In 1859, the philosopher and leading liberal theorist of Victorian Britain, John Stuart Mill, published his most important and enduring work On Liberty. In this essay Mill set out the principle, still acknowledged as universal and valid today, that only the threat of harm to others could justify interfering with anyones liberty of action. The…

There were many at the Brighton Conference who were in no doubt that if it wasn’t for a young, charismatic party leader they would have no party at all. In 1956 Jo Grimond took over the reigns of the Liberal Party and, as many will argue, he saved it from death. He was responsible for…

Reforming Home Secretary, successful Chancellor of the Exchequer, principled European, groundbreaking President of the European Commission and distinguished man of letters, Roy Jenkins had a deep impact on British politics and inspired generations of liberals. This meeting marked the publication of Roy Jenkins: A Retrospective (Oxford University Press), a collection of essays by friends and…

Did the formation of the Social & Liberal Democrats represent the final coming together of the two philosophical traditions united in the Liberal Party of the turn of the century and split by the strains of war and the subsequent Liberal decline?

In the popular view, the Civil War and Glorious Revolution of the seventeenth century heralded the “bourgeois revolution” of which Thatcherism has now proved the culmination. Political change – the triumph of the middle over the upper classes – inevitably followed the social and economic changes deriving from the growing importance of commerce and industry…

A hundred years ago, the Liberal landslide victory in the 1906 election opened the way for a period of radical social reform based on the social-liberal ideology of the New Liberalism. British Liberalism changed decisively from its nineteenth-century Gladstonian inheritance of non-interventionism in economic and social issues to accepting a much more activist role for…

Reform of the House of Lords was one aspect of the new governments manifesto which it seemed in no hurry to implement. The meeting discussed attempts at reform in the twentieth century: the Parliament Act of 1911 and Labour’s attempts to reform the Lords in the 1960s; together with some thoughts on the future of…