Events
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Liberalism and Nationalism: Allies or Enemies?
Liberals and Nationalists have sometimes shared common aims. But how close are they? Are their basic philosophies compatible with each other? How has cooperation worked in practice? Why did nineteenth-century Liberals support nationalist movements while their twentieth-century counterparts have tended to oppose them?
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1974 Remembered
The two elections of 1974 formed a peak of the second post-war Liberal revival, giving the party six million votes but no more than fourteen MPs. Participants in the campaigns – including Tim Beaumont, Viv Bingham, Adrian Slade, Sir Cyril Smith, Paul Tyler MP and Richard Wainwright – shared their recollections of the elections.
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Liberalism in the West Country
The West Country has a special place in the Liberal tradition. Home to Isaac Foot and his sons, Thorpe, Penhaligon, Pardoe … For much of the post-war period, the Liberal Party‘s parliamentary representation rested largely on the South West English MPs, along with their colleagues in the rest of the “Celtic fringe”. Michael Steed (University…
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“Methods of Barbarism” – Liberalism and the Boer War
“When is a war not a war?” asked the Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman. “When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.” One hundred years after the Boer War began, Professor Denis Judd (University of North London), author of The Boer War and Empire, reviewed the response of Liberalism to the War. Dr…
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From Midlothian to Direct Mail: Parliamentary and Political Campaigning
On the eve of the first general election campaign of the twenty-first century, this meeting examined the development of campaigning techniques since the Great Reform Act of 1832. From the introduction of electoral registers, the gradual elimination of corruption, and the appearance of new forms of communications – railways, the telegraph and newspapers – to…
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Exchange goods not bombs
Globalisation and its costs and benefits are at the heart of much of todays political debate. But intense debates on the liberalisation of international trade are by no means new. Free trade was one of the great rallying cries of the Victorian Liberal Party. In the 1840s, the Anti-Corn Law League successfully campaigned for abolition…
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Peace, Reform and Liberation: launch of new Liberal history book
Peace, Reform and Liberation is a comprehensive history of Liberal politics in Britain. Drawing on the most recent scholarly research, the Liberal Democrat History Groups new book examines the roots of Liberal thinking in the revolutionary tumult of the seventeenth century, the history of Whig politics, how the Liberal Party was formed in the mid-nineteenth…
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The Great Reform Act of 1832: its legacy and influence on the Coalition’s reform agenda
Soon after becoming Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg promised “the most significant programmes of reform by a British government since the 19th century…. the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832.” But how do the Coalition governments constitutional changes actually compare to the changes brought in by the Great Reform Bill of 1832? Dr Philip…
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A delicate balance
The long-term decline in popularity of Labour and the Conservatives, and the growth in the number of third-party MPs at Westminster including mostly notably those of the Liberal Democrats means that a Parliament with no single-party overall majority is now arithmetically much more likely. Any third party holding the balance of power in Parliament finds…