Member-only story
Liberal Democrats are making the same mistake that doomed the Liberals
A century on, the party again faces the same questions about its role that the Liberals failed to answer
In its heyday, the Liberal Party was one of the dominant forces in British politics. After the party’s landslide victory in the 1906 general election, the UK would have Liberal Prime Ministers for the next sixteen years, and then would never have another one again.
The fall of the Liberal Party and “the strange death of Liberal England” is one of the foundations of modern British politics. There’s still ongoing debate about the nature of that fall: did the Liberal Party jump or was it pushed? If the party could have found a way to bridge the gap between Asquith and Lloyd George, could it have survived as a major force, or was the changing nature of the country and the advent of universal suffrage always going to lead to it being eclipsed by the rise of the Labour Party?
Of course, those aren’t two mutually exclusive positions and most will come down at some point on a spectrum between them. One might say, for example. that changes in the structure of British society and politics made the Liberal position harder to maintain, but there were better ways the party could have reacted to those changes. And while the collapse of a previously major party is an interesting spectacle, it is not a unique one, and there are many parties around the world who, just like the Liberals, either failed to adapt to changing circumstances or let internal feuding bring them down. (Many managed both)
Which brings us to the Liberal Democrats, who, while never being quite as powerful or prominent as their predecessors, spent a long period as the pre-eminent third party in the British political system. That time has now ended, and the party has now had three disappointing general election results in a row, been through four leaders in the last five years, lost a huge part of their former local government base, and have been languishing in the polling doldrums for over a year.
Now, I could write a long section here about the current state of the Liberal Democrats and the internal debates within the party, but luckily, my friend Will Barter has already done…
