Events
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Winston Churchill: Tory or Liberal?
“I am an English Liberal. I hate the Tory Party, their men, their words and their methods.” These were Winston Churchill’s own words in 1903. As a Liberal, Churchill held high government office and, along with Lloyd George, was regarded as one of the driving forces of Asquith’s reforming administration. Was Liberalism his true political…
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Riding the tiger – the Liberal experience of coalition governments
A one day seminar organised by the Archives Division of the London School of Economics, the British Liberal Political Studies Group and the Journal of Liberal History. The distinguished psephologist Dr David Butler has pointed out that coalitions between unequal partners can turn out to be like the relationship between the tiger and the young…
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Fighting Labour: the struggle for radical supremacy in Scotland 1885-1929
The Liberal Democrat History Group is holding its first meeting in Scotland as part of the fringe at the Scottish Liberal Democrats’ spring conference. The meeting will look back at the Liberal Party’s contribution to radical, progressive politics in Scotland and its struggle with Labour in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in…
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Salad days: merger twenty years on
Twenty years ago a new political party was born from the merger of the Liberal and Social Democratic parties the Social & Liberal Democrats (or Salads, as the party was disparagingly nicknamed by its opponents). This meeting will explore the political background to the merger and the byzantine process of negotiation through which it which…
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Liberals and local government in London since the 1970s
Winning local elections has been a keystone in Liberal (Democrat) success in the years since the adoption of the community politics strategy at the Eastbourne Assembly in 1970. There have been many spectacular advances across London, from the heartland of the south western boroughs to Southwark, Islington and more recently breakthroughs on Camden and Brent…
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Defender of Liberties: Charles James Fox
2006 saw the bicentary of the death of the Whig leader Charles James Fox. A proponent of the supremacy of Parliament, the freedom of the press and the rights and civil liberties of the people, and a believer in reform, rationalism and progress, rather than repression, the ideas he defended particularly over the challenge of…
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Why are the English frightened of constitutional change?
The reform of Britain‘s constitution has been a watchword of the Liberal Democrats and its predecessors for over 150 years. This is partly because, compared to other countries, constitutional change has been relatively rare – particularly in England, and particularly in the 20th century. This meeting examined why this should be so. We concentrated on…
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We Can Conquer Unemployment
The subject of the meeting was the influence of Keynes’s and Lloyd George’s Yellow Book on the problems of conquering unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s. With one of the major policy paper debates at Brighton that year being on Employment Policy, this provided us with a chance to trace the development of Liberal/Liberal Democrat…
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Liberal-Tory Pacts: Partnership of principle or struggle for survival?
Michael Kandiah, Senior Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary British History, spoke on Liberal-Conservative relations in the 1940s and 1950s. He looked at both the national negotiations which concluded in the offer of a cabinet post to Clement Davies by Churchill in 1951, and at the local pacts in Huddersfield and Bolton, which put Liberal…