Liberal Party (UK)
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.
The Liberal Party grew out of the
Whigs, which had their 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, and 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 reforming 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 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 (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. New constituencies with new MPs entered Westminster, such as
Charles Reed the first MP for Hackney. The establishment of the party as a national membership organisation came with the foundation of the
National Liberal Federation in
1877.
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 Tory 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 Tories 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 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 Nationalist 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 (the status of a self-governing
Dominion for Ireland) 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 broke up on the rocks of Irish Home Rule. Gladstone finally retired in
1894, and his ineffectual successor,
Lord Rosebery, led the party to another heavy defeat in
1895.
The Liberals languished in opposition for a decade, while the coalition of Salisbury and Chamberlain held power. In
1900, led by
Henry Campbell-Bannerman, they opposed British policy in the
Second Boer War, handing Salisbury a huge victory in the original "
Khaki election". But with Salisbury's retirement in
1902 the Conservatives split over the issue of free trade and began a short-lived decline. In
1906 Campbell-Bannerman, rallying the party on a platform of free trade and land reform, led the Liberals 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 Commons government effectively castrating the heretofore independent
House of Lords. The two general elections in
1910 saw the Liberals retain power but lose their overall majority, being left once again dependent on the Irish Nationalists.
As a result Asquith was forced to introduce a new Home Rule bill in
1912. Since the House of Lords no longer had the power to block the bill, the Unionists, 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
May 17,
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.
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 inflence 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.
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
1926 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.
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.
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.
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 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 landslide 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 parliament.
(see article at Liberal Democrats (UK) for details of the successor party)In
1988 the two parties merged to create (after a number of name changes) the
Liberal Democrats. Over two-thirds of the members, and all the serving MPs, of the Liberal Party joined this party, led first by Steel and later by
Paddy Ashdown and
Charles Kennedy. With the fading away of the ex-Labour element after
1992, this party is seen by many as a continuation of the old Liberal Party under a new name, and some of its MPs and many of its rank-and-file continue to refer to themselves simply as Liberals. However others argue that the Liberal Democrats do not always follow traditional Liberal policies, whilst in terms of personalities they argue that both Paddy Ashdown (who was closer to the SDP than the Liberals on several matters) and Charles Kennedy (who was an SDP not a Liberal MP) were not old-style Liberals.
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.
Liberal Leaders in the House of Lords, 1859-1916*
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
*
George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon 1902-1908
*
Robert Crewe-Milnes, 1st Marquess of Crewe 1908-1916
Liberal Leaders in the House of Commons, 1859-1916*
Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston 1859-1865
*
William Ewart Gladstone 1865-1875
*
Spencer Compton Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington 1875-1880
*
William Ewart Gladstone 1880-1894
*
Sir William Vernon Harcourt 1894-1899
*
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman 1899-1908
*
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith (1925) 1908-1916
Leaders of the Liberal Party, 1916-1988*
Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith (1925)
1916-
1926*
Donald Maclean, Acting Leader 1919-
1922*
David Lloyd George 1926-
1931*
Sir Herbert Samuel 1931-
1935*
Sir Archibald Sinclair 1935-
1945*
Clement Davies 1945-
1956*
Jo Grimond 1956-
1967*
Jeremy Thorpe 1967-
1976*
Jo Grimond 1976*
David Steel 1976-
1988*
List of Liberal Party (UK) MPs*
Liberalism*
Contributions to liberal theory*
Liberalism worldwide*
List of liberal parties*
Liberal democracy*
Liberalism in the United Kingdom*
Politics of the United Kingdom*
UK topics*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.
*
Liberal Democrat History Group
