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 of Kent) and Adrian Lee (University of Plymouth University), discussed the survival and strength of Liberalism in the West Country, at a meeting in the city that was the stronghold of the Foot dynasty.
Robert Maclennan MP, himself a former leader of the SDP, and Professor Peter Clarke, leading expert on the New Liberals, looked at leaders of the Liberal Party and the SDP over the last hundred years, using analysis and anecdotes to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the two parties leaders.
The audience was polled to see who they consider was the best and the worst Liberal/SDP leader of the last century.
Professor Ben Pimlott (Warden of Goldsmiths College and biographer of Hugh Dalton) and Dr David Dutton (biographer of Sir John Simon) reviewed relations between Liberals and Labour during the key period when Labour established itself as the main opposition party to the Conservatives.
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.
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?
What have Liberal Democrats today to learn from Liberal heroes of the past? Who contributed most to the development of the party and of Liberalism? What common themes bind them together?
Two speakers offered their choices: Bill Rodgers (Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank), one of the SDPs “Gang of Four” and leader of the Liberal Democrat peers; and Graham Watson MEP, former aide to David Steel and the one of the Liberal Democrats first two Euro-MPs. Chair: Graham Tope (Lord Tope of Cheam).
The meeting marked the launch of the Liberal Democrat History Group’s major publication, the Dictionary of Liberal Biography.
In the centenary year of Gladstone’s death, this meeting looked at three crucial aspects of the life of the most famous Liberal Prime Minister.
Conrad Russell, historian and Liberal Democrat front bencher in the Lords, looked at what the Liberal Democrats could learn from Gladstone.
John Maloney, lecturer in economics at Exeter University, will look at Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the founder of the modern Treasury; and
Professor H. C. G. Matthew, editor of Gladstones diaries and biographer of Gladstone, Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, looked at Gladstone and Ireland, the abiding passion of his later years.
What did the Party and its predecessors achieve for women’s rights, from the suffragettes onwards?
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 the Second Chamber.
“Social Insurance and Allied Services – report by Sir William Beveridge” was published in December 1942, and its proposals were passed into legislation by Attlee’s government between 1945 and 1948. As Addison put it, “the historian of social administration finds in the Beveridge Report the blueprint of the postwar welfare state in Britain”. Along with Keynes, Beveridge provided the Liberal powerhouse of ideas which Labour governments implemented, and Conservative governments retained, for almost forty years.
But as the century nears its end, could Beveridges framework – modified and distorted by the Thatcher administations as it was – provide the blueprint for the modern welfare state?
“The Liberal policy”, stated one nonconformist minister late last century, “makes for the establishment of the Kingdom of God”. Our two speakers examined the role that religion and religious movements played in the history of the Liberal Party. Jonathan Parry (Pembroke College, Cambridge; author of The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain) examined the 19th century, while Alan Beith MP (Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrat MPs) dealt with the 20th.
After almost thirty years of continuous decline, the leadership of Jo Grimond, and byelection and local election victories, seemed to herald a new era for the Liberal Party. Why did it all go wrong? William Wallace (Lord Wallace of Saltaire), Lords spokesman on defence and reader in international relations at the LSE, examined the record.
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 MPs in Parliament. Dr Kandiah was in the process of writing a biography of Lord Woolton.
Massive Tory defeat …. sweeping opposition landslide victory …. major gains by small third party …. but what does the new government stand for other than opposition to unpopular Conservative policies?
The outcome of the 1997 general election? No – it happened in 1906, when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman led the Liberal Party to a crushing victory over Arthur Balfour’s Unionists, with the newly-formed Labour Party making important gains on the back of an electoral pact with the Liberals. And despite the lack of any clear Liberal election programme other than reversal of unpopular Tory policies, the following eight years were to see one of the most sustained periods of political and social reform of the twentieth century, as the Government put into practice the thinking and policies of the New Liberalism.
Nine decades later, were similar ingredients in place once again? The topic was discussed by Andrew Adonis, Political Editor of the Observer; John Grigg, biographer of Lloyd George; and Earl Russell, historian and Lords spokesman on social security.
The speaker is a former lecturer at the University of Surrey, several times a Liberal candidate and author of The History of the Liberal Party 1895-1970.
The policy of the Liberal Party on the question of the land.
Unity in Europe was a central theme for the Liberal Party since Gladstone’s day, and was an important factor behind the SDP’s breakaway from the Labour Party. Yet continental liberal parties have not always proved so enthusiastic. Our three speakers examined the historical record.
The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 split the Tories for a generation, laid the foundations of the Victorian Liberal Party and ushered in nearly a century of free trade orthodoxy in economic policy.
One hundred and fifty years later, the Liberal Democrat History Group discussed this momentous event with one of the period’s leading historians.
The reforming Liberal Governments of 1906-14 helped lay the foundations of the British welfare state; amongst other achievements, they introduced old age pensions, national insurance and the principle of graduated taxation. Underpinning these political achievements lay the school of thought known as the “New Liberalism”.
New Liberal writers such as Green, Hobhouse and Hobson advanced the philosophical underpinnings of the Liberal Party onwards from Gladstonian individualism, developing the concept of community and drawing attention to the need for positive action to redress social and economic inequalities. Yet theirs was still identifiably a liberal and non-collectivist approach, stressing the need for participative reformism, rather than seeking to impose reforms from above.
Was Tony Blair’s “new Labour” Party adopting this agenda? Or were the Liberal Democrats the true inheritors of the New Liberalism?
Each talked about a philosopher, writer or politician of the past who still had something of relevance to contribute to the Party’s principles and policies. The aim was to connect the political beliefs and values which modern day Liberal Democrats hold with a historical tradition, or school of thought, or individual writings. (Alan Beith chose W. T. Stead, Sir William Goodhart Judge Learned Hand.)
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 thought on this important topic.
Lord Skidelsky was Professor of Political Economy at University of Warwick. His books include Politicians and the Slump and Oswald Mosley; he is perhaps best known for his biography of Keynes.