Liberal Party

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Before 1868 the Liberal Party had been an uneasy coalition of Whigs and radicals. The broadening of the suffrage in the boroughs in the Reform Act of 1867 strengthened the radicals and the Gladstone government of 1868-74 ranks as one of the great reforming administrations of modern times. Whig disquiet grew, especially during the second Gladstone government of 1880-5. There was a slow drift of Whigs to the Conservatives but Gladstone's Home Rule Bill of 1886 was the catalyst for the realignment of parties which had long been prophesied. Ninety-three Liberal MPs voted against its second reading in June 1886. Despite the loss of Chamberlain and his closest colleagues, the effect of the schism was to radicalize the Liberal Party: it also fractionalized it.

More important than the Whig secession was the change in the character of radicalism. Until 1868 radicalism was an individualist creed. The mid-century Liberal slogan—‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’—summed up radical aspirations. The mid-century radicals were conspicuous champions of laissez-faire. The radical programme was negative in character. It called for the disestablishment of the Church of England and for the redress of other nonconformist grievances. It sought to limit the power of government and demanded that government should not intervene in economic and social affairs.

After 1868 there was a gradual but major change in the nature of radicalism. Radicals began to address the problems of industrial society. Thus, Joseph Chamberlain as mayor of Birmingham embarked on a major programme of social reform in that city.

In the 1890s a new cleavage developed. After Gladstone gave up the leadership, some of the most prominent Liberals, such as Rosebery, his successor as prime minister, demanded a reorientation of party attitudes. The Liberal Party must show that it could be trusted with the administration of a great empire. Liberal Imperialism ranged itself against Little Englandism. Asquith, Grey, and Haldane, all to hold high office in Liberal governments after 1906, were among the leaders of the new organization, the Liberal League. The onset of the Boer War dramatized and made more acute the division of the party.

In the end, the mistakes of the Unionists restored the unity of the Liberal Party. The Education Act of 1902 upset the religious balance achieved by the Liberal Education Act of 1870. Nonconformists were outraged and many of those who had deserted the party in 1886 came back. More important, in 1903, Chamberlain, now one of the leading figures in the Unionist government, repudiated free trade, an article of faith to both parties for over 50 years. The Education Act and tariff reform healed the rift in the Liberal Party which, in 1906, won a landslide victory.

Liberal hegemony lasted until 1915. During those nine years the party largely completed the unfinished agenda of Victorian radicalism, restricting the powers of the Lords, introducing Irish Home Rule, and disestablishing the Church of England in Wales. At the same time it looked forward, with the introduction of old-age pensions in 1908, the Trade Boards Act of 1909, and the National Insurance Act of 1911, to the collectivist agenda of the 20th cent.

There were two general elections in 1910, both bound up with the problem of the House of Lords. The Liberals, now led by Asquith, lost their overall majority and their continuance in office depended on the recently founded Labour Party and on the Irish nationalists. The next few years were a period of bitter political conflict over Irish Home Rule and a dangerous division between the two main parties was averted only by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. A coalition government under Asquith was formed in 1915; dissatisfaction with Asquith's leadership led to the formation of a new coalition with Asquith's rival, Lloyd George, as premier. Asquith, still party leader, went into opposition, with the Conservatives and a section of the Liberals following Lloyd George. At the general election at the end of the war in 1918, Lloyd George and his Liberals allied with the Conservatives against Asquith's independent Liberals and Labour. The result was a triumph for Lloyd George and a disaster for the Liberals. Even the two wings added together could muster only 170 MPs.

The early post-war years provided the most encouraging backcloth that Labour could have had. Heavy unemployment contributed to the unpopularity of the governing coalition which Labour, with more MPs than the Asquithians, could exploit. In 1922 the Conservatives broke with Lloyd George: a purely Conservative government was formed and called an early general election. The Liberals fought as rival sections. Their combined total fell to 115 while Labour more than doubled its representation to 142. This was a decisive victory, for Labour now became the official opposition in Parliament and henceforth the alternative to the Conservatives. Two years and two elections later, the reshaping of the party system was confirmed. In 1924 the Liberals, though reunited, were reduced to 40 MPs.

The Liberal Party split again in 1930 over the question of supporting the minority Labour government, a split made permanent in 1932 when more than half the party's MPs decided to support the National Government, under the title of National Liberal. The independent Liberals soldiered on but elected only nineteen MPs at the general election of 1935: after the Second World War the decline continued until the party was reduced to five MPs in 1957.

There then began the first of the post-war Liberal revivals. Those of 1958 and 1962 soon petered out; but another revival in the early 1970s was followed by a remarkable Liberal performance in the two elections of 1974, when in October the party polled one-fifth of the votes and elected 13 members. The schism in the Labour Party in 1981 led to the formation of the Liberal-SDP alliance: in 1983 it won 25 per cent of the votes (2 per cent behind Labour) and elected 23 MPs, the best showing for the Liberals since 1929. Strains within the alliance led to a merger of the two parties in 1987 under the name Liberal Democrats. It, and its predecessor the Liberal Party, has been the most consistently pro-European of all three parties. At the general election of 1997, the Liberal Democrats gained 46 seats. As party leader, Ashdown was followed by Charles Kennedy. Its future seems still to depend upon its ability to effect proportional representation, but its number of MPs increased to 52 in 2001 and to 62 in 2005.