Throughout this series, I have examined the histories of the constitutions of Britain’s major political parties. I concluded that the Conservative Party has been ruthlessly effective at structuring itself to focus on electoral victory, though the challenge of the 2024 election leaves open the question of whether this will continue. The Labour Party’s success, meanwhile, has been founded on the degree to which it has been able to corral its permanent internal factionalism into an effective (if not always comfortable) alliance.
In this blog, I turn my attention to the Liberal Party, and its successor the Liberal Democrats. Its experience, ranging from being the dominant party of the late 19th century to the doldrums of single-figure representation in the Commons in the 1950s and to the partial recovery of the present day, contains elements of both these stories. The Liberal Party has frequently been at the forefront of adapting to changes in the way British politics has been run, from the mass mobilisation of the 1870s and 1880s to members’ involvement in electing leaders, to effective social media campaigning in the 2000s. At the same time the Liberal Party has, at various points in its history, faced the threat of destruction through damaging splits. This blog examines these successes and failures and charts the story of the survival of the Liberals and Liberal Democrats.
From the Foundation to the First Split
The Liberal Party was founded on 6 June 1859 by a group of Whigs, radicals, and former Conservatives who had followed Sir Robert Peel out of the Party in 1846. Each of these groups had distinct political traditions, but they had been drawn together by free trade and a shared antipathy to the Conservatives. The new party was therefore a rather uneasy alliance. Throughout its early years, internal division were a constant source of tension. Whig aristocrats, whose party alignment sometimes owed more to their family’s allegiances during the Glorious Revolution than to contemporary ideology, had little in common with the industrial radicalism of Richard Cobden, or the nonconformists who formed an significant portion of the Liberal vote in the late 19th century. However, William Gladstone, the defining figure of the 19th century Liberal Party and leader for most of the period from 1868 to 1894, was generally shrewd enough to keep this unruly coalition together.
At its foundation, the Liberal Party was a relatively informal grouping of MPs, lacking a mass membership or the tools of national mobilisation. In 1860, the Liberal Registration Association was formed to provide an institutional link between the parliamentary party and the various local associations which existed to advance Liberal interests across the country. This was in effect a small party bureaucracy under the firm control of the parliamentary leadership, but it lacked any means of representing grassroots interests to MPs. Renamed the Liberal Central Association in 1874, it remained at the core of the Liberal Party’s structures until the 1930s.
This was a tentative first step towards the formalisation of the Party. The need to go further was underlined in the aftermath of the Second Reform Act of 1867, which fundamentally transformed British politics into something approaching a mass democracy by extending the franchise to a significant number of working men for the first time. Though the Conservatives under Disraeli had passed the Act, it was the Liberals who were able to take advantage of it.
The biggest step towards adapting the Party to take advantage of this new reality was the formation of the National Liberal Federation in 1877 (driven by the radical Birmingham politician and organiser Joseph Chamberlain), which represented a radical reformulation of how political parties could organise. The NLF was in effect an annual conference with a permanent secretariat, and it can be seen as the model on which the British system of party conferences is based. Though the body lacked the ability to dictate policy or decide on party leadership (both of which remained were firmly matters for the parliamentary party), it became a decisive force in Liberal politics, giving local activists a voice in the direction of the Party for the first time. A similar organisation was established in Scotland in 1881 as the Scottish Liberal Association (later Federation), which remained entirely separate.
At the same time, an explosion in the informal associational culture around Liberal politics drew more people at all levels of society into the culture of the Party. The changes in internal structure allowed the Party to adopt new methods of organising, and Gladstone’s Midlothian Campaign of 1879-80 represented a new advance in the management of mass campaigning, particularly in the central role of media management in politics.
Yet this positive news for the Party did not last. The hard work of maintaining unity in the face of internal dissension could not survive Gladstone’s damascene conversion to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland in December 1885. Early the next year a large group of MPs and peers left the Party to oppose Home rule. This group included most of the old Whig aristocracy as well as a group of radicals including the Party’s most effective campaigner Joseph Chamberlain. These groups then entered into arrangements with the Conservatives to topple the Liberals in the 1886 general election. The alliance between the defectors and the Conservative Party was sustained, and the Liberal Unionists were eventually absorbed into the renamed Conservative and Unionist Party in 1912.
Division and Decline
In the wake of this damaging split, the Liberal Party continued to innovate methods of political organising. In 1891, the NLF demonstrated its strength by publishing the Newcastle Programme, a clear policy plan for government which was quickly endorsed by Gladstone. For the first time, a formal party document (as opposed to brief, discursive addresses by individual politicians) was put to the people in advance of their vote. This bold step towards programmatic politics was opposed, including by many in the Liberal Party, yet it set the terms for the manifesto culture we have today.
At the turn of the century, the fate of the Liberal Party depended on how it would manage the new power in British politics: organised labour. Despite attempts to accommodate the aspirations of the organised working class through the election of ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs jointly endorsed by the Party and trade unions, the Party remained mostly middle-class, without significant representation of working men. Dissatisfaction with this and the conflict in the interest of Liberal-supporting factory owners resulted in the mass defection of trade unionists (many of whom were naturally Liberal in sympathy) to the new Labour Party, founded in 1900.
The Liberal Party’s failure to contain this force within itself and the resulting informal split would prove fatal as Labour began to emerge as a serious third force in British politics. However, the immediate crisis for the Liberals came in 1916 when yet another split divided the Party.
A political coup by the Chancellor David Lloyd George, working in concert with the Conservatives who had joined a wartime coalition the year before resulted in the forced resignation of the Prime Minister and Liberal leader H. H. Asquith and the ascension of Lloyd George to the premiership. Some Liberals followed Asquith into opposition, whilst others remained in government under Lloyd George. This division continued after the war, when the Liberal Prime Minister had the unusual fate of sitting facing party colleagues on the opposition benches, though the party split was only formalised in 1922. Lloyd George rejoined the rump Liberals in 1924, but by this time the Liberal Party’s place as the second party of British politics had been usurped by the Labour Party.
The existential crisis of decline for the Liberals was exacerbated by its organisational woes. The mass defection of politicians, activists, and backers to the Labour Party (and to a lesser extent the Conservatives) had starved the Party of campaigners and of funds.
Despite the hugely damaging divisions that dominated and relegated Liberal politics in the 1920s, this was nonetheless also a time of great intellectual energy within the Party. The organising of annual Summer Schools created a forum for ideological radicalism. The Party’s proposals on industrial management (‘the Yellow Book’) and unemployment gave the Liberals a detailed and radical policy framework in this period, albeit they lacked the means to enact it.
Yet such efforts could not reverse the decline, and at the end of the decade the Party was fundamentally divided. Schisms over support for the 1929-31 Labour government created an informal grouping under Sir John Simon who favoured working with the Conservatives. On the creation of the National Government in 1931 (notionally a coalition but dominated by the Conservative Party), the Liberals joined, but the increasingly close relationship of Simon’s faction to the Conservatives led to yet another split and the formation of the National Liberal Party.
The Liberal Party thus entered the 1931 general election as three separate groups: the National Liberals under Simon, the rump of the Party under Herbert Samuel, and Independent Liberals under Lloyd George who had once again dissented from the Party line. The result, and the subsequent abandonment of the National Government by the rump party in 1933, made permanent the divide. Though Lloyd George would once again rejoin the Liberal Party in 1935, the many splits and divisions had left the Party a mere shadow of its former self. In 1935, it was reduced to just 21 seats.
The National Liberal Party (which the Conservative politician Robert Boothby described as ‘neither National, nor Liberal, nor a Party’) continued its existence as an increasingly dependent appendage of the Conservative Party. Despite attempts to bring it back into the Liberal fold, it’s leaders never showed much interest. By the time it was wound up in 1968, it had become little more than a label adopted by Conservative candidates in deference to local sensibilities in formerly Liberal seats.
The Nadir and New Directions
Post 1935, the Party’s spirits were low, but the period of damaging splits that had sapped its energy over the previous 20 years was at an end. The Party’s organisation, most of which dated from the Victorian era, was in need of change. The new leader Archibald Sinclair appointed the Meston Committee to review the whole basis of Liberal organisation as a result. The NLF, the LCA, and various other bodies were abolished and replaced by the Liberal Party Organisation as the permanent secretariat, and the annual Liberal Assembly as the supreme body of the Party. For the first time, the Scottish Pary was represented in these structures, though the Scottish Liberal Federation continued to operate autonomously.
The reforms were important, but they could not address the fundamental political, financial, and constitution barriers to Liberal reemergence. The Party returned to government as a bit player in the wartime coalition, and the intellectual contribution it made continued in plans for postwar reconstruction in the form of prominent Liberals John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge (the latter of whom was elected as a Liberal MP in a 1944 by-election). Nonetheless, the Party failed to mount effective campaigns, or take advantage of new technologies and methods of campaigning, and was perpetually hampered by financial problems. It continued to decline and in 1957 the Party briefly reached its all time low of 5 MPs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, ambitious politicians continued to defect to Labour or the Conservatives.
Further change was needed and began under the leadership of Jo Grimond from 1955, and his successor Jeremy Thorpe from 1967. Grimond’s work to develop a distinctive Liberal offering (insisting that the Liberals were a radical party of the left and committing the party to European integration) went hand in hand with a ferocious effort to build up the Party’s organisation. An increase in membership (tripling to 350,000 by 1963) gave the Party a large activist base to draw on and also attracted more money (though the Party continued to find it difficult to field candidates in many seats).
Jeremy Thorpe continued this work, both by stabilising the Party’s finances by attracting new donors, and in going some way to modernising the internal structure of the Party machine. A new constitution in 1969 put the Party’s governance on a new footing, though the changes to the 1936 settlement were relatively minor. Despite this modernisation, and new campaigning methods (notably Thorpe’s eye for a photo-op and the increasing emphasis on community politics in major cities from 1970) the much-reduced status of the Party made it difficult to cut through, and it remained hamstrung by the electoral system.
The biggest and most consequential change to the Party came immediately after Thorpe’s resignation in the wake of a major scandal in 1976. Responding to pressure from the activist base which had sustained the Party, Thorpe’s successor was elected not by the 14 MPs at Westminster, but by an electoral college representing members in local associations. For the first time, the leader of a major British political party was elected by Party members rather than by MPs. For better or for worse, this set the stage for the leadership elections now common to all major parties today.
Towards the Liberal Democrats
From 1979, the election of the Thatcher government and the leftward shift in Labour opened up new electoral opportunities for the Liberal Party. The biggest transformation for the Party, however, was the formation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. The ‘Gang of Four’, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers led a breakaway from the Labour Party joined by one MP’s defection from the Conservatives. On its formation, it immediately became the third largest party in the Commons, edging the Liberals into fourth place.
It was unclear what space there was for another party in the centre of British politics, and the SDP offered Cabinet experience (lacking from the Liberal Party) and new routes to political support. The prospect of an alliance or a merger was present from the very start, then, with the Liberal leader David Steel being a particular advocate for fusion. Scepticism in both camps was strong, however, and David Owen, who became leader of the SDP in 1983, was strongly personally opposed. Instead, the two parties formed the Alliance, an electoral pact, and contested the 1983 and 1987 general elections with a combined manifesto. It was initially thought that the Alliance would do well, with some polls suggesting it would carry all before it into government, however, after 1987 proved that was not the case, both parties agreed to formally merge. The politics of that merger proved difficult, and many described the process as farcical; after protracted disputes over foreign policy and the party’s new name, the entire Liberal negotiating team resigned.
Nonetheless, an eventual agreement was reached, and in early 1988 both parties assented to the terms of the union. After 119 years, the Liberal Party ceased to exist and was replaced by the Social and Liberal Democrats (which changed its name in 1989 to the Liberal Democrats). The structures of the Party were completely new. It would have a federal structure, with parties in England, Scotland, and Wales coming together at a supreme bi-annual conference. Its policymaking organs were streamlined, with a new policy committee which retains an important role in shaping the Party’s direction today. It also mandated that the Party leader would be elected directly by members on the basis of one member one vote, becoming the first of the major parties to choose a leader in this manner. Though these changes were significant, they continued Liberal traditions: the Scottish and Welsh parties were given autonomy as with the SLA back in 1881; the conferences continued the democratic traditions of the Liberal Assemblies of the pre-1988 Party; and leadership elections pushed the logic of internal party democracy further than had been done in 1976.
1988 to Today
Since 1988, the fortunes of the Liberal Democrats have waxed and waned, yet its internal structures have remained largely unchanged. The Party has been without major internal reform (‘modernisation’ in the Liberal Democrats has largely meant shifting the Party’s orientation rather than constitutional change) and there has been an absence of the major splits that defined much of the Liberal Party’s 20th century existence. Nowhere was this relative harmony more visible than in the saga of Brexit, where the Liberal Democrats were able to present themselves as the most united of the three traditional parties. While there remain major ideological divides within the Party (particularly among its grassroots), on the whole, it has managed to moderate major disagreements. Even its leadership elections are now famously dull; a state surely preferable to any excitingly bloody scenes of factional strife.
Partly as a result of this, the Liberal democrats have been able to weather storms including a hugely unpopular spell in government in coalition with the Conservatives from 2010. Indeed, the future seems brighter than it has for some years for the Party. Its success in last year’s general election was hugely significant, and suggests the moderate success it enjoyed from the period under New Labour through to the beginning of the coalition was not a fluke. The limitations on its growth are structural, lying in the electoral system, rather than the internal logics and systems of the Party itself.
Periodic enthusiasm for the Liberal Democrats has frequently been fuelled with dissatisfaction with Labour and Conservatives, but the structure of the Party has proven its value in being flexible to adapt to the challenges of campaigning in a 21st century democracy. The Party which gave British politics the media-orientated election campaign, annual conferences, programmatic manifestos, and leadership elections involving members, has continued be an innovator in political campaigning. The Liberal Democrats have leveraged a democratic and effective party structure to manage internal dissension and give a much-reduced Party the space to adopt new methods to fight its old battles on into the 21st century.
Ed Selkirk Ford.
Ed Selkirk Ford is a PhD candidate and postgraduate teaching associate in history at the University of Exeter. He researches debates about parliaments and representation in Britain and British settler colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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