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

Nick Barlow
5 min readFeb 8, 2021

--

David Lloyd George and HH Asquith, the UK’s last two Liberal Prime Ministers (source: Wikipedia)

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…

--

--

Nick Barlow
Nick Barlow

Written by Nick Barlow

Former academic and politician, now walking, cycling and working out what comes next. https://linktr.ee/nickbarlow

No responses yet

What are your thoughts?