Abstract
In politics all success is ephemeral. Parties may achieve electoral triumphs and fulfil some of their goals, but they satisfy transient needs and in time, having lost their raison d’être, they are replaced. Sometimes this is disguised by the accident of institutional survival. There is a party which calls itself a Conservative Party today, just as there was in the 1840s; but little connects the two organisations except the name and a few hazy historical memories. Nor would Keir Hardie and other Labour pioneers easily recognise any affinities with the political party which now bears the ‘Labour’ title. The once-mighty Liberal Party of Gladstone, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith and Lloyd George served its turn before fading into insignificance. Does that make it any different from other political parties? What should be avoided is allowing our knowledge of eventual decline to distract attention from the very substantial achievements which the Party had earlier secured.
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Notes
Cited in J. A. Thompson, ‘Historians and the Decline of the Liberal Party’, Albion, 22 (1990), p. 82.
When Duncan Tanner claims to be demonstrating the ‘viability’ of the Edwardian Liberal Party in the face of Labour’s ‘challenge’, he is sometimes doing nothing more than explaining why the Labour Party was never to be as effective a party as the Liberals whom it was supplanting (Tanner, D., Political Change and the Labour Party 1900–1918 [Cambridge, 1990]).
Cited in Glaser, J. F., ‘English Nonconformity and the Decline of Liberalism’, American Historical Review, 63 (1957–8), p. 361.
Cowling, M. The Impact of Labour 1920–1924 (Cambridge, 1971), Chs 18–20.
Cited in Cook, C., The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain, 1922–1929 (London, 1975), p. 183.
Samuel Storey, Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 12 January 1906, cited Purdue, A. W., ‘The Liberal and Labour Parties in North-East Politics, 1900–14: The Struggle for Supremacy’, International Review of Social History, 26 (1981), pp. 12–13.
Matthew, H. C. G., The Liberal Imperialists: the ideas and politics of a post-Gladstonian élite (Oxford, 1973), p. 128.
Bentley, M., ‘The Liberal Response to Socialism, 1918–29’, in Brown, K. D. (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History (London, 1974), p. 72.
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Peter Clarke, ‘Liberals and Social Democrats in Historical Perspective’, in Bogdanor, V. (ed.), Liberal Party Politics (Oxford, 1983), pp. 39–42. Clarke’s thesis in 1983 was that, with the Labour Party apparently disintegrating, its ‘social democratic’ wing would finally abandon it and, within the ambit of the ‘Alliance’, reunite with the more ideologically compatible Liberals.
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On this subject, see Hannah, L., The Rise of the Corporate Economy: The British Experience (London, 1976).
James, R. R. (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson’s Memoirs and Papers 1910–37 (London, 1969), pp. 289–90.
Pinto-Duschinsky, M., British Political Finance 1830–1980 (Washington, D.C., 1981), pp. 111–13.
Savage, M., The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: the Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 144.
See for example, MacDonald’s remarks at Southampton in 1894, on accepting the invitation to contest the borough as an independent Labour representative: ‘Our movement is neither a party nor a class movement, but a national one…’, in Marquand, D., Ramsay MacDonald (London, 1977), p. 37; this was a claim which he also liked to make in his later ‘theoretical’ defences of socialism.
McKibbin, R., The Ideologies of Class (Oxford, 1990), p. 281.
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© 1992 G. R. Searle
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Searle, G.R. (1992). Conclusion. In: The Liberal Party. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22165-3_9
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