An Irishman’s Diary on the decline and fall of Britain’s Liberals

It will be 100 years on May 17th since the last purely Liberal government ruled the UK. That date in 1915 witnessed an end to a tradition of government in Britain that stretched back almost 300 years. And it is the case that Ireland played no small part in what George Dangerfield famously called “the strange death of Liberal England”.

Although the usual founding date given for what was called the Liberal Party is 1859, its origins lay in the opposition within the English parliament to the rule of the second Stuart monarch, Charles I, in the early 17th century. That century proved a turbulent time in British politics, with a civil war, the beheading of Charles I, the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II and the deposition of his successor, James II, in the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which again saw parliament assert its power over the monarchy.

Whigs and Tories

From the late 1680s up to the founding of the Liberal Party 170 years later, two political groupings competed for power – the “Whigs” and the “Tories”. Broadly speaking, the Tories were the party of the Crown and the established Anglican Church and the Whigs espoused the supremacy of parliament and, influenced by the ideas of the American and French Revolutions, broadening the franchise and religious toleration. One of their most famous statesmen was Charles James Fox, to whom Wordsworth paid tribute in a fine poem,

Loud is the Vale

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A Whig government passed the Great Reform Act of 1832, which extended the franchise and began a process that continued throughout the 19th century. The Liberal party emerged in June 1859 from a combination of Whigs, free-trade Peelites (former Conservatives opposed to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846) and Radicals (mainly middle-class politicians elected since the Reform Act). Not long afterwards emerged William Gladstone, the greatest leader of the Liberals and arguably the greatest statesman England has so far produced.

In his stimulating and superbly written book The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), George Dangerfield saw four happenings during the 1910-14 period as causing the demise of the Liberals. These were the Conservatives' fight against the 1911 Parliament Act (which curbed the power of the House of Lords), the possibility of civil war in Ireland as the unionists revolted against the prospect of home rule, the campaign of the suffragettes led by the Pankhursts, and increasing labour militancy under the influence of syndicalism.

The first two of those occurrences were closely related because the Conservatives were determined to exploit to the full Carson’s anti-home rule campaign, with its inherent threat of civil war in Ireland, in order to drive the Liberals from power.

Ireland

But we can go back further in Anglo-Irish history, to Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill of 1886, to see how the Irish political situation inflicted great damage on the Liberals. Because a significant rump of Gladstone’s party, 93 in total led by Joseph Chamberlain and dubbed “Liberal Unionists”, voted against the bill and left the party.

The Liberals were not to return to power for the next 30 years, except for a brief spell as a minority government in the early 1890s. There is no doubt that the situation in Ireland did serious harm to the Liberals again in the 1910-14 period and the Great War administered the coup de grâce.

It has been well said that “the war struck at the heart of everything British Liberals believed in”. The wartime Liberal government introduced what would be considered pretty illiberal policies, including conscription and the Defence of the Realm Act, policies that divided the party. A number of ministers resigned, and Herbert Asquith, a skilful pre-war leader, proved a less successful war leader. Two of his ministers, however, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, zealously pursued the war effort and gradually forced the old peace-oriented Liberals ministers out.

Coalition

The bad experiences of the early months of the war forced Asquith to invite the Conservatives into a coalition (on May 17th, 1915). In late 1916, the Conservatives withdrew their support, Asquith resigned and Lloyd George became the leader of a largely Conservative government. It was a blow from which the Liberal Party was never to recover as Labour emerged to take its place.

The party limped on amid a series of splits, troughs (mainly) and occasional peaks (especially under strong leaders such as Jo Grimond in the late 1950s and Jeremy Thorpe in the 1970s). It merged with the Social Democrats in the late 1980s to become the Liberal Democrats and has been in government with the Conservatives since 2010.

With the British electoral system of “first past the post”, it is hard to see it recovering the former glory that it finally relinquished 100 years ago.