I.

Introduction

Liberal Party, historical political party in Great Britain, a major governing party in the 19th century and up to World War I. Its formal establishment has sometimes been ascribed to 1859, when a meeting of Whigs, Radicals, and Peelites supporting the former prime minister Sir Robert Peel agreed to support a government under Lord Henry Palmerston. However, the term had been used earlier, and was used to describe some of those among the Whigs and Radicals, who were opposed to the Tories in the period of the great Reform Act of 1832. Many of the Whigs, Radicals, and Liberals of the post-1832 period saw themselves as successors of the great reformist Charles James Fox, and various other late 18th-century “Friends of Liberty”, nationalists, and opponents of autocracy. Middle-class politicians were able to make more of an impact in the Houses of Parliament under the post-1832 reformed system. Radical businessmen such as Richard Cobden and John Bright pressed for free trade, peace, retrenchment, and moderate reforms. Many felt that the principles behind the Great Reform Act should be extended further. Nonconformist tradesmen, craftsmen and artisans generally supported liberalism of one hue or another. In the words of the British philosopher, economist, and Liberal Member of Parliament(MP) John Stuart Mill, “a Liberal is one who looks forward for his principles of government; a Tory looks backward”.

II.

Palmerston’s Era

The Whigs and the growing forces of Liberalism held office under the premierships of Earl Charles Grey (1830-1834), Viscount Melbourne (1834, 1835-1841), Lord John Russell, (later Earl Russell 1846-1852 and 1865-1866), and Viscount Palmerston (1855-1858 and 1859-1865), and in a coalition government under George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen (1852-1855), a Peelite. While some historians have argued that there was political polarization in the House of Commons during the 1830s, study of voting lists for 1835-1837 has shown that this had not advanced very far, with many government supporters voting several times against the government. After the collapse of economic protectionism and the division of the Conservative Party in 1846, the Peelites became an important group, while Whigs and Radicals were increasingly prone to call themselves “Liberal”. Peelite administrative ability and belief in public financial probity merged with Liberal trust in free trade, faith in material progress, and nationalism. This coming together took time—and in the case of William Ewart Gladstone took personal distaste for Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader in the House of Commons, to overcome lack of enthusiasm for Palmerston.

Palmerston came to dominate British politics through much of his last decade (1855-1865). Palmerston presented a strong foreign policy, supporting British interests, and warmed to democratic and nationalist movements. He took pains to appeal to Liberal sentiment in the country, both by speeches and by cultivating the press. Opposition to a minority Conservative government under Lord Derby (1858-1859) united Whigs, Radicals, and Peelites, and nearly all who could be part of a Liberal coalition met at Willis’s Rooms in London and agreed to oust Derby’s government. In Palmerston’s second government, the premier did not hasten further parliamentary reform, but Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, did add further to his reputation as a financial reformer, making it ever more likely that in due course he would lead the forces of Liberalism.

III.

Gladstone’s Leaderships

Gladstone became prime minister for the first time after the 1868 general election, held after the extension of the franchise under the Second Reform Act of 1867. The Liberals won 387 seats, the Conservatives 271. The Liberals were strong in the boroughs, other than in Middlesex (the beginning of the swing of the suburban vote to the Conservatives) and in Lancashire (where anti-Irish sentiments boosted Protestantism in politics). The Liberals were also strong in Scotland and Wales, and, more generally, with Nonconformist voters.

The first Gladstone government disestablished the Church of Ireland in 1869 and passed the Irish Land Act of 1870, which offered some measure of security to tenant farmers. It also provided a range of social reforms that went some way in offering equality of opportunity in the civil service, the army, and the universities, as well as improving elementary education (the great Education Act of 1870), introducing the secret ballot for electors, and improving the judicial system. While the impact of the reforms should not be exaggerated, they were fair in their direction and were popular with the middle classes. However, many middle-class voters, especially in the southern of England, appear to have feared that Gladstone might take further reform too far for them. Also, Gladstone’s foreign policy, in which he preferred arbitration to assertion of imperial strength and wished to cut costs, allowed Disraeli to appear the successor to Palmerston in such matters. In 1874, with support for his government crumbling, Gladstone went to the country with plans for cuts in military expenditure, and the abolition of income tax and the duty on sugar. The result was the first outright victory for the Conservatives since 1841 (Conservatives 342 seats, Liberals 251, Irish Nationalists 59). After the electoral defeat, Gladstone withdrew from active leadership, and formally resigned as leader of the Liberal Party in January 1875. So the opposition to Disraeli’s government of 1874-1880 was led by Earl Granville in the House of Lords, and Spencer Compton Cavendish, Lord Hartington (the heir of the Duke of Devonshire), in the Commons.

Gladstone, always at his best when acting with a strong current of public opinion in his favour, emerged from retirement in 1876 to condemn Turkish massacres in Bulgaria. He then engaged in a further moral campaign condemning the foreign policy of the Earl of Beaconsfield (Queen Victoria had awarded Disraeli this title in 1876) in 1879 and 1880 as he conducted his ultimately successful bid for the Tory Scottish country seat of Midlothian. In the 1880 general election, held during a period of economic gloom, especially in agriculture, the Liberals swept to victory, winning 353 seats to the Conservatives’ 238 and the Irish Nationalists’ 65. The Liberals recovered their strong grip on boroughs, further strengthened their position in Scotland and Wales, and made some inroads into English counties. Gladstone’s Midlothian campaigns, his powerful presence in the Commons, and the scale of the Liberal victory enabled him to resume the premiership and the Liberal leadership.

Gladstone’s second government (1880-1885) was disappointing for many Liberals. It did bring in the Third Reform Act, which increased the electorate of the United Kingdom from some 3.1 million to roughly 5.6 million (about 56 per cent of all adult males), and the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act, 1883, which set severe penalties for electoral misdeeds. Otherwise, after a number of minor measures in its first year, Irish and British Empire issues overshadowed its domestic reform policies. Irish policy was marked both by the Irish Land Act of 1881, which went much further than that of 1870 in providing security to tenant farmers, and by coercive measures, especially after the 1882 assassination of the Chief Secretary and Under-Secretary for Ireland in Phoenix Park, Dublin. There were serious tensions within the Cabinet over imperial policy: too much gunboat diplomacy for some in intervening in Egypt in 1882, and too little for others, in the Transvaal after the defeat of British forces by rebellious Boers under Paul Kruger at Majuba Hill in 1881 and the failure to save General Gordon at Khartoum. The government fell in June 1885, after losing a vote on the budget, and was replaced by a Conservative government under the Marquess of Salisbury. In the autumn general election of that year, the Liberals won 335 seats, half the total, the Conservatives 249, and the Irish Nationalists 86.

Even before this election, Gladstone had been moving towards the policy of Irish Home Rule. His son’s revelation to the press of his views undercut Gladstone’s chances of convincing all his colleagues of the need for the policy. After Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish Nationalists helped vote out the Conservatives, Gladstone formed a third government (February-July 1886). This presented a Bill for Irish Home Rule to the Commons, but it was rejected by 343 to 313 (with 93 Liberals voting against the bill). Joseph Chamberlain and Hartington were among those who broke with Gladstone and the Liberal Party. In the ensuing general election, the Liberals won only 191 seats, the Irish Nationalists 85, the now separate Liberal Unionists 77, and the Conservatives 317. The residual Liberal Party was very much “the Gladstonian Liberal Party”.

Gladstone’s main, but not exclusive, focus of interest remained Home Rule for Ireland. In the 1892 general election the Liberals won 272 seats and the Irish Nationalists 80, while the Conservatives won 268, and the Liberal Unionists 46 (with 4 others elected). Gladstone formed his fourth government (1892-1894) and in 1893 introduced his second Home Rule Bill. This time it was passed by the House of Commons but rejected by the House of Lords. The defeat in the Lords by 419 to 41 votes revealed how little remained of Whig aristocratic support for Gladstonian Liberalism.

IV.

The Age of Asquith and Lloyd George

After Gladstone’s retirement in 1894, the Earl of Rosebery succeeded him as premier (1894-1895). Rosebery, a Liberal Imperialist, annexed Uganda within a month of Gladstone’s departure; otherwise, his government was most notable for the introduction of graduated death duties by Sir William Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his 1894 budget. Rosebery and Harcourt loathed each other. Rosebery resigned abruptly as leader in 1896 and Harcourt, who succeeded him, resigned in turn in December 1898. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a worthy but not charismatic ex-minister, became party leader (1899-1908) at the nadir of the Liberal Party’s fortunes.

In the 1895 and 1900 general elections, the Liberals did badly, winning only 177 seats in 1895 and 184 in 1900. They were no longer winning a majority of English boroughs even in 1885. In 1895 and 1900 they did badly in these, and the Conservatives made gains in Scotland (where support for Ulster was strong). The Conservatives remained strong in London and Lancashire. Liberal strength remained in the North-East, West Yorkshire, parts of the East Midlands, rural Scotland, and Wales. The Liberal Party divided three ways over the South African War, and suffered in the “khaki election” of 1900, held when the conflict turned for a while in Britain’s favour. The party remained divided as Rosebery and Liberal Imperialists (notably Herbert Henry Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and Richard Burdon Haldane) called for new policies and for “national efficiency”. The party reunited (except for Rosebery) in opposition to the 1902 Education Act of Arthur Balfour, which outraged Nonconformists, and Joseph Chamberlain’s campaign for a return to protectionism (“tariff reform”). After the bad urban election results of 1895 and 1900, Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal Chief Whip, made a secret electoral pact in 1903 with James Ramsay MacDonald, the secretary of the Labour Party Representation Committee, to unite “the forces of progress” in the next general election. In the event, in 1906, the Liberals won by a landslide (377 Liberal seats, 83 Irish Nationalist, 30 Labour, 241 Conservative, 32 Liberal Unionist), but in the two 1910 general elections the extension of the pact may well have been important in keeping the Liberals in office.

Campbell-Bannerman took office in December 1905, after Balfour’s resignation, without initially facing the electorate. During his premiership, many bills offering reforms desired by Nonconformists were mutilated or rejected in the House of Lords. Under Asquith’s premiership (1908-1916) innovative yet ad hoc and piecemeal social reforms dealing with aspects of poverty were passed, beginning with the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill took the lead in such matters as labour exchanges (1909), trade boards (1909), and unemployment and sickness insurance (National Insurance Act, 1911). Lloyd George demonstrated that Free Trade finance could provide the state with part of the funding for such reforms (as well as naval construction programmes) in his People’s Budget, 1909. The House of Lords’ rejection of this caused a constitutional crisis, which ended with a reduction in the second chamber’s powers by the Parliament Act of 1911 (see Liberal Britain).

The pre-World War I years were stormy ones in British politics. The Liberals successfully passed Irish Home Rule—but this led to serious threats of rebellion in Ulster, encouraged by the Conservative Party leadership. The implementation of the Home Rule Act was suspended by the outbreak of the World War I. The Liberals’ democratic credentials were questioned by the suffragette movement, and their support among organized labour weakened amid growing trade union strength and high levels of industrial unrest in 1910-1914. For all this, there was no “strange death of Liberal England” before World War I, even if the Liberals were not likely to win a fourth successive general election.

World War I seriously damaged the Liberal Party. As in other belligerent countries, governments in office at the outbreak of war suffered from disappointed hopes of a short war. As a result of the First Sea Lord, Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher, suddenly resigning as the Gallipoli Campaign failed to yield early success, and of claims of a shells shortage on the Western Front, Asquith readily acceded in May 1915 to construct a coalition government, not least because that ensured all-party agreement to avoid a general election in the coming months.

Asquith’s own position was weakened as wartime premier, as he appeared to need to be pushed into taking tough decisions. Lloyd George and some Liberals, along with the Conservatives, prodded him to adopt conscription. Later, Lloyd George pushed for a more effective war committee to direct the war. After the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin, Asquith failed to insist on Unionist support to settle the Home Rule issue that autumn. In December 1916 Lloyd George replaced Asquith, an event that led to the division of the Liberal Party and much bitterness among some of their supporters.

Lloyd George as premier (1916-1922) relied on Conservative support. During the war, when his coalition included Labour, this may well have not mattered, if there had been reconciliation at its end. Asquith declined a Cabinet place and Lloyd George called a general election while the country was euphoric with victory. The 1918 general election, called on a new franchise that included women for the first time, and with more seats contested, gave Lloyd George a landslide victory, but one in which coalition Conservatives and independent Conservatives were in a majority without Lloyd George; 133 Coalition Liberals were elected, but only 28 of Asquith’s followers. Asquith and his leading supporters were defeated. The collapse of Lloyd George’s coalition and the resulting general election of November 1922 showed the ebbing of Liberal support: 62 of Lloyd George’s supporters and 54 Asquithian Liberals were elected, a combined number eclipsed by Labour’s 142 MPs. When the Conservatives called another general election in December 1923 on tariff reform or free trade, of the two Free Trade parties Labour again secured more MPs with 191 to the reunited Liberals’ 59. As a result, Asquith supported the formation of a first Labour government. After its defeat in the Commons, Labour lost office after the 1924 general election; but the main loser was the Liberal Party, which lost 32 per cent of its 1923 vote in 1924 and secured only 40 MPs. In spite of some recovery in its vote, only 59 MPs were elected in 1929.

In the 1920s, the Liberal Party was fertile with ideas, many aired at Liberal summer schools. Lloyd George used his political fund to finance research into various policy areas. He succeeded to the leadership when Asquith misjudged rank-and-file opinion on the 1926 General Strike and resigned after it became clear that few Liberals warmed to Asquith’s support for the Baldwin government. The Liberals’ 1929 election campaign policies on unemployment owed something to Lloyd George and much to John Maynard Keynes, the economist. With the formation of the second Labour government, Lloyd George at first supported each government proposal on its merits, then from mid-1930 offered cooperation. When the Great Depression overwhelmed an already unstable government, he was seriously ill, and did not enter the National Government of 1931 with the other Liberal leaders. When that government called a general election, the Liberal Party fragmented. Soon one group of Liberals led by Sir John Simon virtually coalesced with the Conservatives, another group under Herbert Samuel resigned from office during 1931-1932, while Lloyd George led an independent group of four MPs.

V.

Third-Party Politics

After 1932 the Liberals independent of the Conservatives dwindled in number. They fell to 12 MPs in 1945, 9 in 1950, and 6 in 1951, 1955, and 1959. After Samuel (1931-1935), they were led by Sir Archibald Sinclair, who took office in Churchill’s wartime coalition government (1940-1945) as Air Minister, and Clement Davies (1945-1956). Liberal municipal strength also crumbled, with only 92 Liberal councillors being elected in the seats contested in November 1945, and only Huddersfield remaining under Liberal control. Nevertheless, the Liberals still projected fresh ideas—with William Beveridge, a Liberal MP in 1944-1945, providing the party with his report, Full Employment in a Free Society.

The Liberal Party began to revive under the leadership (1956-1967) of Jo Grimond. The Liberals won by-elections at Torrington (1958) and Orpington (1962), and secured 9 MPs in 1964 and 12 in 1966. Under Jeremy Thorpe’s leadership (1967-1976) the Liberals won a series of by-election victories between 1969 and 1973. In the February 1974 general election the Liberals polled over 6 million votes, but won only 14 seats (compared with 2 million votes and 6 seats in 1970). Their policy platform embraced freedom of information, devolution of power to the regions, electoral reform, and opposition to racial discrimination. Edward Heath, the Conservative premier, tried to stay on in coalition with the Liberals, and offered Thorpe a Cabinet position. The Liberals declined to support a government that had called a general election and lost its majority. In the October election of that year the Liberal vote fell back to 5.3 million, with 13 MPs elected. At this time Thorpe’s leadership disintegrated under a welter of allegations, including that of conspiracy to murder. In the ensuing court case, Thorpe was found not guilty on all charges.

David Steel led the Liberals into a period of alliances. In 1977-1978 he entered into the “Lib-Lab Pact” to sustain the Labour government of James Callaghan, a pact that prioritized devolution policies and a Liberal housing bill. After the 1979 general election, in which the Liberal vote dropped to 4.3 million and 11 MPs were elected, Steel encouraged Labour dissidents to set up the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The Liberals and SDP agreed to share by-elections and constituencies in a general election. In the winter of 1981-1982 the new Liberal-SDP Alliance Party received 50 per cent support in opinion polls and won sensational by-election victories at Crosby (1981) and Glasgow Hillhead (1982). In the 1983 general election the Alliance polled 25.4 per cent to Labour’s 27.6 per cent (with 22 MPs elected), as the Alliance leadership of Steel and SDP leader Dr David Owen appeared increasingly disunited. After the election, Steel called for a fusion of the two parties, and the majority of the SDP merged in 1987—though Owen ran until 1990 a minority “continuing SDP”. From March 1988 the great majority of Liberals merged into the new party, the Social and Liberal Democrats (changed to Liberal Democrats in 1989), with Paddy Ashdown as its first leader. In the 1992 election it polled 6 million votes and elected 20 MPs. In the May 1997 general election Liberal Democrat representation was more than doubled, with 46 MPs returned. The improvement continued at the 2001 general election. With Charles Kennedy as leader, the party elected 52 MPs, although it polled only 4.8 million votes on what was a low electoral turnout. At the 2005 general election, the Liberal Democrats, again led by Kennedy, increased their number of MPs to 62; meanwhile the number of votes polled rose to just below 6 million. At the same election the Liberal Party fielded candidates in 14 constituencies, but failed to win any seats.