This article is about the historic Liberal Party. For the new Liberal Party formed by those opposing the 1988 merger with
the SDP, see Liberal Party (UK, 1989).
The Liberal Party was one of the two major British political parties from the early 19th century until the 1920s, and a
third party of varying strength and importance up to 1988, when it merged with the Social Democratic Party (the SDP) to form a new party which would become known as the
Liberal Democrats.
Origins
The Liberal Party grew out of the Whigs, which had its origins as an aristocratic
faction in the reign of Charles II. The Whigs were in favour of reducing the power
of the Crown and increasing the power of the Parliament.
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 for its own sake. The great figures of reformist
Whiggery were Charles James Fox (died 1806) and his
disciple and successor Earl Grey. After decades in opposition the Whigs came
to power under Grey in 1830 and carried the First Reform Act in 1832.
The Reform Act was the climax of Whiggery but also brought about the Whigs' demise. The admission of the middle classes 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, a fairly traditional Whig, and then by Lord John Russell, the son of a Duke but a crusading radical, and Lord Palmerston, a renegade Irish Tory and
essentially a conservative, although capable of radical gestures.
As early as 1839 Russell had adopted the name Liberal Party, but in reality the party was a loose coalition of Whigs in the
House of Lords and Radicals in the Commons. The
leading Radicals were John Bright and Richard
Cobden, who represented the manufacturing towns that had gained representation under the Reform Act. They favoured social
reform, personal liberty, reducing the powers of the Crown and the Church of England
(many of them were Nonconformists), avoidance of war and foreign alliances (which were bad
for business), and above all free trade. For a century free trade was 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 was short, because the
Conservatives split over the repeal of the Corn Laws, a free trade issue, and a faction known
as the Peelites (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 to hold office for most of the 1850s and 1860s. The leading Peelite was William Ewart Gladstone, who was a zealous reforming Chancellor of the Exchequer 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.
The Whig-Radical amalgam could not become a true modern political party, however, 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 interlude (during which the Second Reform Act 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 in 1877.
The Gladstonian era
For the next thirty years Gladstone and Liberalism were synonymous. The "Grand Old Man", as he became known, was Prime
Minister four times and the powerful flow of his rhetoric dominated British politics even when he was out of office. His rivalry
with the Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli became legendary. Gladstone was a
High Church Anglican and enjoyed the company of aristocrats, but he grew ever more radical
as he grew older: he was, as one wit put it, "a Tory in all but essentials". Queen Victoria, who had grown up as a Whig supporter under the
tutelage of Melbourne, became a Conservative in reaction to Gladstone's moralising Liberalism.
Gladstone's great achievements in office were his reforms to education, land reform (particularly in Ireland, where he ended centuries of landlord oppression), the disestablishment of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland, the
introduction of democratic local government, the abolition of patronage in the civil service and the army, and the
Third Reform Act which greatly extended the vote to almost all
adult males. In foreign policy, Gladstone was in general against foreign entanglements but did not resist the reality of
imperialism. For example he approved of the occupation of Egypt by British forces in 1882.
In 1874 Gladstone was defeated by the Conservatives under
Disraeli during a sharp recession. He formally resigned as Liberal leader and was succeeded by
the Marquess of Hartington, 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.
Among the consequences of the Third Reform Act was the giving of the vote to the Catholic peasants in Ireland, and the
consequent creation of an Irish Parliamentry Party led by Charles Stewart Parnell. In 1885
this party won the balance of power in the House of Commons, and demanded Irish Home
Rule 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 result was a catastrophic split in the Liberal Party, and heavy defeat in the 1886 election at the hands of Lord Salisbury. 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. Gladstone finally retired in
1894, and his ineffectual successor, Lord Rosebery, led the
party to another heavy defeat in 1895.
The Liberal Zenith
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 principle successors to Gladstone, party leader William Harcourt, former prime minster Lord Rosebery, and Gladstone's personal secretary,
John Morley. 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 soon nearly broke the party apart, with Rosebery and a circle of
supporters including important future Liberal leaders H.H. Asquith, 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 hostilites. Quickly
rising to prominence among the Pro-Boers was David Lloyd George, a relatively new MP and master of rhetoric and demagoguery that
took advantage of having a national stage to speak out on a controversial issue to begin his rise to stardom 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 a new
education bill 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 lead 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 was
overshadowed by his ministers, most notably Herbert Henry Asquith at the Exchequer,
Edward Grey at the Foreign Office, Richard Burdon Haldane at the War Office and David Lloyd George at the Board of Trade. An ill Campbell-Bannerman retired in 1908 and died later
that year. 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, a
recent defector from the Conservatives.
The Liberals pushed through much legislation, including the regulation of working hours, national insurance and welfare. It
was at this time that a political battle over the so-called People's Budget resulted in
the passage of an act ending the power of the House of Lords to block legislation. The
cost was high, however, as the government needed to call two general elections in 1910 to validate its position and ended up
frittering away most of its large majority, being left once again dependent on the Irish Nationalists.
As a result Asquith was forced to introduce a new third Home Rule bill in 1912.
Since the House of Lords no longer had the power to block the bill, the Unionist's Ulster
Volunteers led by Sir Edward Carson, launched a campaign of
opposition that included the threat of armed resistance in Ulster and the threat of
mutiny by army officers in Ireland in 1914 (see Curragh
Incident). In their resistance to Home Rule the Ulster Protestants had the full support of the Conservatives, whose
leader, Andrew Bonar Law, was of Ulster-Scots
descent. The country seemed to be on the brink of civil war when World War I broke out in
August 1914.
The war struck at the heart of everything British Liberals believed in. Several Cabinet ministers resigned, and Asquith, the
master of domestic politics, proved a poor war leader. Lloyd George and Churchill, however, were zealous supporters of the war,
and gradually forced the old pacifist Liberals out. The poor British performance in the early months of the war forced Asquith to
invite the Conservatives into a coalition (on 17 May, 1915). This
marked the end of the last all-Liberal government. This coalition fell apart at the end of 1916, when the Conservatives withdrew
their support from Asquith and gave it to Lloyd George instead, who became Prime Minister at the head of a coalition government
largely made up of Conservatives. Asquith and his followers moved to the opposition benches in Parliament and the Liberal Party
was split once again.
Liberal decline
In the 1918 general election Lloyd George, "the Man who Won the War", led his coalition into another khaki election, and won a sweeping victory over the Asquithian Liberals and the newly-emerging
Labour Party. Lloyd George and the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law 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. Asquith and most of his colleagues lost their seats. Lloyd George still
claimed to be leading a Liberal government, but he was increasingly under the influence of the rejuvenated Conservative party. In
1922 the Conservative backbenchers rebelled against the continuation of the coalition, citing in particular the Chanak Crisis over Turkey and Lloyd George's corrupt sale of honours
amongst other grievances, and Lloyd George was forced to resign. The Conservatives came back to power under Bonar Law and then
Stanley Baldwin.
At the 1922 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 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 ominously 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 get support from both Conservatives and Labour
in crucial Commons divisions. But 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 expenses. It was a fatal error.
A graph showing the percentage of the popular vote received by major parties in general elections, 1832-2005. Following initial
success as the successor to the Whig party, the party's share of the popular vote plumeted after the First World War as it lost
votes to the new Labour party and factioned into groups such as the National and Coalition Liberals.
Labour was determined to destroy the Liberals and become the sole party of the left. Ramsay
MacDonald 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, were
the sons of Liberal MPs.)
Asquith died in 1928 and the enigmatic figure of Lloyd George returned to the leadership and 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. 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, 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", 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.
The splits over the National Government
In 1931 MacDonald's government fell apart under the Great
Depression, and the Liberals agreed to join his National Government, dominated by the Conservatives. Lloyd George himself
was ill and did not actually join. Soon, however, the Liberals faced another divisive crisis when a National Government was
proposed to fight the 1931 general election with a mandate for
tariffs. From the outside, Lloyd George called for the party to abandon the government completely in defence of free trade, but
only a few MPs and candidates followed. Another group under Sir John Simon then emerged, who
were prepared to continue their support for the government and take the Liberal places in the Cabinet if there were resignations.
The third group under Sir Herbert Samuel pressed for the parties in
government to fight the election on separate platforms. In doing so the bulk of Liberals remained supporting the government, but
two distinct Liberal groups had emerged within this bulk - the National
Liberals 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 35 MPs but proceeded to diverge even further after the election, with the
National Liberals 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. In 1946 the Liberal and National Liberal party organisations in London did merge.
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 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
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 general
election, just 17 Liberal MPs were elected, along with Lloyd George and three followers as "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 National Liberals 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
the Second World War and who would lead it after the war in.
Near extinction
Samuel had lost his seat in the 1935 election and the
leadership of the party fell to Sir Archibald Sinclair. With
many traditional domestic Liberal policies now regarded as irrelevant, he focused the part on opposition to both the rise of
Fascism in Europe and the appeasement foreign policy of the British 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. However, it
was a sign of the party's lack of importance that they were not included in the War Cabinet.
At the 1945 general election, however, Sinclair and many of his
colleagues lost their seats to both Conservatives and Labour. By 1951 there were only six MPs, all but one of them were aided by
the Conservatives not putting up a candidate. In 1957 this total fell to five when one of their MPs died and the subsequent
by-election was lost to the Labour Party, who fielded the former Liberal Deputy Leader Lady
Megan Lloyd George as their candidate. The Liberal Party seemed close to extinction. During this low period, it was often
joked that Liberal MP's 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 Liberal leader in 1956, was MP for the remote Orkney and Shetland islands. Under his leadership a Liberal revival
began, marked by the famous Orpington by-election of March 1962 which was
won by Eric Lubbock, in which 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 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 appealed to the young post-war university students and recent graduates, appealing to younger voters in a way that
many of his recent predecessors did not, asserting a new strand of Liberalism for the post war world.
The postwar middle-class suburban generation began to find the Liberals' policies attractive again, and under Grimond 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.
In local elections Liverpool remained a Liberal stronghold, with the party taking the
plurality of seats on the elections to the new Liverpool
Metropolitan Borough Council in 1973. In the 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 due to the Ulster
Unionist MPs refusing to support the Conservatives after the Northern Ireland Sunningdale Agreement. The Liberals 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, but the party insisted on a clear government commitment to introducing proportional representation 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 general election the Liberals slipped back slightly and the
Labour government won a wafer-thin majority.
Thorpe was subsequently forced to resign in a sordid sex scandal. The party's new leader, David
Steel negotiated the Lib-Lab pact with the new Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, whereby the Liberals would support the government in crucial votes in exchange for some
influence over policy. This pact lasted from 1977-1978 but proved relatively fruitless as the Liberals' key demand of
proportional representation was anathema to most Labour MPs whilst the
contacts between Liberal spokespersons and Labour ministers often proved detrimental, such as between finance spokesperson
John Pardoe and Chancellor of the
Exchequer Denis Healey who did not get on at all.
When the Labour government fell in 1979, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher
won a victory which served to push the Liberals back into the
margins. In 1981 defectors from the moderate wing of the Labour Party, led by former Cabinet ministers Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams, founded the Social Democratic Party. The two parties fought the 1983 and 1987
general elections jointly as the SDP-Liberal Alliance. During 1982 and 1983, at the
depths of Labour's fortunes under Michael Foot, there was much talk of the Alliance
becoming the dominant party of the left and even of Jenkins becoming Prime Minister. In fact, while the Alliance won over 20% of
the vote each time, it never made the hoped-for breakthrough in parliamentary seats due to the non-proportional nature of the
First Past The Post electoral system used in Britain.
Merger with SDP
(see article at Liberal Democrats (UK) for details of the successor
party)
In 1988 the Liberals and Social Democrats merged to create what came to be called the Liberal Democrats. Over two-thirds of the members, and all the serving MPs, of the Liberal Party
joined this party, led first jointly by Steel and the SDP leader Robert Maclennan, and later by Paddy
Ashdown (1988-99), Charles Kennedy (1999-2006) and Sir Menzies Campbell (2006-07).
A group of Liberal opponents of the merger, including Michael Meadowcroft
formerly Liberal MP for Leeds West and Dr Paul Wiggin who served on Peterborough City Council as a Liberal, continued under the
old name of "the Liberal Party"; this was legally a new organisation (the
headquarters, records, assets and debts of the old party were inherited by the Liberal Democrats), but its constitution asserts
it to be the same Liberal party.
Though the merger process was traumatic and the new party suffered a few years of extremely poor poll results, it gradually
found much greater electoral success than the Liberal Party had done in the post-war era. In the 2005 General Election, the Liberal Democrats elected 62 MPs to the House of
Commons, a far cry from the days when the Liberals had just 5 MPs and Liberalism as a political force had seemed near to
extinction.
As was the case with the Liberal Party for most of the 20th century, the Liberal Democrats face constant questioning about
which of the other two parties they are closest to, in particular about which they would support in the event of a
hung parliament. The party is keen to maintain its independent identity however, and
argues that the need for a modern Liberal force in British politics has never been greater.
Liberal leaders 1859-1988
Liberal Leaders in the House of Lords, 1859-1988
- 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 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
- Beatrice Seear, Baroness Seear 1984-1988
Liberal Leaders in the House of Commons, 1859-1916
Leaders of the Liberal Party, 1916-1988
See also
References
- Chris Cook, A Short History of the Liberal Party, 1900-2001 (6th edition). Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. ISBN
0-333-91838-X.
- Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. Yale, 1993.ISBN 0-300-06718-6.
External links
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