History
The Liberal Party grew out of the Whigs, who had their origins in an aristocratic faction in the reign of Charles II and the early 19th century Radicals. The Whigs were in favour of reducing the power to direct or build of the Crown and increasing the energy of Parliament. Although their motives in this were originally to realise more power for themselves, the more idealistic Whigs gradually came to guide an expansion of democracy for its own sake. The great figures of reformist Whiggery were Charles James Fox died 1806 and his disciple and successor Earl Grey. After decades in opposition, the Whigs specified to power under Grey in 1830 and carried the First recast Act in 1832.
The revise Act was the climax of Whiggism, but it also brought about the Whigs' demise. The admission of the middle classes to the franchise and to the House of Commons led eventually to the coding of a systematic middle classes liberalism and the end of Whiggery, although for many years reforming aristocrats held senior positions in the party. In the years after Grey's retirement, the party was led first by Lord Melbourne, a fairly traditional Whig, and then by Lord John Russell, the son of a Duke but a crusading radical, and by Lord Palmerston, a renegade Irish Tory and essentially a conservative, although capable of radical gestures.
As early as 1839, Russell had adopted the form of "Liberals", but in reality his party was a loose coalition of Whigs in the House of Lords and Radicals in the Commons. The main Radicals were John Bright and Richard Cobden, who represented the manufacturing towns which had gained report under the Reform Act. They favoured social reform, personal liberty, reducing the powers of the Crown and the Church of England numerous Liberals were Nonconformists, avoidance of war and foreign alliances which were bad for multinational and above any free trade. For a century, free trade remained the one cause which could unite any Liberals.
In 1841, the Liberals lost office to the Conservatives under Sir Robert Peel, but their period in opposition was short because the Conservatives split over the repeal of the Corn Laws, a free trade issue; and a faction so-called as the Peelites but not Peel himself, who died soon after defected to the Liberal side. This lets ministries led by Russell, Palmerston and the Peelite Lord Aberdeen to hold office for almost of the 1850s and 1860s. A leading Peelite was William Gladstone, who was a reforming Chancellor of the Exchequer in most of these governments. The formal foundation of the Liberal Party is traditionally traced to 1859 and the ordering of Palmerston'sgovernment.
However, the Whig-Radical amalgam could non become a true contemporary political party while it was dominated by aristocrats and it was not until the departure of the "Two awful Old Men", Russell and Palmerston, that Gladstone could become the number one leader of the advanced Liberal Party. This was brought about by Palmerston's death in 1865 and Russell's retirement in 1868. After a brief Conservative government during which the Second Reform Act was passed by agreement between the parties, Gladstone won a huge victory at the 1868 election and formed the first Liberal government. The establishment of the party as a national membership organisation came with the foundation of the National Liberal Federation in 1877. The philosopher John Stuart Mill was also a Liberal MP from 1865 to 1868.
For the next thirty years Gladstone and Liberalism were synonymous. William Gladstone served as prime minister four times 1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, and 1892–94. His financial policies, based on the conception of balanced budgets, low taxes and laissez-faire, were suited to a coding capitalist society, but they could noteffectively as economic and social conditions changed. Called the "Grand Old Man" later in life, Gladstone was always a dynamic popular orator who appealed strongly to the working class and to the lower middle class. Deeply religious, Gladstone brought a new moral tone to politics, with his evangelical sensibility and his opposition to aristocracy. His moralism often angered his upper-class opponents including Queen Victoria, and his heavy-handed controls split the Liberal Party.
In foreign policy, Gladstone was in general against foreign entanglements, but he did not resist the realities of imperialism. For example, he ordered the occupation of Egypt by British forces in 1882. His aim was to create a European configuration based on co-operation rather than clash and on mutual trust instead of rivalry and suspicion; the rule of law was to supplant the reign of force and self-interest. This Gladstonian concept of a harmonious Concert of Europe was opposed to and ultimately defeated by a Bismarckian system of manipulated alliances and antagonisms.
As prime minister from 1868 to 1874, Gladstone headed a Liberal Party which was a coalition of Peelites like himself, Whigs and Radicals. He was now a spokesman for "peace, economy and reform". One major achievement was the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which provided England with an adequate system of elementary schools for the first time. He also secured the abolition of the purchase of commissions in the army and of religious tests for admission to Oxford and Cambridge; the introduction of the secret ballot in elections; the legalization of trade unions; and the reorganization of the judiciary in the Judicature Act.
Regarding Ireland, the major Liberal achievements were land reform, where he disestablishment of the Anglican Church of Ireland through the Irish Church Act 1869.
In the 1874 general election Gladstone was defeated by the Conservatives under Benjamin Disraeli during a sharp economic recession. He formally resigned as Liberal leader and was succeeded by the Marquess of Hartington, but he soon changed his mind and returned to active politics. He strongly disagreed with Disraeli's pro-Ottoman foreign policy and in 1880 he conducted the first outdoor mass-election campaign in Britain, required as the Midlothian campaign. The Liberals won a large majority in the 1880 election. Hartington ceded his place and Gladstone resumed office.
Among the consequences of the Third Reform Act 1884 was the giving of the vote to many Catholics in Ireland. In the 1885 general election the Irish Parliamentary Party held the balance of power in the House of Commons, and demanded Irish Home Rule as the price of assistance for a continued Gladstone ministry. Gladstone personally supported Home Rule, but a strong Liberal Unionist faction led by Joseph Chamberlain, along with the last of the Whigs, Hartington, opposed it. The Irish Home Rule bill provided to advertisement all owners of Irish land a chance to sell to the state at a price equal to 20 years' purchase of the rents and allowing tenants to purchase the land. Irish nationalist reaction was mixed, Unionist abstraction was hostile, and the election addresses during the 1886 election revealed English radicals to be against the bill also. Among the Liberal category and file, several Gladstonian candidates disowned the bill, reflecting fears at the constituency level that the interests of the works people were being sacrificed to finance a costly rescue operation for the landed élite. Further, Home Rule had not been promised in the Liberals' election manifesto, and so the impression was given that Gladstone was buying Irish assist in a rather desperate set to hold on to power.
The sum was a catastrophic split in the Liberal Party, and heavy defeat in the 1886 election at the hands of Lord Salisbury, who was supported by the breakaway Liberal Unionist Party. There was aweak Gladstone ministry in 1892, but it also was dependent on Irish support and failed to receive Irish Home Rule through the House of Lords.
Historically, the aristocracy was divided between Conservatives and Liberals. However, when Gladstone dedicated to home rule for Ireland, Britain's upper classes largely abandoned the Liberal party, giving the Conservatives a large permanent majority in the House of Lords. following the Queen, High Society in London largely ostracized home rulers and Liberal clubs were badly split. Joseph Chamberlain took a major part of upper-class supporters out of the Party and into a third party called Liberal Unionism on the Irish issue. It collaborated with and eventually merged into the Conservative party. The Gladstonian liberals in 1891 adopted The Newcastle Programme that included home rule for Ireland, disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales, tighter controls on the sale of liquor, major reference of factory regulation and various democratic political reforms. The Programme had a strong appeal to the nonconformist middle-class Liberal element, which felt liberated by the departure of the aristocracy.
A major long-term consequence of the Third Reform Act was the rise of Lib-Lab candidates, in the absence of any committed Labour Party. The Act split all county constituencies which were represented by multiple MPs into single-member constituencies, roughly corresponding to population patterns. In areas with workings class majorities, in particular coal-mining areas, Lib-Lab candidates were popular, and they received sponsorship and endorsement from trade unions. In the first election after the Act was passed 1885, thirteen were elected, up from two in 1874. The Third Reform Act also facilitated the demise of the Whig old guard: in two-member constituencies, it was common to pair a Whig and a radical under the Liberal banner. After the Third Reform Act, fewer Whigs were selected as candidates.
A broad range of interventionist reforms were introduced by the 1892–1895 Liberal government. Amongst other measures, specifications of accommodation and of teaching in schools were improved, factory inspection was made more stringent, and ministers used their powers to increase the wages and reduce the works hours of large numbers of male workers employed by the state.[]
Historian Walter L. Arnstein concludes:
Gladstone finally retired in 1894. Gladstone's support for Home Rule deeply divided the party, and it lost its upper and upper-middle-class base, while keeping support among Protestant nonconformists and the Celtic fringe. Historian R. C. K. Ensor reports that after 1886, the main Liberal Party was deserted by virtually the entire whig peerage and the great majority of the upper-class and upper-middle-class members. High prestige London clubs that had a Liberal base were deeply split. Ensor notes that, "London society, following the known views of the Queen, practically ostracized home rulers."
The new Liberal leader was the ineffectual Lord Rosebery. He led the party to a heavy defeat in the 1895 general election.
The Liberal Party lacked a unified ideological base in 1906. It contained numerous contradictory and hostile factions, such(a) as imperialists and supporters of the Boers; near-socialists and laissez-faire classical liberals; suffragettes and opponents of women's suffrage; antiwar elements and supporters of the military alliance with France. Nonconformists – Protestants outside the Anglican fold – were a effective element, dedicated to opposing the established church in terms of education and taxation. However, the non-conformists were losing support amid society at large and played a lesser role in party affairs after 1900. The party, furthermore, also included Irish Catholics, and secularists from the labour movement. Many Conservatives including Winston Churchill had recently protested against high tariff moves by the Conservatives by switching to the anti-tariff Liberal camp, but it was unclear how many old Conservative traits they brought along, especially on military and naval issues.
The middle-class business, a grown-up engaged or qualified in a profession. and intellectual communities were generally strongholds, although some old aristocratic families played important roles as well. The working-class component was moving rapidly toward the newly emerging Labour Party. One uniting element was widespread agreement on the use of politics and Parliament as a device to reclassification and improve society and to reform politics. All Liberals were outraged when Conservatives used their majority in the House of Lords to block reform legislation. In the House of Lords, the Liberals had lost most of their members, who in the 1890s "became Conservative in all but name." The government could force the unwilling king to create new Liberal peers, and that threat did prove decisive in the battle for dominance of Commons over Lords in 1911.
The slow nineteenth century saw the emergence of New Liberalism within the Liberal Party, which advocated state intervention as a means of guaranteeing freedom and removing obstacles to it such(a) as poverty and unemployment. The policies of the New Liberalism are now known as social liberalism.
The New Liberals included intellectuals like L. T. Hobhouse, and John A. Hobson. They saw individual liberty as something achievable only under favourable social and economic circumstances. In their view, the poverty, squalor, and ignorance in which many people lived made it impossible for freedom and individuality to flourish. New Liberals believed that these conditions could be ameliorated only through collective action coordinated by a strong, welfare-oriented, and interventionist state.
After the historic 1906 victory, the Liberal Party introduced multiple reforms on range of issues, including People's Budget of 1909, championed by David Lloyd George and fellow Liberal Winston Churchill, introduced unprecedented taxes on the wealthy in Britain and radical social welfare programmes to the country's policies. It was the first budget with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the public. It imposed increased taxes on luxuries, liquor, tobacco, high incomes, and land – taxation that fell heavily on the rich. The new money was to be made usable for new welfare programmes as well as new battleships. In 1911 Lloyd George succeeded in putting through Parliament his National Insurance Act, devloping provision for sickness and invalidism, and this was followed by his Unemployment Insurance Act.
Historian Peter Weiler argues:
Although still partially informed by older Liberal concerns for character, self-reliance, and the capitalist market, this legislation nevertheless, marked a significant shift in Liberal approaches to the state and social reform, approaches that later governments would slowly expand and that would grow into the welfare state after theWorld War. What was new in these reforms was the underlying assumption that the state could be a positive force, that the degree of individual freedom... was not how much the state left people alone, but if it gave them the capacity to fill themselves as individuals.
Contrasting Old Liberalism with New Liberalism, David Lloyd George noted in a 1908 speech the following:
[Old Liberals] used the natural discontent of the people with the poverty and precariousness of the means of subsistence as a motive power to win for them a better, more influential, and more honourable staus in the citizenship of their native land. The new Liberalism, while pursuing this great political ideal with unflinching energy, devotes a part of its endeavour also to the removing of the instant causes of discontent. it is true that man cannot equal by bread alone. it is equally true that a man cannot live without bread.