selected as candidates.
Reform policies
A broad range of interventionist reforms were introduced by the 1892–1895 Liberal government. Amongst other measures, standards of accommodation and of teaching in schools were improved, factory inspection was made more stringent, and ministers used their powers to increase the wages and reduce the working hours of large numbers of male workers employed by the state.
Historian Walter L. Arnstein concludes:
:Notable as the Gladstonian reforms had been, they had almost all remained within the nineteenth-century Liberal tradition of gradually removing the religious, economic, and political barriers that prevented men of varied creeds and classes from exercising their individual talents in order to improve themselves and their society. As the third quarter of the century drew to a close, the essential bastions of
Victorianism still held firm: respectability; a government of aristocrats and gentlemen now influenced not only by middle-class merchants and manufacturers but also by industrious working people; a prosperity that seemed to rest largely on the tenets of
laissez-faire economics; and a Britannia that ruled the waves and many a dominion beyond.
After Gladstone
Gladstone finally retired in 1894. Gladstone's support for Home Rule deeply divided the party, and it lost its upper and upper-middle-class base, while keeping support among Protestant nonconformists and the Celtic fringe. Historian
R. C. K. Ensor
Sir Robert Charles Kirkwood Ensor (16 October 1877 – 4 December 1958) was a British writer, poet, journalist, liberal intellectual and historian. He is best known for ''England: 1870-1914'' (1936), a volume in the ''Oxford History of England'' ...
reports that after 1886, the main Liberal Party was deserted by practically the entire whig peerage and the great majority of the upper-class and upper-middle-class members. High prestige London clubs that had a Liberal base were deeply split. Ensor notes that, "London society, following the known views of the Queen, practically ostracized home rulers."
The new Liberal leader was the ineffectual
Lord Rosebery
Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, 1st Earl of Midlothian, (7 May 1847 – 21 May 1929) was a British Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from March 1894 to June 1895. Between the death of ...
. He led the party to a heavy defeat in the
1895 general election.
Liberal factions
The Liberal Party lacked a unified ideological base in 1906. It contained numerous contradictory and hostile factions, such as imperialists and supporters of the Boers; near-socialists and laissez-faire
classical liberals
Classical liberalism is a political tradition and a branch of liberalism that advocates free market and laissez-faire economics; civil liberties under the rule of law with especial emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic ...
;
suffragette
A suffragette was a member of an activist women's organisation in the early 20th century who, under the banner "Votes for Women", fought for the right to vote in public elections in the United Kingdom. The term refers in particular to members ...
s and opponents of
women's suffrage
Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the start of the 18th century, some people sought to change voting laws to allow women to vote. Liberal political parties would go on to grant women the right to vot ...
;
antiwar elements and supporters of the
military alliance with France.
Nonconformist
Nonconformity or nonconformism may refer to:
Culture and society
* Insubordination, the act of willfully disobeying an order of one's superior
*Dissent, a sentiment or philosophy of non-agreement or opposition to a prevailing idea or entity
** ...
s –
Protestants
Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...
outside the
Anglican
Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of th ...
fold – were a powerful element, dedicated to opposing the
established church
A state religion (also called religious state or official religion) is a religion or creed officially endorsed by a sovereign state. A state with an official religion (also known as confessional state), while not secular, is not necessarily a t ...
in terms of education and taxation. However, the non-conformists were losing support amid society at large and played a lesser role in party affairs after 1900. The party, furthermore, also included Irish Catholics, and secularists from the labour movement. Many Conservatives (including
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...
) had recently protested against high tariff moves by the Conservatives by switching to the anti-tariff Liberal camp, but it was unclear how many old Conservative traits they brought along, especially on military and naval issues.
The middle-class business, professional and intellectual communities were generally strongholds, although some old aristocratic families played important roles as well. The working-class element was moving rapidly toward the newly emerging Labour Party. One uniting element was widespread agreement on the use of politics and Parliament as a device to upgrade and improve society and to reform politics. All Liberals were outraged when Conservatives used their majority in the House of Lords to block reform legislation. In the House of Lords, the Liberals had lost most of their members, who in the 1890s "became Conservative in all but name." The government could force the unwilling king to create new Liberal peers, and that threat did prove decisive in the battle for dominance of Commons over Lords in 1911.
Rise of New Liberalism
The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of New Liberalism within the Liberal Party, which advocated state intervention as a means of guaranteeing freedom and removing obstacles to it such as poverty and unemployment. The policies of the New Liberalism are now known as
social liberalism
Social liberalism (german: Sozialliberalismus, es, socioliberalismo, nl, Sociaalliberalisme), also known as new liberalism in the United Kingdom, modern liberalism, or simply liberalism in the contemporary United States, left-liberalism ...
.
![ChurchillGeorge0001](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/ChurchillGeorge0001.jpg)
The New Liberals included intellectuals like
L. T. Hobhouse
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, FBA (8 September 1864 – 21 June 1929) was an English liberal political theorist and sociologist, who has been considered one of the leading and earliest proponents of social liberalism. His works, culminating in ...
, and
John A. Hobson
John Atkinson Hobson (6 July 1858 – 1 April 1940) was an English economist and social scientist. Hobson is best known for his writing on imperialism, which influenced Vladimir Lenin, and his theory of underconsumption.
His principal and e ...
. They saw individual liberty as something achievable only under favourable social and economic circumstances.
In their view, the poverty, squalor, and ignorance in which many people lived made it impossible for freedom and individuality to flourish. New Liberals believed that these conditions could be ameliorated only through collective action coordinated by a strong, welfare-oriented, and interventionist state.
After the historic 1906 victory, the Liberal Party introduced multiple reforms on range of issues, including
health insurance
Health insurance or medical insurance (also known as medical aid in South Africa) is a type of insurance that covers the whole or a part of the risk of a person incurring medical expenses. As with other types of insurance, risk is shared among ma ...
,
unemployment insurance, and
pension
A pension (, from Latin ''pensiō'', "payment") is a fund into which a sum of money is added during an employee's employment years and from which payments are drawn to support the person's retirement from work in the form of periodic payments ...
s for elderly workers, thereby laying the groundwork for the future British
welfare state
A welfare state is a form of government in which the state (or a well-established network of social institutions) protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens, based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitabl ...
. Some proposals failed, such as licensing fewer pubs, or rolling back Conservative educational policies. The
People's Budget
The 1909/1910 People's Budget was a proposal of the Liberal government that introduced unprecedented taxes on the lands and incomes of Britain's wealthy to fund new social welfare programmes. It passed the House of Commons in 1909 but was bloc ...
of 1909, championed by
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. He was a Liberal Party politician from Wales, known for leading the United Kingdom during t ...
and fellow Liberal
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...
, introduced unprecedented taxes on the wealthy in Britain and radical social welfare programmes to the country's policies. In the Liberal camp, as noted by one study, “the Budget was on the whole enthusiastically received.” It was the first budget with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the public. It imposed increased taxes on luxuries, liquor, tobacco, high incomes, and land –
taxation that fell heavily on the rich. The new money was to be made available for new welfare programmes as well as new battleships. In 1911 Lloyd George succeeded in putting through Parliament his
National Insurance Act
The National Insurance Act 1911 created National Insurance, originally a system of health insurance for industrial workers in Great Britain based on contributions from employers, the government, and the workers themselves. It was one of the foun ...
, making provision for sickness and invalidism, and this was followed by his
Unemployment Insurance Act.
Historian Peter Weiler argues:
Contrasting Old Liberalism with New Liberalism,
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. He was a Liberal Party politician from Wales, known for leading the United Kingdom during t ...
noted in a 1908 speech the following:
Liberal zenith
![Ten Years of Toryism](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Ten_Years_of_Toryism.jpg)
The Liberals languished in opposition for a decade while the coalition of Salisbury and Chamberlain held power. The 1890s were marred by infighting between the three principal successors to Gladstone, party leader
William Harcourt, former prime minister
Lord Rosebery
Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, 1st Earl of Midlothian, (7 May 1847 – 21 May 1929) was a British Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from March 1894 to June 1895. Between the death of ...
, and Gladstone's personal secretary,
John Morley
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, (24 December 1838 – 23 September 1923) was a British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor.
Initially, a journalist in the North of England and then editor of the newly Liberal-leani ...
. This intrigue finally led Harcourt and Morley to resign their positions in 1898 as they continued to be at loggerheads with Rosebery over Irish home rule and issues relating to imperialism. Replacing Harcourt as party leader was Sir
Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Harcourt's resignation briefly muted the turmoil in the party, but the beginning of the
Second Boer War
The Second Boer War ( af, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, , 11 October 189931 May 1902), also known as the Boer War, the Anglo–Boer War, or the South African War, was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the two Boer Republics (the Sout ...
soon nearly broke the party apart, with Rosebery and a circle of supporters including important future Liberal figures
H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928), generally known as H. H. Asquith, was a British statesman and Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom f ...
,
Edward Grey and
Richard Burdon Haldane forming a clique dubbed the Liberal Imperialists that supported the government in the prosecution of the war. On the other side, more radical members of the party formed a Pro-Boer faction that denounced the conflict and called for an immediate end to hostilities. Quickly rising to prominence among the Pro-Boers was David Lloyd George, a relatively new MP and a master of rhetoric, who took advantage of having a national stage to speak out on a controversial issue to make his name in the party. Harcourt and Morley also sided with this group, though with slightly different aims. Campbell-Bannerman tried to keep these forces together at the head of a moderate Liberal rump, but in 1901 he delivered a speech on the government's "methods of barbarism" in South Africa that pulled him further to the left and nearly tore the party in two. The party was saved after Salisbury's retirement in 1902 when his successor,
Arthur Balfour, pushed a series of unpopular initiatives such as the
Education Act 1902
The Education Act 1902 ( 2 Edw. 7 c. 42), also known as the Balfour Act, was a highly controversial Act of Parliament that set the pattern of elementary education in England and Wales for four decades. It was brought to Parliament by a Conservat ...
and Joseph Chamberlain called for a new system of protectionist tariffs.
Campbell-Bannerman was able to rally the party around the traditional liberal platform of free trade and land reform and led them to
the greatest election victory in their history. This would prove the last time the Liberals won a majority in their own right.
Although he presided over a large majority,
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (né Campbell; 7 September 183622 April 1908) was a British statesman and Liberal politician. He served as the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1905 to 1908 and leader of the Liberal Party from 1899 to 190 ...
was overshadowed by his ministers, most notably
H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928), generally known as H. H. Asquith, was a British statesman and Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom f ...
at the Exchequer,
Edward Grey at the Foreign Office,
Richard Burdon Haldane at the War Office and
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. He was a Liberal Party politician from Wales, known for leading the United Kingdom during t ...
at the Board of Trade. Campbell-Bannerman retired in 1908 and died soon after. He was succeeded by Asquith, who stepped up the government's radicalism. Lloyd George succeeded Asquith at the Exchequer, and was in turn succeeded at the Board of Trade by
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 Winston Churchill in the Second World War, dur ...
, a recent defector from the Conservatives.
![Asquith Q 42036](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Asquith_Q_42036.jpg)
The 1906 general election also represented a shift to the left by the Liberal Party. According to Rosemary Rees, almost half of the Liberal MPs elected in 1906 were supportive of the 'New Liberalism' (which advocated government action to improve people's lives),) while claims were made that “five-sixths of the Liberal party are left wing.” Other historians, however, have questioned the extent to which the Liberal Party experienced a leftward shift; according to Robert C. Self however, only between 50 and 60 Liberal MPs out of the 400 in the parliamentary party after 1906 were Social Radicals, with a core of 20 to 30. Nevertheless, important junior offices were held in the cabinet by what Duncan Tanner has termed "genuine New Liberals, Centrist reformers, and
Fabian collectivists," and much legislation was pushed through by the Liberals in government. This included the regulation of working hours,
National Insurance
National Insurance (NI) is a fundamental component of the welfare state in the United Kingdom. It acts as a form of social security, since payment of NI contributions establishes entitlement to certain state benefits for workers and their famil ...
and welfare.
A political battle erupted over the
People's Budget
The 1909/1910 People's Budget was a proposal of the Liberal government that introduced unprecedented taxes on the lands and incomes of Britain's wealthy to fund new social welfare programmes. It passed the House of Commons in 1909 but was bloc ...
, which was rejected by the
House of Lords
The House of Lords, also known as the House of Peers, is the Bicameralism, upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Membership is by Life peer, appointment, Hereditary peer, heredity or Lords Spiritual, official function. Like the ...
and for which the government obtained an electoral mandate at the
January 1910 election. The election resulted in a
hung parliament, with the government left dependent on the
Irish Nationalists
Irish nationalism is a nationalist political movement which, in its broadest sense, asserts that the people of Ireland should govern Ireland as a sovereign state. Since the mid-19th century, Irish nationalism has largely taken the form of cu ...
. Although the Lords now passed the budget, the government wished to curtail their power to block legislation. Asquith was required by King George V to fight a second general election in
December 1910
The following events occurred in December 1910:
December 1, 1910 (Thursday)
* Porfirio Diaz was inaugurated for his eighth term as President of Mexico."Record of Current Events", ''The American Monthly Review of Reviews'' (January 1911), pp ...
(whose result was little changed from that in January) before he agreed, if necessary, to create hundreds of Liberals peers. Faced with that threat, the Lords voted to give up their veto power and allowed the passage of the
Parliament Act 1911
The Parliament Act 1911 (1 & 2 Geo. 5 c. 13) is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It is constitutionally important and partly governs the relationship between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the two Houses of Parlia ...
.
As the price of Irish support, Asquith was now forced to introduce a
third Home Rule bill
The Government of Ireland Act 1914 (4 & 5 Geo. 5 c. 90), also known as the Home Rule Act, and before enactment as the Third Home Rule Bill, was an Act of Parliament, Act passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom intended to provide home ...
in 1912. Since the House of Lords no longer had the power to block the bill, but only to delay it for two years, it was due to become law in 1914. The Unionist
Ulster Volunteers
The Ulster Volunteers was an Irish unionist, loyalist paramilitary organisation founded in 1912 to block domestic self-government ("Home Rule") for Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom. The Ulster Volunteers were based in the ...
, led by Sir
Edward Carson, launched a campaign of opposition that included the threat of a provisional government and armed resistance in
Ulster
Ulster (; ga, Ulaidh or ''Cúige Uladh'' ; sco, label= Ulster Scots, Ulstèr or ''Ulster'') is one of the four traditional Irish provinces. It is made up of nine counties: six of these constitute Northern Ireland (a part of the United King ...
. The
Ulster Protestants had the full support of the Conservatives, whose leader,
Bonar Law
Andrew Bonar Law ( ; 16 September 1858 – 30 October 1923) was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from October 1922 to May 1923.
Law was born in the British colony of New Brunswick (now a ...
, was of
Ulster-Scots Ulster Scots, may refer to:
* Ulster Scots people
The Ulster Scots ( Ulster-Scots: ''Ulstèr-Scotch''; ga, Albanaigh Ultach), also called Ulster Scots people (''Ulstèr-Scotch fowk'') or (in North America) Scotch-Irish (''Scotch-Airisch'') ...
descent. Government plans to deploy troops into Ulster had to be cancelled after the threat of mass resignation of their commissions by army officers in March 1914 (''see
Curragh Incident
The Curragh incident of 20 March 1914, sometimes known as the Curragh mutiny, occurred in the Curragh, County Kildare, Ireland. The Curragh Camp was then the main base for the British Army in Ireland, which at the time still formed part of the U ...
''). Ireland seemed to be on the brink of civil war when the
First World War
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
broke out in August 1914. Asquith had offered the Six Counties (later to become
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...
) an opt out from Home Rule for six years (i.e. until after two more general elections were likely to have taken place) but the Nationalists refused to agree to permanent
Partition of Ireland
The partition of Ireland ( ga, críochdheighilt na hÉireann) was the process by which the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland divided Ireland into two self-governing polities: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. I ...
. Historian
George Dangerfield
George Bubb Dangerfield (28 October 1904 in Newbury, Berkshire – 27 December 1986 in Santa Barbara, California) was a British-born American journalist, historian, and the literary editor of '' Vanity Fair'' from 1933 to 1935. He is known prima ...
has argued that the multiplicity of crises in 1910 to 1914, political and industrial, so weakened the Liberal coalition before the war broke out that it marked the ''
Strange Death of Liberal England''. However, most historians date the collapse to the crisis of the First World War.
Decline
The Liberal Party might have survived a short war, but the totality of the Great War called for measures that the Party had long rejected. The result was the permanent destruction of the ability of the Liberal Party to lead a government. Historian
Robert Blake Robert Blake may refer to:
Sportspeople
* Bob Blake (American football) (1885–1962), American football player
* Robbie Blake (born 1976), English footballer
* Bob Blake (ice hockey) (1914–2008), American ice hockey player
* Rob Blake (born 19 ...
explains the dilemma:
Blake further notes that it was the Liberals, not the Conservatives who needed the moral outrage of Belgium to justify going to war, while the Conservatives called for intervention from the start of the crisis on the grounds of ''realpolitik'' and the balance of power. However, Lloyd George and Churchill were zealous supporters of the war, and gradually forced the old peace-orientated Liberals out.
Asquith was blamed for the poor British performance in the first year. Since the Liberals ran the war without consulting the Conservatives, there were heavy partisan attacks. However, even Liberal commentators were dismayed by the lack of energy at the top. At the time, public opinion was intensely hostile, both in the media and in the street, against any young man in civilian garb and labeled as a slacker. The leading Liberal newspaper, the ''
Manchester Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' complained:
Asquith's Liberal government was brought down in , due in particular to a
crisis in inadequate artillery shell production and the protest resignation of
Admiral Fisher
John Arbuthnot Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, (25 January 1841 – 10 July 1920), commonly known as Jacky or Jackie Fisher, was a British Admiral of the Fleet. With more than sixty years in the Royal Navy, his efforts to reform the service helped ...
over the disastrous
Gallipoli Campaign against Turkey. Reluctant to face doom in an election, Asquith formed a new coalition government on 25 May, with the majority of the new cabinet coming from his own Liberal party and the
Unionist (Conservative) party, along with a token Labour representation. The new government lasted a year and a half, and was the last time Liberals controlled the government. The analysis of historian
A. J. P. Taylor
Alan John Percivale Taylor (25 March 1906 – 7 September 1990) was a British historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his televis ...
is that the British people were so deeply divided over numerous issues, But on all sides there was growing distrust of the Asquith government. There was no agreement whatsoever on wartime issues. The leaders of the two parties realized that embittered debates in Parliament would further undermine popular morale and so the House of Commons did not once discuss the war before May 1915. Taylor argues:
The 1915 coalition fell apart at the end of 1916, when the Conservatives withdrew their support from Asquith and gave it instead to Lloyd George, who became prime minister at the head of a new coalition largely made up of Conservatives. Asquith and his followers moved to the opposition benches in Parliament and the Liberal Party was deeply split once again.
Lloyd George as a Liberal heading a Conservative coalition
Lloyd George remained a Liberal all his life, but he abandoned many standard Liberal principles in his crusade to win the war at all costs. He insisted on strong government controls over business as opposed to the ''
laissez-faire
''Laissez-faire'' ( ; from french: laissez faire , ) is an economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies) deriving from special interest groups. ...
'' attitudes of traditional Liberals. in 1915-16 he had insisted on conscription of young men into the Army, a position that deeply troubled his old colleagues. That brought him and a few like-minded Liberals into the new coalition on the ground long occupied by Conservatives. There was no more planning for world peace or liberal treatment of Germany, nor discomfit with aggressive and authoritarian measures of state power. More deadly to the future of the party, says historian Trevor Wilson, was its repudiation by ideological Liberals, who decided sadly that it no longer represented their principles. Finally the presence of the vigorous new Labour Party on the left gave a new home to voters disenchanted with the Liberal performance.
The last majority Liberal Government in Britain was elected in 1906. The years preceding the First World War were marked by worker strikes and civil unrest and saw many violent confrontations between civilians and the police and armed forces. Other issues of the period included
women's suffrage
Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the start of the 18th century, some people sought to change voting laws to allow women to vote. Liberal political parties would go on to grant women the right to vot ...
and the
Irish Home Rule
The Irish Home Rule movement was a movement that campaigned for Devolution, self-government (or "home rule") for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1 ...
movement. After the carnage of 1914–1918, the democratic reforms of the
Representation of the People Act 1918
The Representation of the People Act 1918 was an Act of Parliament passed to reform the electoral system in Great Britain and Ireland. It is sometimes known as the Fourth Reform Act. The Act extended the franchise in parliamentary elections, also ...
instantly tripled the number of people entitled to vote in Britain from seven to twenty-one million. The Labour Party benefited most from this huge change in the electorate, forming its
first minority government in 1924.
![David Lloyd George](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/David_Lloyd_George.jpg)
In the
1918 general election, Lloyd George, hailed as "the Man Who Won the War", led his coalition into a
khaki election
In Westminster systems of government, a khaki election is any national election which is heavily influenced by wartime or postwar sentiment. In the British general election of 1900, the Conservative Party government of Lord Salisbury was returne ...
. Lloyd George and the Conservative leader
Bonar Law
Andrew Bonar Law ( ; 16 September 1858 – 30 October 1923) was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from October 1922 to May 1923.
Law was born in the British colony of New Brunswick (now a ...
wrote a joint letter of support to candidates to indicate they were considered the official Coalition candidates—this "
coupon", as it became known, was issued against many sitting Liberal MPs, often to devastating effect, though not against Asquith himself. The coalition won a massive victory: Labour increased their position slightly but the Asquithian Liberals were decimated. Those remaining Liberal MPs who were opposed to the Coalition Government went into opposition under the parliamentary leadership of
Sir Donald MacLean who also became
Leader of the Opposition
The Leader of the Opposition is a title traditionally held by the leader of the largest political party not in government, typical in countries utilizing the parliamentary system form of government. The leader of the opposition is typically se ...
. Asquith, who had appointed MacLean, remained as overall Leader of the Liberal Party even though he lost his seat in 1918. Asquith
returned to Parliament in 1920 and resumed leadership. Between 1919 and 1923, the anti-Lloyd George Liberals were called Asquithian Liberals,
Wee Free
The term Wee Free was an epithet commonly used to distinguish two Scottish Presbyterian Churches after the union of 1900: The Free Kirk and The United Free Kirk. Since the United Free were approximately 25 times larger, but hard to distinguish ...
Liberals or
Independent Liberals.
Lloyd George was increasingly under the influence of the rejuvenated Conservative party who numerically dominated the coalition. In 1922, the Conservative backbenchers
rebelled
Rebellion, uprising, or insurrection is a refusal of obedience or order. It refers to the open resistance against the orders of an established authority.
A rebellion originates from a sentiment of indignation and disapproval of a situation and ...
against the continuation of the coalition, citing, in particular, Lloyd George's plan for war with Turkey in the
Chanak Crisis, and his corrupt sale of honours. He resigned as prime minister and was succeeded by
Bonar Law
Andrew Bonar Law ( ; 16 September 1858 – 30 October 1923) was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from October 1922 to May 1923.
Law was born in the British colony of New Brunswick (now a ...
.
At the
1922
Events
January
* January 7 – Dáil Éireann (Irish Republic), Dáil Éireann, the parliament of the Irish Republic, ratifies the Anglo-Irish Treaty by 64–57 votes.
* January 10 – Arthur Griffith is elected President of Dáil Éirean ...
and
1923 elections the Liberals won barely a third of the vote and only a quarter of the seats in the House of Commons as many radical voters abandoned the divided Liberals and went over to Labour. In 1922, Labour became the official opposition. A reunion of the two warring factions took place in 1923 when the new Conservative prime minister
Stanley Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, (3 August 186714 December 1947) was a British Conservative Party politician who dominated the government of the United Kingdom between the world wars, serving as prime minister on three occasions, ...
committed his party to protective tariffs, causing the Liberals to reunite in support of free trade. The party gained ground in the
1923 general election but made most of its gains from Conservatives whilst losing ground to Labour—a sign of the party's direction for many years to come. The party remained the third largest in the House of Commons, but the Conservatives had lost their majority. There was much speculation and fear about the prospect of a Labour government and comparatively little about a Liberal government, even though it could have plausibly presented an experienced team of ministers compared to Labour's almost complete lack of experience as well as offering a middle ground that could obtain support from both Conservatives and Labour in crucial Commons divisions. However, instead of trying to force the opportunity to form a Liberal government, Asquith decided instead to allow Labour the chance of office in the belief that they would prove incompetent and this would set the stage for a revival of Liberal fortunes at Labour's expense, but it was a fatal error.
![UK popular vote](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/UK_popular_vote.svg)
Labour was determined to destroy the Liberals and become the sole party of the left.
Ramsay MacDonald
James Ramsay MacDonald (; 12 October 18669 November 1937) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the first who belonged to the Labour Party, leading minority Labour governments for nine months in 1924 ...
was forced into a
snap election in 1924 and although his government was defeated he achieved his objective of virtually wiping the Liberals out as many more radical voters now moved to Labour whilst moderate middle-class Liberal voters concerned about socialism moved to the Conservatives. The Liberals were reduced to a mere forty seats in Parliament, only seven of which had been won against candidates from both parties and none of these formed a coherent area of Liberal survival. The party seemed finished, and during this period some Liberals, such as Churchill, went over to the Conservatives while others went over to Labour. Several Labour ministers of later generations, such as
Michael Foot and
Tony Benn
Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn (3 April 1925 – 14 March 2014), known between 1960 and 1963 as Viscount Stansgate, was a British politician, writer and diarist who served as a Cabinet of the United Kingdom, Cabinet minister in the 1960s and 1970s. ...
, were the sons of Liberal MPs.
Asquith finally resigned as Liberal leader in 1926 (he died in 1928). Lloyd George, now party leader, began a drive to produce coherent policies on many key issues of the day. In the
1929 general election, he made a final bid to return the Liberals to the political mainstream, with an ambitious programme of state stimulation of the economy called ''We Can Conquer Unemployment!'', largely written for him by the Liberal economist
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946), was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in ...
. The Liberal Party stood in Northern Ireland for the first and only time in the
1929 general election, gaining 17% of the vote, but won no seats. The Liberals gained ground, but once again it was at the Conservatives' expense whilst also losing seats to Labour. Indeed, the urban areas of the country suffering heavily from
unemployment
Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for Work (human activity), w ...
, which might have been expected to respond the most to the radical economic policies of the Liberals, instead gave the party its worst results. By contrast, most of the party's seats were won either due to the absence of a candidate from one of the other parties or in rural areas on the
Celtic fringe
The Celtic nations are a cultural area and collection of geographical regions in Northwestern Europe where the Celtic languages and cultural traits have survived. The term ''nation'' is used in its original sense to mean a people who shar ...
, where local evidence suggests that economic ideas were at best peripheral to the electorate's concerns. The Liberals now found themselves with 59 members, holding the balance of power in a Parliament where Labour was the largest party but lacked an overall majority. Lloyd George offered a degree of support to the Labour government in the hope of winning concessions, including a degree of electoral reform to introduce the
alternative vote, but this support was to prove bitterly divisive as the Liberals increasingly divided between those seeking to gain what Liberal goals they could achieve, those who preferred a Conservative government to a Labour one and vice versa.
Splits over the National Government
![Gws samuel 01](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Gws_samuel_01.jpg)
A group of Liberal MPs led by
Sir John Simon
John Allsebrook Simon, 1st Viscount Simon, (28 February 1873 – 11 January 1954), was a British politician who held senior Cabinet posts from the beginning of the First World War to the end of the Second World War. He is one of only three peop ...
opposed the Liberal Party's support for the minority Labour government. They preferred to reach an accommodation with the Conservatives. In 1931 MacDonald's Labour government fell apart in response to the
Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
. Macdonald agreed to lead a
National Government A national government is the government of a nation.
National government or
National Government may also refer to:
* Central government in a unitary state, or a country that does not give significant power to regional divisions
* Federal governme ...
of all parties, which passed a budget to deal with the financial crisis. When few Labour MPs backed the National government, it became clear that the Conservatives had the clear majority of government supporters. They then forced MacDonald to call a
general election
A general election is a political voting election where generally all or most members of a given political body are chosen. These are usually held for a nation, state, or territory's primary legislative body, and are different from by-elections ( ...
. Lloyd George called for the party to leave the National Government but Independent Liberals (UK, 1931), only a few MPs and candidates followed. The majority, led by Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel, Sir Herbert Samuel, decided to contest the elections as part of the government. The bulk of Liberal MPs supported the government, – the National Liberal Party (UK, 1931), Liberal Nationals (officially the "National Liberals" after 1947) led by Simon, also known as "Simonites", and the "Samuelites" or "official Liberals", led by Samuel who remained as the official party. Both groups secured about 34 MPs but proceeded to diverge even further after the election, with the Liberal Nationals remaining supporters of the government throughout its life. There were to be a succession of discussions about them rejoining the Liberals, but these usually foundered on the issues of free trade and continued support for the National Government. The one significant reunification came in 1946 when the Liberal and Liberal National party organisations in London merged. The National Liberals, as they were called by then, were gradually absorbed into the Conservative Party, finally merging in 1968.
The official Liberals found themselves a tiny minority within a government committed to protectionism. Slowly they found this issue to be one they could not support. In early 1932 it was agreed to suspend the principle of Cabinet collective responsibility, collective responsibility to allow the Liberals to oppose the introduction of tariffs. Later in 1932 the Liberals resigned their ministerial posts over the introduction of the Ottawa Conference, Ottawa Agreement on Imperial Preference. However, they remained sitting on the government benches supporting it in Parliament, though in the country local Liberal activists bitterly opposed the government. Finally in late 1933 the Liberals crossed the floor of the House of Commons and went into complete opposition. By this point their number of MPs was severely depleted. In the 1935 United Kingdom general election, 1935 general election, just 17 Liberal MPs were elected, along with Lloyd George and three followers as Independent Liberals (UK, 1931), independent Liberals. Immediately after the election the two groups reunited, though Lloyd George declined to play much of a formal role in his old party. Over the next ten years there would be further defections as MPs deserted to either the Liberal Nationals or Labour. Yet there were a few recruits, such as Clement Davies, who had deserted to the National Liberals in 1931 but now returned to the party during World War II and who would lead it after the war.
Near extinction
Samuel had lost his seat in the 1935 United Kingdom general election, 1935 election and the leadership of the party fell to Archibald Sinclair, 1st Viscount Thurso, Sir Archibald Sinclair. With many traditional domestic Liberal policies now regarded as irrelevant, he focused the party on opposition to both the rise of Fascism in Europe and the appeasement foreign policy of the National Government (1937–1939), National Government, arguing that intervention was needed, in contrast to the Labour calls for pacifism. Despite the party's weaknesses, Sinclair gained a high profile as he sought to recall the Midlothian Campaign and once more revitalise the Liberals as the party of a strong foreign policy.
In 1940, they joined Churchill's wartime coalition government, with Sinclair serving as Secretary of State for Air, the last British Liberal to hold Cabinet rank office for seventy years. However, it was a sign of the party's lack of importance that they were not included in the War Cabinet; some leading party members founded Radical Action, a group which called for liberal candidates to break the war-time electoral pact. At the 1945 United Kingdom general election, 1945 general election, Sinclair and many of his colleagues lost their seats to both Conservatives and Labour and the party returned just 12 MPs to Westminster, but this was just the beginning of the decline. In 1950 United Kingdom general election, 1950, the general election saw the Liberals return just nine MPs. Another 1951 United Kingdom general election, general election was called in 1951 and the Liberals were left with just six MPs and all but one of them were aided by the fact that the Conservatives refrained from fielding candidates in those constituencies.
In 1957, this total fell to five when one of the Liberal MPs died and the subsequent by-election was lost to the Labour Party, which selected the former Liberal Deputy Leader Megan Lloyd George as its own candidate. The Liberal Party seemed close to extinction. During this low period, it was often joked that Liberal MPs could hold meetings in the back of one taxi.
Liberal revival
Through the 1950s and into the 1960s the Liberals survived only because a handful of constituencies in rural Scotland and Wales clung to their Liberal traditions, whilst in two English towns, Bolton and Huddersfield, local Liberals and Conservatives agreed to each contest only one of the town's two seats. Jo Grimond, for example, who became Leader of the Liberal Party (UK), Leader of the Liberal Party in 1956, was MP for the remote Orkney and Shetland (UK Parliament constituency), Orkney and Shetland islands. Under his leadership a Liberal revival began, marked by the 1962 Orpington by-election, Orpington by-election of March 1962 which was won by Eric Lubbock, 4th Baron Avebury, Eric Lubbock. There, the Liberals won a seat in the London suburbs for the first time since 1935.
The Liberals became the first of the major British political parties to advocate United Kingdom membership of the European Economic Area, British membership of the European Economic Community. Grimond also sought an intellectual revival of the party, seeking to position it as a non-socialist radical alternative to the Conservative government of the day. In particular he canvassed the support of the young post-war university students and recent graduates, appealing to younger voters in a way that many of his recent predecessors had not, and asserting a new strand of Liberalism for the post-war world.
The new middle-class suburban generation began to find the Liberals' policies attractive again. Under Grimond (who retired in 1967) and his successor, Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberals regained the status of a serious third force in British politics, polling up to 20% of the vote, but unable to break the duopoly of Labour and Conservative and win more than fourteen seats in the Commons. An additional problem was competition in the Liberal heartlands in Scotland and Wales from the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru who both grew as electoral forces from the 1960s onwards. Although Emlyn Hooson held on to the seat of Montgomeryshire, upon Clement Davies death in 1962, the party lost five Welsh seats between 1950 and 1966. In September 1966, the Welsh Liberal Party formed their own state party, moving the Liberal Party into a fully federal structure.
In local elections, Liverpool remained a Liberal stronghold, with the party taking the plurality of seats on the 1973 United Kingdom local elections, elections to the new Liverpool Metropolitan Borough Council in 1973. On 26 July 1973, the party won two by-elections on the same day, in the 1973 Isle of Ely by-election, Isle of Ely (with Clement Freud), and 1973 Ripon by-election, Ripon (with David Austick). In the February 1974 United Kingdom general election, February 1974 general election, the Conservative government of Edward Heath won a plurality of votes cast, but the Labour Party gained a plurality of seats. The Conservatives were unable to form a government due to the Ulster Unionist Party, Ulster Unionist MPs refusing to support the Conservatives after the Northern Ireland Sunningdale Agreement. The Liberals obtained 6.1 million votes, the most it would ever achieve, and now held the balance of power in the Commons. Conservatives offered Thorpe the Home Office if he would join a coalition government with Heath. Thorpe was personally in favour of it, but the party insisted it would only agree pending a clear government commitment to introducing proportional representation (PR) and a change of prime minister. The former was unacceptable to Heath's cabinet and the latter to Heath personally, so the talks collapsed. Instead, a minority Labour government was formed under Harold Wilson but with no formal support from Thorpe. In the October 1974 United Kingdom general election, October 1974 general election, the Liberals total vote slipped back slightly (and declined in each of the next three) and the Labour government won a wafer-thin majority.
Thorpe was subsequently forced to resign after allegations that he attempted to have his Homosexuality, homosexual lover murdered by a hitman. The party's new leader, David Steel, negotiated the Lib-Lab pact with Wilson's successor as prime minister, James Callaghan. According to this pact, the Liberals would support the government in crucial votes in exchange for some influence over policy. The agreement lasted from 1977 to 1978, but proved mostly fruitless, for two reasons: the Liberals' key demand of PR was rejected by most Labour MPs, whilst the contacts between Liberal spokespersons and Labour ministers often proved detrimental, such as between Treasury spokesperson John Pardoe and
Chancellor of the Exchequer
The chancellor of the Exchequer, often abbreviated to chancellor, is a senior minister of the Crown within the Government of the United Kingdom, and head of His Majesty's Treasury. As one of the four Great Offices of State, the Chancellor is ...
Denis Healey, who were mutually antagonistic.
Alliance, Liberal Democrats and reconstituted Liberal Party
The Conservative Party under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher won the 1979 United Kingdom general election, 1979 general election, placing the Labour Party back in opposition, which served to push the Liberals back into the margins.
In 1981, defectors from a moderate faction of the Labour Party, led by former Cabinet ministers Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams, founded the
Social Democratic Party
The name Social Democratic Party or Social Democrats has been used by many political parties in various countries around the world. Such parties are most commonly aligned to social democracy as their political ideology.
Active parties
For ...
(SDP). The new party and the Liberals quickly formed the SDP–Liberal Alliance, which for a while polled as high as 50% in the opinion polls and appeared capable of winning the next general election. Indeed, Steel was so confident of an Alliance victory that he told the 1981 Liberal conference, "Go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!".
However, the Alliance was overtaken in the polls by the Tories in the aftermath of the Falkland Islands War and at the
1983 general election the Conservatives were re-elected by a landslide, with Labour once again forming the opposition. While the SDP–Liberal Alliance came close to Labour in terms of votes (a share of more than 25%), it only had 23 MPs compared to Labour's 209. The Alliance's support was spread out across the country, and was not concentrated in enough areas to translate into seats.
In the
1987 general election, the Alliance's share of the votes fell slightly and it now had 22 MPs. In the election's aftermath Steel proposed a merger of the two parties. Most SDP members voted in favour of the merger, but SDP leader David Owen objected and continued to lead a "rump" SDP.
In March 1988, the Liberal Party and Social Democratic Party merged to create the Social and Liberal Democrats, renamed the
Liberal Democrats in October 1989. Over two-thirds of Liberal members joined the merged party, along with all sitting MPs. Steel and SDP leader Robert Maclennan, Baron Maclennan of Rogart, Robert Maclennan served briefly as interim leaders of the merged party.
A group of Liberal opponents of the merger with the Social Democrats, including Michael Meadowcroft (the former Liberal MP for Leeds West) and Paul Wiggin (who served on Peterborough City Council as a Liberal), continued with a new party organisation under the name of the '
Liberal Party'. Meadowcroft joined the Liberal Democrats in 2007, but the Liberal Party as reconstituted in 1989 Liberal Party (UK, 1989) election results, continues to hold council seats and field candidates in Westminster Parliamentary elections. None of the nineteen Liberal candidates in 2019 achieved 5% of the votes, resulting in all losing their deposits.
Ideology
![Leeds Town Hall, General Election results](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Leeds_Town_Hall%2C_General_Election_results.jpg)
During the 19th century, the Liberal Party was broadly in favour of what would today be called classical liberalism, supporting ''
laissez-faire
''Laissez-faire'' ( ; from french: laissez faire , ) is an economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies) deriving from special interest groups. ...
'' economic policies such as
free trade
Free trade is a trade policy that does not restrict imports or exports. It can also be understood as the free market idea applied to international trade. In government, free trade is predominantly advocated by political parties that hold econo ...
and Limited government, minimal government interference in the economy (this doctrine was usually termed Gladstonian liberalism after the Victorian era Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone). The Liberal Party favoured social reform, personal liberty, reducing the powers of the Crown and the
Church of England
The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...
(many of them were Nonconformist (Protestantism), nonconformists) and an extension of the electoral Suffrage, franchise. Sir
William Harcourt, a prominent Liberal politician in the Victorian era, said this about liberalism in 1872:
If there be any party which is more pledged than another to resist a policy of restrictive legislation, having for its object social coercion, that party is the Liberal party. (Cheers.) But liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right, (Hear, hear.) The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes; a Liberal Government tries, as far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do as he wishes. It has been the tradition of the Liberal party consistently to maintain the doctrine of individual liberty. It is because they have done so that England is the place where people can do more what they please than in any other country in the world. [...] It is this practice of allowing one set of people to dictate to another set of people what they shall do, what they shall think, what they shall drink, when they shall go to bed, what they shall buy, and where they shall buy it, what wages they shall get and how they shall spend them, against which the Liberal party have always protested.[''The Times'' (31 December 1872), p. 5.]
The political terms of "modern", "progressive" or "new" Liberalism began to appear in the mid to late 1880s and became increasingly common to denote the tendency in the Liberal Party to favour an increased role for the state as more important than the classical liberal stress on self-help and freedom of choice.
By the early 20th century, the Liberals stance began to shift towards "New Liberalism", what would today be called
social liberalism
Social liberalism (german: Sozialliberalismus, es, socioliberalismo, nl, Sociaalliberalisme), also known as new liberalism in the United Kingdom, modern liberalism, or simply liberalism in the contemporary United States, left-liberalism ...
, namely a belief in personal liberty with a support for government intervention to provide social welfare. This shift was best exemplified by the Liberal government of
H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928), generally known as H. H. Asquith, was a British statesman and Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom f ...
and his Chancellor
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. He was a Liberal Party politician from Wales, known for leading the United Kingdom during t ...
, whose Liberal reforms in the early 1900s created a basic
welfare state
A welfare state is a form of government in which the state (or a well-established network of social institutions) protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of its citizens, based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitabl ...
.
David Lloyd George adopted a programme at the
1929 general election entitled ''We Can Conquer Unemployment!'', although by this stage the Liberals had declined to third-party status. The Liberals as expressed in the ''Liberal Yellow Book'' now regarded opposition to state intervention as being a characteristic of Right-wing politics, right-wing extremists.
After nearly becoming extinct in the 1940s and the 1950s, the Liberal Party revived its fortunes somewhat under the leadership of Jo Grimond in the 1960s by positioning itself as a Radical center (politics), radical centrist, non-Socialism, socialist alternative to the Conservative and Labour Party governments of the time.
Religious alignment
Since 1660, Nonconformist (Protestantism), nonconformist Protestants have played a major role in English politics. Relatively few MPs were English Dissenters, Dissenters. However the Dissenters were a major voting bloc in many areas, such as the East Midlands. They were very well organised and highly motivated and largely won over the Whigs and Liberals to their cause. Down to the 1830s, Dissenters demanded removal of political and civil disabilities that applied to them (especially those in the Test and Corporation Acts). The Anglican establishment strongly resisted until 1828. Numerous reforms of voting rights, especially that of 1832, increased the political power of Dissenters. They demanded an end to compulsory church rates, in which local taxes went only to Anglican churches. They finally achieved the end of religious tests for university degrees in 1905. Gladstone brought the majority of Dissenters around to support for Home Rule for Ireland, putting the dissenting Protestants in league with the Irish Roman Catholics in an otherwise unlikely alliance. The Dissenters gave significant support to moralistic issues, such as temperance and sabbath enforcement. The nonconformist conscience, as it was called, was repeatedly called upon by Gladstone for support for his moralistic foreign policy. In election after election, Protestant ministers rallied their congregations to the Liberal ticket. In Scotland, the Presbyterians played a similar role to the Nonconformist Methodists, Baptists and other groups in England and Wales.
By the 1820s, the different Nonconformists, including Wesleyan Methodist Church (Great Britain), Wesleyan Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and Unitarians, had formed the Committee of Dissenting Deputies and agitated for repeal of the highly restrictive Test and Corporation Act 1661, Corporation Acts. These Acts excluded Nonconformists from holding civil or military office or attending Oxford or Cambridge, compelling them to set up their own Dissenting Academies privately.
[Iain MacAllister et al., "Yellow fever? The political geography of Liberal voting in Great Britain", ''Political Geography'' (2002) 21#4, pp. 421–447.] The Tories (British political party), Tories tended to be in favour of these Acts and so the Nonconformist cause was linked closely to the
Whigs, who advocated civil and religious liberty. After the Test and Corporation Acts were Sacramental Test Act 1828, repealed in 1828, all the Nonconformists elected to Parliament were Liberals. Nonconformists were angered by the
Education Act 1902
The Education Act 1902 ( 2 Edw. 7 c. 42), also known as the Balfour Act, was a highly controversial Act of Parliament that set the pattern of elementary education in England and Wales for four decades. It was brought to Parliament by a Conservat ...
, which integrated Church of England denominational schools into the state system and provided for their support from taxes. John Clifford (minister), John Clifford formed the National Passive Resistance Committee and by 1906 over 170 Nonconformists had gone to prison for refusing to pay school taxes.
They included 60 Primitive Methodists, 48 Baptists, 40 Congregationalists and 15 Wesleyan Methodists.
The political strength of Dissent faded sharply after 1920 with the secularisation of British society in the 20th century. The rise of the Labour Party reduced the Liberal Party strongholds into the nonconformist and remote "Celtic Fringe", where the party survived by an emphasis on localism and historic religious identity, thereby neutralising much of the class pressure on behalf of the Labour movement.
Meanwhile, the Anglican Church was a bastion of strength for the Conservative Party. On the Irish issue, the Anglicans strongly supported unionism. Increasingly after 1850, the Roman Catholic element in England and Scotland was composed of recent emigrants from Ireland who largely voted for the
Irish Parliamentary Party until its collapse in 1918.
Liberal leaders
Liberal Leaders in the House of Lords
* Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville (1859–1865)
* John Russell, 1st Earl Russell (1865–1868)
* Granville George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville (1868–1891)
* John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley (1891–1894)
* Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery (1894–1896)
* John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley (1896–1902)
* John Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer (1902–1905)
* George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon (1905–1908)
* Robert Offley Ashburton Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe, Robert Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe (1908–1923)
* Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1923–1924)
* William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp (1924–1931)
* Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading (1931–1936)
* Robert Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe (1936–1944)
* Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel (1944–1955)
* Philip Rea, 2nd Baron Rea (1955–1967)
* Frank Byers, Baron Byers (1967–1984)
* Nancy Seear, Baroness Seear (1984–1989)
Liberal Leaders in the House of Commons
* Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1859–1865)
*
William Gladstone
William Ewart Gladstone ( ; 29 December 1809 – 19 May 1898) was a British statesman and Liberal politician. In a career lasting over 60 years, he served for 12 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, spread over four non-conse ...
(1865–1875)
* Spencer Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire (1875–1880)
* William Gladstone (1880–1894)
* William Harcourt (politician), Sir William Harcourt (1894–1898)
*
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (né Campbell; 7 September 183622 April 1908) was a British statesman and Liberal politician. He served as the prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1905 to 1908 and leader of the Liberal Party from 1899 to 190 ...
(1899–1908)
*
H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928), generally known as H. H. Asquith, was a British statesman and Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom f ...
(1908–1916)
Leaders of the Liberal Party
*
H. H. Asquith
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, (12 September 1852 – 15 February 1928), generally known as H. H. Asquith, was a British statesman and Liberal Party politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom f ...
, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, 1925 (1916–1926)
** Donald Maclean (British politician), Donald Maclean, Acting Leader (1919–1920)
*
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor, (17 January 1863 – 26 March 1945) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922. He was a Liberal Party politician from Wales, known for leading the United Kingdom during t ...
(1926–1931)
* Herbert Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel, Sir Herbert Samuel (1931–1935)
* Archibald Sinclair, 1st Viscount Thurso, Sir Archibald Sinclair (1935–1945)
* Clement Davies (1945–1956)
* Jo Grimond (1956–1967)
* Jeremy Thorpe (1967–1976)
* Jo Grimond, Interim Leader (1976)
* David Steel (1976–1988)
Deputy Leaders of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons
* Herbert Samuel (1929–1931)
* Archibald Sinclair (1931–1935)
* Post vacant (1935–1940)
* Percy Harris (politician), Percy Harris (1940–1945)
* Post vacant (1945–1949)
* Megan Lloyd George (1949–1951)
* Post vacant (1951–1962)
* Donald Wade (1962–1964)
* Post vacant (1964–1979)
* John Pardoe (1976–1979)
* Post vacant (1979–1985)
* Alan Beith (1985–1988)
Deputy Leaders of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords
* Eric Drummond, 16th Earl of Perth (1946–1951)
* Walter Layton, 1st Baron Layton (1952–1955)
* Post vacant (1955–1965)
* Gladwyn Jebb, 1st Baron Gladwyn (1965–1988)
Liberal Party front bench team members
* Liberal Party Frontbench Team, 1945–1956, 1945–1956
* Liberal Party Frontbench Team, 1956–1967, 1956–1967
* Liberal Party Frontbench Team, 1967–1976, 1967–1976
Electoral performance
; Notes
See also
![Leeds and County Liberal Club blue plaque](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Leeds_and_County_Liberal_Club_blue_plaque.jpg)
* :Liberal Party (UK) MPs
* List of Liberal Party (UK) MPs
* Liberalism in the United Kingdom
*
Liberal Democrats
* List of United Kingdom Liberal Party Leaders
* List of United Kingdom Whig and allied party leaders (1801–59)
* Liberal Chief Whip, List of Liberal Chief Whips
* President of the Liberal Party (UK), President of the Liberal Party
* List of UK Liberal Party general election manifestos
References
Further reading
* Adelman, Paul. ''The decline of the Liberal Party 1910–1931'' (2nd ed. Routledge, 2014).
* Bentley, Michael ''The Climax of Liberal Politics: British Liberalism in Theory and Practice, 1868–1918'' (1987).
*
* Brack, Duncan; Ingham, Robert; Little, Tony, eds. ''British Liberal Leaders'' (2015).
* John Campbell (biographer), Campbell, John ''Lloyd George, The Goat in the Wilderness, 1922–31'' (1977).
* Clarke, P. F. "The Electoral Position of the Liberal and Labour Parties, 1910–1914." ''English Historical Review'' 90.357 (1975): 828–836
in JSTOR
* Cook, Chris. ''A Short History of the Liberal Party, 1900–2001'' (6th edition). Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. .
* Cregier, Don M. "The Murder of the British Liberal Party," ''The History Teacher'' 3#4 (1970), pp. 27–3
online edition* Cross, Colin. ''The Liberals in Power, 1905–1914'' (1963).
* David, Edward. “The Liberal Party Divided 1916-1918.” ''Historical Journal'' 13#3 (1970, pp. 509–32, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2637886 online]
* Dangerfield, George. ''The Strange Death of Liberal England'' (1935), a famous classi
online free
* Dutton, David. ''A History of the Liberal Party Since 1900'' (2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
* Fairlie, Henry. "Oratory in Political Life," ''History Today'' (Jan 1960) 10#1 pp 3–13. A survey of political oratory in Britain from 1730 to 1960.
* Fahey, David M. “Temperance and the Liberal Party - Lord Peel’s Report, 1899.” ''Journal of British Studies'' 20#3 (1971), pp. 132–59
online
* Gilbert, Bentley Brinkerhoff. ''David Lloyd George: A Political Life: The Architect of Change 1863–1912'' (1987)' ''David Lloyd George: A Political Life: Organizer of Victory, 1912–1916'' (1992).
* Goodlad, Graham D. “The Liberal Party and Gladstone’s Land Purchase Bill of 1886.” ''Historical Journal'' 32#3 (1989), pp. 627–41
online
* Hammond, J. L. and M. R. D. Foot.
Gladstone and Liberalism' (1952)
* Häusermann, Silja, Georg Picot, and Dominik Geering. "Review article: Rethinking party politics and the welfare state–recent advances in the literature". ''British Journal of Political Science'' 43#1 (2013): 221–24
online
* Hazlehurst, Cameron. "Asquith as Prime Minister, 1908–1916," ''The English Historical Review'' 85#336 (1970), pp. 502–53
in JSTOR
* Heyck, Thomas William. “Home Rule, Radicalism, and the Liberal Party, 1886-1895.” ''Journal of British Studies'' 13#2 (1974), pp. 66–91
online
* Hughes, K. M. “A Political Party and Education: Reflections on the Liberal Party’s Educational Policy, 1867-1902.” ''British Journal of Educational Studies'' 8#2, (1960), pp. 112–26
online
* Jenkins, Roy. "From Gladstone to Asquith: The Late Victorian Pattern of Liberal Leadership," ''History Today'' (July 1964) 14#7 pp 445–452.
* Jenkins, Roy. ''Asquith: portrait of a man and an era'' (1964).
* Jenkins, T. A. “Gladstone, the Whigs and the Leadership of the Liberal Party, 1879-1880.” ''Historical Journal'' 27#2 (1984), pp. 337–60
online
* Thomas Jones (civil servant), Jones, Thomas. ''Lloyd George'' (1951), short biography
* Kellas, James G. “The Liberal Party in Scotland 1876-1895.” ''Scottish Historical Review'' 44#137, (1965), pp. 1–16
online* Laybourn, Keith. "The rise of Labour and the decline of Liberalism: the state of the debate." ''History'' 80.259 (1995): 207–226, historiography.
* Lubenow, W. C. “Irish Home Rule and the Social Basis of the Great Separation in the Liberal Party in 1886.” ''Historical Journal'' 28#1 (1985), pp. 125–42
online
* Lynch, Patricia. ''The Liberal Party in Rural England, 1885–1910: Radicalism and Community'' (2003).
* MacAllister, Iain, et al., "Yellow fever? The political geography of Liberal voting in Great Britain," ''Political Geography'' (2002) 21#4 pp. 421–447.
* McEwen, John M. “The Liberal Party and the Irish Question during the First World War.” ''Journal of British Studies,'' 12#1, (1972), pp. 109–31
online
* McGill, Barry. “Francis Schnadhorst and Liberal Party Organization.” ''Journal of Modern History'' 34#1 (1962), pp. 19–39
online
* Machin, G. I. T. "Gladstone and Nonconformity in the 1860s: The Formation of an Alliance." ''Historical Journal'' 17, no. 2 (1974): 347–64
online
* McCready, H. W. “Home Rule and the Liberal Party, 1899-1906.” ''Irish Historical Studies'' 13#52, (1963), pp. 316–48
online
*
* Mowat, Charles Loch. ''Britain between the Wars, 1918–1940'' (1955) 694 pp. scholarly surve
online* Packer, Ian. ''Liberal government and politics, 1905–15'' (Springer, 2006).
* Parry, Jonathan. ''The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain'' (Yale, 1993) .
* Poe, William A. “Conservative Nonconformists: Religious Leaders and the Liberal Party in Yorkshire/Lancashire.” ''Nineteenth Century Studies'', vol. 2, (1988), pp. 63–72
online
* Pugh, Martin D. "Asquith, Bonar Law and the First Coalition." ''Historical Journal'' 17.4 (1974): 813–836.
* Pugh, Martin. “The Liberal Party and the Popular Front.” ''English Historical Review'' 121#494, (2006), pp. 1327–50
online
* Rossi, John P. “The Transformation of the British Liberal Party: A Study of the Tactics of the Liberal Opposition, 1874-1880.” ''Transactions of the American Philosophical Society'' 68#8, (1978), pp. 1–133
online
* Rossi, John P. “English Catholics, the Liberal Party, and the General Election of 1880.” ''Catholic Historical Review,'' 63#3, (1977), pp. 411–27
online[.
* Russell, A.K. ''Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906'' (David & Charles, 1973).
* Searle, G. R. “The Edwardian Liberal Party and Business.” ''English Historical Review'' 98#386, (1983), pp. 28–60, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/570163 online
* Searle, G. R. ''A New England? Peace and war, 1886–1918'' (Oxford University Press, 2004), wide-ranging scholarly survey
* Thorpe, Andrew. "Labour Leaders and the Liberals, 1906–1924", ''Cercles'' 21 (2011), pp. 39–54
online">online[.
* Russell, A.K. ''Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906'' (David & Charles, 1973).
* Searle, G. R. “The Edwardian Liberal Party and Business.” ''English Historical Review'' 98#386, (1983), pp. 28–60, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/570163 online
* Searle, G. R. ''A New England? Peace and war, 1886–1918'' (Oxford University Press, 2004), wide-ranging scholarly survey
* Thorpe, Andrew. "Labour Leaders and the Liberals, 1906–1924", ''Cercles'' 21 (2011), pp. 39–54. [http://www.cercles.com/n21/thorpe.pdf online
* Tregidga, Garry. “Turning of the Tide? A Case Study of the Liberal Party in Provincial Britain in the Late 1930s.” ''History'' 92#3 (2007), pp. 347–66
online">online">online[.
* Russell, A.K. ''Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906'' (David & Charles, 1973).
* Searle, G. R. “The Edwardian Liberal Party and Business.” ''English Historical Review'' 98#386, (1983), pp. 28–60, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/570163 online
* Searle, G. R. ''A New England? Peace and war, 1886–1918'' (Oxford University Press, 2004), wide-ranging scholarly survey
* Thorpe, Andrew. "Labour Leaders and the Liberals, 1906–1924", ''Cercles'' 21 (2011), pp. 39–54. [http://www.cercles.com/n21/thorpe.pdf online
* Tregidga, Garry. “Turning of the Tide? A Case Study of the Liberal Party in Provincial Britain in the Late 1930s.” ''History'' 92#3 (2007), pp. 347–66, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/24428247 online
* Weiler, Peter. ''The New Liberalism: Liberal Social Theory in Great Britain, 1889–1914'' (Routledge, 2016).
* Wilson, Trevor. ''The Downfall of the Liberal Party: 1914–1935'' (1966).
Historiography
* St. John, Ian. ''The Historiography of Gladstone and Disraeli'' (Anthem Press, 2016) 402 pp. [https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ybo1DgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&ots=IcL5VXce3k&sig=WzQebEyOba7DeJ2n6qdfICzxOwk#v=onepage&q&f=false excerpt">online">online">online">online[.
* Russell, A.K. ''Liberal Landslide: The General Election of 1906'' (David & Charles, 1973).
* Searle, G. R. “The Edwardian Liberal Party and Business.” ''English Historical Review'' 98#386, (1983), pp. 28–60
* Tregidga, Garry. “Turning of the Tide? A Case Study of the Liberal Party in Provincial Britain in the Late 1930s.” ''History'' 92#3 (2007), pp. 347–66, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/24428247 online
* Weiler, Peter. ''The New Liberalism: Liberal Social Theory in Great Britain, 1889–1914'' (Routledge, 2016).
* Wilson, Trevor. ''The Downfall of the Liberal Party: 1914–1935'' (1966).
Historiography
* St. John, Ian. ''The Historiography of Gladstone and Disraeli'' (Anthem Press, 2016) 402 pp. [https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ybo1DgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&ots=IcL5VXce3k&sig=WzQebEyOba7DeJ2n6qdfICzxOwk#v=onepage&q&f=false excerpt
* Thompson, J. A. “The Historians and the Decline of the Liberal Party.” ''Albion' 22#1, (1990), pp. 65–83
online
* Searle, G. R. ''A New England? Peace and war, 1886–1918'' (Oxford University Press, 2004), wide-ranging scholarly survey
* Thorpe, Andrew. "Labour Leaders and the Liberals, 1906–1924", ''Cercles'' 21 (2011), pp. 39–54. [http://www.cercles.com/n21/thorpe.pdf online
* Tregidga, Garry. “Turning of the Tide? A Case Study of the Liberal Party in Provincial Britain in the Late 1930s.” ''History'' 92#3 (2007), pp. 347–66, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/24428247 online
* Weiler, Peter. ''The New Liberalism: Liberal Social Theory in Great Britain, 1889–1914'' (Routledge, 2016).
* Wilson, Trevor. ''The Downfall of the Liberal Party: 1914–1935'' (1966).
Historiography
* St. John, Ian. ''The Historiography of Gladstone and Disraeli'' (Anthem Press, 2016) 402 pp. [https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ybo1DgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&ots=IcL5VXce3k&sig=WzQebEyOba7DeJ2n6qdfICzxOwk#v=onepage&q&f=false excerpt
* Thompson, J. A. “The Historians and the Decline of the Liberal Party.” ''Albion' 22#1, (1990), pp. 65–83, [https://doi.org/10.2307/4050257 online
Primary sources
* [https://archive.org/details/liberalmagazine01britgoog/page/n8 ''Liberal Magazine 1901''">online">online
* Searle, G. R. ''A New England? Peace and war, 1886–1918'' (Oxford University Press, 2004), wide-ranging scholarly survey
* Thorpe, Andrew. "Labour Leaders and the Liberals, 1906–1924", ''Cercles'' 21 (2011), pp. 39–54
online
* Tregidga, Garry. “Turning of the Tide? A Case Study of the Liberal Party in Provincial Britain in the Late 1930s.” ''History'' 92#3 (2007), pp. 347–66
online
* Weiler, Peter. ''The New Liberalism: Liberal Social Theory in Great Britain, 1889–1914'' (Routledge, 2016).
* Wilson, Trevor. ''The Downfall of the Liberal Party: 1914–1935'' (1966).
Historiography
* St. John, Ian. ''The Historiography of Gladstone and Disraeli'' (Anthem Press, 2016) 402 pp
excerpt
* Thompson, J. A. “The Historians and the Decline of the Liberal Party.” ''Albion' 22#1, (1990), pp. 65–83
online
Primary sources
''Liberal Magazine 1901''in-depth coverage of 1900.
''Liberal Magazine 1900''in-depth coverage of 1899.
* Biographies and voting returns since 1880s.
* Craig, Frederick Walter Scott, ed. (1975). ''British General Election Manifestos, 1900–74''. Springer.
External links
Liberal Democrat History Group
Catalogueof the Liberal Party papers (mostly dating from after 1945) a
The Liberal Magazine Volume 2 1895
Liberal Magazine A Periodical for the Use of Liberal Speakers, Writers and Canvassers Volume 1 1893
Facts for Liberal Politicians By John Noble 1879
Proceedings in Connection with the Annual Meeting of the National Liberal Federation with the Annual Report By National Liberal Federation, 1881
Annual Report Presented at a Meeting of the Council By National Liberal Federation, 1887
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Council By National Liberal Federation, 1895
Five Years of Liberal Policy and Conservative Opposition By George Charles Brodrick, 1874
The Liberal year book for 1908
The Government's record, 1906-1913 : seven years of Liberal legislation and administration By Liberal Publication Dept. (Great Britain)
The Yale Review Volume 4 1895
The Age of Lloyd George The Liberal Party and British Politics, 1890-1929 By Kenneth O. Morgan, 2021
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Defunct political parties in the United Kingdom
Defunct liberal political parties, United Kingdom 1860s
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1859 establishments in the United Kingdom
1988 disestablishments in the United Kingdom
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