The Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats - Professor Vernon Bogdanor FBA CBE

ladies and gentlemen I'd like to thank the hardy souls who braved the weather tonight to turn up for this lecture on the Liberals and Liberal Democrats it's not clear to me which is more bleak the weather forecast or the position of the Liberal Democrats but this lecture falls naturally into two halves corresponding to two quite distinct periods in the history of the party because unlike the Conservatives who are the subject of my first lecture in this series this is a second the Liberals have not been a governing party for the whole of the 19th and 20th centuries but only until 1922 since then they have occasionally been in government in coalition's both in war and in peace but for most of the time they've been a minor party a third party more recently they've been a fourth party since in 2015 and 2017 they won fewer seats than the SNP and they've been perhaps a somewhat ineffective minor party certainly they've been less effective in securing concessions from government than the SNP and since the June general election than the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland so broadly speaking local Liberals did until 1922 really mattered in British politics after 1922 except on quite rare occasions it did not now significantly perhaps during its period of power the Liberals were strongly against proportional representation after 1922 they came to be in favor of it proportional representation since then as sometimes seemed the central cause for which the Liberals stood but its first appearance in a liberal manifesto dates from 1922 when it was favored by the independent liberals led by Asquith who had been against proportional representation when he'd been in government equally significantly the lloyd-george liberals who were in coalition with the Conservatives and still saw themselves as a party of government did not in 1922 advocate proportional representation though Lloyd George did come to favor it later on and so the history of the Liberals falls into two distinct halves now I think the earliest mention of the word liberal can be found in the Old Testament in Isaiah where it is said the vile person shall no more be called liberal and that word liberal here means generous open-handed magnanimous and as a political philosophy liberalism was born in the conditions of the American and French Revolutions at the end of the 18th century and their central theme was the need for government to gain the consent of the governed and on the continent liberal parties preached the importance of religious tolerance free inquiry and self-government in Britain liberalism had I think deeper roots growing out of earlier conflicts and in particular the 17th century struggle for freedom of conscience and the resistance of Parliament to the arbitrary Authority of the king in the early 19th century conservatives responded to the French Revolution by a policy of resistance but liberals drew the opposite lesson revolutions occur so they believed from a refusal to reform until the agitation for reform could no longer be controlled and it burst out into revolution during the 19th century liberals did not share the of conservatives that extension of the franchise would lead to revolution they believed instead that it was an essential precondition for progress the term liberal was first used by a political party in 1800 and 47 in the general election but the formation of the Liberal Party is usually held to date from June 1900 June 1859 when in a meeting in London Whigs P lights and radicals joined together to form a new party whose aim was to remove restrictions on individual freedom and to extend the franchise the first Liberal government is generally held to be that led by Gladstone which lasted from 1868 to 1874 and after it fell the Liberals decided they needed an organization in the country to take account of the extension of the franchise which made it essential to canvass the new mass electorate this required a larger voluntary organization of constituency workers but it was more difficult for the Liberals to establish such an organization than it had been with the Conservatives because the conservative organizations a National Union and the central office which I discussed in my last lecture were simply extensions of the Conservative Party in Parliament but the Liberals unlike the Conservatives had to accommodate powerful extra parliamentary organizations such as the non conformists and various pressure groups on the Left which sought for example educational reform these organizations and pressure groups and in particular the non conformists saw the Liberal Party as a vehicle for their efforts in the 19th century religion was often more important as determinants of voting behavior than class Anglicans tending to vote conservative nonconformist liberal one of Gladstone's close Left tenants John Moore lief declared the Liberals had three bastions of strength Scottish Presbyterians English and Welsh non conformists and Irish Roman in 1877 the Liberals established a national liberal Federation to represent the party outside Parliament this her organization was under the nominal leadership of Gladstone but the real inspiration for it was the radical mayor of Birmingham Joseph Chamberlain he saw the Federation as a kind of battering ram by which he could push the more conservative minded members of parliament into more radical policies a bit like momentum and the Corvina stirs in the labour party today indeed Joseph Chamberlain in his radical period was perhaps the first Corbin astir the Liberal Party in the late 19th century stood the individual self-respect and self-reliance against the traditional forces of patronage represented by the landed aristocracy and the Church of England it was essentially a movement for political independence rather than for social or economic change and to achieve these ends it sought to reinforce the strength of middle-class nonconformity by extending the franchise to the organised working-class liberals also stored for free trade between nations on ethical grounds as much as grounds of economic interest for a new view of most liberals free trade would lead to peace and international harmony while tariff barriers were a cause of conflict liberals stood for self-government abroad for the rights of small nations and was skeptical of the value of imperialism and armaments they saw themselves as internationalists in the 20th century they were to be strong supporters of the League of Nations and then the United Nations and also leading champions of European unity and cooperation they were to be the first party to advocate that Britain joins the European community precursor of the European Union and today they are the only major party committed to a further referendum on brexit which they hope will reverse it now the first Gladstone government which lasted from 1868 to 1874 succeeded in remove many of the barriers to individual freedom it removed tests imposed on non conformists and other non Anglican denominations it began the process of state education and established the secret ballot Gladstone's second government which lasted from 1880 to 1885 expanded the franchise so that it came to embrace all male householders and it began the process of female emancipation by enabling married women to own property in their own right Gladstone's third and fourth government's in 1886 and from 1892 to 1894 glads and the only British prime minister to have headed for governments his third and fourth governments attempted to secure Home Rule for Ireland in accordance with the liberal doctrine of self-government but Gladstone failed to secure support of either the House of Lords or the electorate for this policy and it caused a split in the party leading to the defection of the leading social reformer Joseph Chamberlain who helped to form a breakaway party called the liberal unionists and eventually joined a conservative dominated cabinet becoming a staunch imperialist but Gladstone's fourth government did achieve one valuable democratic reform the reform of local government establishing a structure of district and parish councils which lasted until a local government reorganisation of 1972 but liberals were now coming to understand that freedom implied more than the removal of barriers to government action it required also positive action on the part of the state to ensure social security it needed in short measures of social welfare and by the time of Gladstone's retirement in 1894 the older liberalism as defined by Gladstone and his supporters seemed to reached its terminus and Gladstone increasingly appeared a figure from the past someone from another age he seemed unaware the new problems that Britain was facing and was out of sympathy with currents of modern thought he particularly disliked the ideas of those seeking to modernize liberalism it's pet idea he said is what they call construction that is taking into the state the business of the individual man and Gladstone particularly deplored what he called the leaning of both parties to socialism which I radically disapprove for Gladstone liberalism meant a society of self-reliant individuals were the opportunity to rise as far as their talents could take them and the opportunity of participating in politics at all levels when quitting office for the last time in 1894 he wrote of one thing I am and always have been convinced it is not by the state that man can be regenerated and the terrible woes of this darkened world effectually dealt with but politics was entering a post Gladstone in phase and it seemed to some that the basic liberal task had been completed liberals had to adjust to a new era in which social problems were coming to the fore Winston Churchill would later write that by the end of the eighth the end of the 1880s was also the end of an epoch authority everywhere was broken slaves were free conscience was free trade was free but hunger and squalor and cold were also free and people demanded something more than Liberty that was what liberalism had to accommodate itself to and some of the younger liberals were beginning to understand it legislation to improve social conditions they believed would not deprive individuals of their independence but on the contrary removed those economic constraints which restricted their independence so liberalism in future should signify not the absence of restraint but the presence of opportunities here was the germ of what was called a new liberalism which was to reach fruition in the great liberal reforming governments of nineteen five to fourteen more than ever before one Liberal Minister declared on the eve of this great government in five and two be the last liberal government able to win an overall majority on its own so of course no one realizes at the time more than ever before the Liberal Party is on its trial as an engine for securing social reform and under the premierships of Sir Henry campbell-bannerman and Asquith Sir Henry campbell-bannerman now a forgotten figure but he won the second largest majority ever gained in Britain for a party the left in nineteen six in the general election the largest was won by Tony Blair in 1997 so these are the two great figures of the British left in electoral terms so Henry campbell-bannerman and Tony Blair and Tony Blair once said that there was one tradition of the Labour Party which he didn't like and that was losing elections and this these two prime ministers Sir Henry campbell-bannerman and Asquith presided over great reforming governments which instituted old-age pensions national health insurance the germ of the post Second World War National Health Service and unemployment insurance all were part of what Winston Churchill called the untrodden ground of politics they were all new and they proved the basis of a modern welfare state in addition the Liberal government's imposed taxes on land ownership and instituted a steeply graduated progressive income tax involving the redistribution of income so the rich paid a larger share of Taxation to help finance the welfare state further than that they gave new rights to the trade unions indeed some critics argue they gave them too many rights by the trade disputes Act of nineteen six the unions were given wide legal immunities so they were no longer legally liable and could not be sued while exercising the right to strike or the right to peaceful picket though it was sometimes difficult to distinguish peaceful picketing which meant persuasion from the threat of force one conservative opponent summed up the consequence of this act by saying the King can do no wrong nor can a trade union but these immunities remained until the time of Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s there was also a second trade union reform by the trade union Act of 1913 the Liberals allowed trade unions to establish political funds thumbs which were in practice used to support the young Labor Party and a trade unionist was to be presumed to consent to part of his subscription being used for labour party funds unless he took active steps to contract out and this required specific initiative on his part and human nature being what it is few bothered to take it in consequence many conservative and liberal trade unionists must have been helping to contribute to Labour Party fans through apathy or inertia for the default position was to contribute the contracting out provision was altered to contracting in by a Conservative government in 1927 after the general strike and led to a dramatic fall in trade union funds it was then ordered back again to contracting out by the post-war Labour government in 1946 so it was clear but by 1914 liberalism could no longer be identified with a lace affair philosophy indeed it seems to me fundamentally not an economic philosophy at all but a political one its aim being to secure the emancipation and freedom of the individual economics were a means to that end and if the free market would help in achieving it well and good but if not then intervention by the state was justifiable perhaps one can say er the new liberalism what Tony Blair said of new labor at the end of the 20th century that the market is a good servant but a bad master that is what they believed now some held that by this time liberalism was merging into a different philosophy and one liberal thinker wrote in nineteen four that the old liberalism had done its work it had all been very well in its time but political democracy and the rest were now well established facts what was needed was to build a social democracy on the basis so prepared and for that we needed new formulas new inspirations others preferred not to use the terms social democracy but new liberalism but the term new liberalism seems to me in part of fudge because there might well be a conflict between liberal values and social democratic values a number of liberal reforms exemplify that conflict for example the National Insurance Act required compulsory contributions from employers and employees to finance unemployment and health insurance why in liberal terms should individuals be required to contribute the Trade Union Act of 1913 which I have just described required trade unionists specifically to contract out if they did not wish to support the Labor Party well that a truly liberal measure from the point of view of expanding individual freedom of choice perhaps from a modern vantage point liberalism and social democracy were coming to diverge and perhaps social democracy was coming to supplant liberalism perhaps the leading liberal reformers and lloyd-george in particular far from adapting liberalism were leaving it behind and becoming something different Social Democrats they were taking Britain out of one era a liberal era and into another a more statist era perhaps paradoxically Asquith and Lloyd George were presiding over the demise of liberal England and there is so it seems to me one important philosophical difference between liberalism and social democracy and it became clear when Lloyd George introduced his policy of national health insurance in 1911 Lord George wanted to introduce a single commission to administer the scheme for the whole of the United Kingdom he was pressed however to set up separate national commissions for England Scotland Wales and Ireland the whole of Ireland was then of course part of the United Kingdom now although Welsh himself Lloyd George resisted this idea of set national Commission's but at almost the last moment before the bill was published he gave way on the grounds that you have got to defer to sentiment now why was Lloyd George so keen on a single scheme for the whole country it was because he believed that the benefits which individuals should receive through welfare measures should depend not on where they lived but upon their needs whether a claimant lived in Scotland Wales or England or Ireland was irrelevant what was important was how ill he was I used the word he since the National Health Insurance Scheme made no provision for women except for a maternity benefit now the problems of the underprivileged in Ireland Scotland or Wales so Lloyd George believed did not differ in any essential respect from the problems of the underprivileged in England they were to be resolved not by policy divergences between the four parts of the kingdom but a strong reforming government at Westminster a true welfare state therefore implied centralized government this went against liberal ideas of decentralization devolution local self-government and participation so there seems to be a conflict between a social democratic philosophy and a liberal one now the principle that benefits should depend upon need and not upon geography was carried for fruition by the acting government after 1945 and reached its culmination in the National Health Service established in 1948 Bevin and Irene Bevin was like Lloyd George a Welshman he too resisted creating separate health services for the different component parts of the United Kingdom but unlike Lloyd George he felt no need to defer to sentiment and a single national organization was created to administer the new service perhaps sentiment was weaker in 1946 than it had been in 1911 but with devolution in 1998 implemented by a the government paradoxically a social democratic government not a liberal one the wheel has turned full circle again and health service has been devolved in Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland and these devolved bodies have very wide powers they could if they so wished abolish the National Health Service in their areas it's an interesting question of how far differences in health care are acceptable to the public sometimes the same people who plead for devolution decentralization and localism and stress the value of community or liberal concepts also complain of the same people complain about the postcode lottery but to deal with the postcode lottery implies centralization a social democratic concept and what seems clear to me is that liberalism and social democracy are bottomed different and possibly incompatible philosophies the one favoring the dispersal of power limiting the size of the state and dispersing it territorially the other legitimizing strong and centralized government and what is also clear is that the welfare reforms or the Liberal government in the early 20th century like those of the post-war Atlee government are to 1945 presuppose some degree of centralization so the notion of the new liberalism was to some extent a fudge an attempt to reconcile incompatible philosophies of government but perhaps that did not matter too much from a practical point of view before 1914 for the Liberals seem securely in power and did not face real competition from the Labour Party which was little more than a small pressure group at the time before 1914 it never succeeded in winning more than 42 seats and many of those were won with the aid of an electoral pact with liberals so a number of Labour MPs owed their seats to the acquiescence of the Liberals by 1914 the Liberals seemed to have come to terms with the new forces in politics and the growth of class feeling they were no longer a mere repository for nonconformist or Celtic grievances that seemed to be a vehicle by which the working class and the under privileged more generally could secure social reform few would have believed in 1914 that the Liberals would soon be supplanted by the Labour Party in social reform the Liberals were in many respects a head of labour they were certainly not holding labor back indeed some in the labour party were coming to believe that the formation of an independent party had been a mistake and that there was little that the new party could achieve which could not be better achieved by the Liberals many went further and believed that the Progressive Alliance was growing up between the two parts of the left since they seemed to be moving close together and in 1914 Lloyd George asked Ramsay MacDonald the leader of the Labour Party where the Labour might actually be willing to join the government some speculated that when Asquith's retired he would be succeeded by Lloyd George and then by Ramsay MacDonald as leader of a joint Progressive Party but it was not to be after the first world war the Liberals were supplanted as the main party over left by Labour and Lloyd George who fell from power in 1922 was to prove the last liberal Prime Minister historians have spilt much ink on the reasons for the decline of the Liberal Party and replacement by Labour indeed it has become something of an academic growth industry some believe the rise of labour was inevitable in a society divided by class which had conceded universal suffrage my own view for what it is worth is somewhat different it is that the decline of liberals was not preordained but contingent contingent on the war and the wartime feud between the followers of Asquith and the followers of Lloyd George who displaced Asquith in 1916 war of course is always dangerous for liberals so it requires a great increase in the strength and authority of the state and the introduction of what may be seen as a liberal measures in particular conscription which was adopted of the first time in British history in 1916 wars are not in general thought or one on liberal values in 1916 Asquith was supplanted as prime minister by Lloyd George partly because Asquith did not seem to be in sympathy with some of the illiberal measures needed to win the war and after 1916 there was a split between the followers of the two men and it worsened after the war when the Lloyd George faction the so-called coalition liberals fought the election of 1918 in alliance with the Conservatives now in this election the Lord George liberals and conservatives together won a large majority and governs the coalition while the followers of Asquith went into opposition the Lord George coalition Liberals won a hundred and fifty eight seats while the Asquith e'en independent Liberals won just 28 but the figure for the Lord George Liberals is misleading because their seats were won through an electoral pact with the Conservatives which ensured just one coalition candidate stood in each constituency so most coalition liberals were not opposed by conservatives and owed their seats to the Conservatives indeed Lloyd George only retained the Premiership by leave up the Conservatives who were by far the largest party in the coalition government the a swift and Liberals by contrast had won most of their seats against the opposition of both conservatives and labour now in the 1918 election the Labour Party won 63 seats 35 more than the independent Liberals labour was therefore now the largest opposition party it is possible that a united Liberal Party would have won more seats than Labour but in the event it was now labour rather than the Liberals that led the opposition and under a first past the post electoral system labour reap benefits from its status as a second party because voters on the right gravitated to the Conservatives to keep labour out while voters from the Left gravitated away from the Liberals to labour which was the party that seemed to have the best chance of asking the conservative so the Liberals came to be squeezed between left and right and that has been their basic problem ever since and it was a split and the Liberals in my view that gave labour the chance to fill the gap on the left in the 1920s the Liberals came to be split between those on the left and those on the right the radical section and the Whig sections now someone asked the great economist John Maynard Keynes himself a liberal what the difference was between the Whigs and the radicals Keynes replied as follows a Whig is a perfectly sensible conservative a radical is a perfectly sensible labour right a liberal is anyone who is perfectly sensible but there was simply not enough sensible voters in the 1920s to elect a liberal government liberals found themselves a third party and as time went on an increasingly ineffective one labour now larger than the Liberals refused to renew the Progressive Alliance Ramsay MacDonald the first Labour prime minister told the editor of the Manchester Guardian as the garden then walls in July 1924 during the period of the first Labour government that he disliked the Liberals more than the Conservatives in the words of the editor MacDonald reverted again in the game to this dislike and distrust of liberals he could get on with the Tories they differed at times openly then forgot all about it and shook hands they were gentlemen but the Liberals were cads the feeling against the Liberals was General in the party and one member of the first Labour government told his store and there was only one generally accepted thing in all the confusion and flux of the time for parties determination to avoid the liberal embrace Labour's leaders realized that them to share office with the Liberals would mean a new lease of life to the older party whereas the attainment of power was dependent upon the destruction of the Liberals in 1931 the Liberals split three ways two of the factions joined the conservative dominated national government though one of them broke off in 1932 because it could not agree to a departure from free trade the other faction in the government the so-called liberal Nationals gradually became absorbed by the Conservatives as the anti Home Rule liberal unionists had been in the late 19th century and the independent Liberals were later to call the liberal Nationals Vichy liberals now the Liberals did take part in government again in the war from nineteen forty to forty five as part of the Churchill coalition but after the war they seemed irrelevant and by the early 1950s it seems as if the party might disappear entirely as late as May 1964 the times was to declare in a leader by all accounts the Liberal Party ought to die and yet it does not in the 1951 general election the Liberals put up just 109 candidates and won only six seats all but one of the six were elected without conservative opposition the only MP to win against both conservative and Labour was Joe grimmons in the far-flung and rather untypical constituency of orkney and shetland the Liberals seemed irrelevant in a period of consensus politics when it appeared that liberal values were so widely diffused in the conservative and labor parties but not only was there no room for a separate liberal party there was no need for one the paradox of the post-war consensus is that was built on the work of two great liberals beverage and Keynes two of the most influential figures in 20th century Britain the one showing the way to a higher level of employment the other showing the way to a universal welfare state but with a welfare state and full employment achieved why did you need a separate liberal party liberal values were already securely defended by the Conservatives under the benign leadership of Churchill and the Labour Party and athle one foreign commentator declare that the Liberal Party buried itself with a kind of triumph because Britain as a whole is liberal the liberal party dies and indeed it seemed for a brief time as if the liberal part would disappear but the leader of the party in the immediate post-war years Clement Davis was determined to preserve its independence after the disastrous 1951 election Churchill who had a soft spot for liberals having been one himself in between leaving the Conservative Party in nineteen four and rejoining it in 1924 offered Clement Davis a place in the cabinet as Minister for education but Liberal Party executive urged his office be rejected and Davis agreed this was the right decision had Davis accepted the offer the Liberals would almost certainly have ceased to exist as an independent political force but for you lloyd George's former secretary had written to Clement Davis in January 1950 there would certainly have been no liberal parliamentary party today Clement Davis is today a forgotten figure but perhaps he more than anyone else is responsible for the fact that the Liberal Party actually survived to fight another day Davis was succeeded as Liberal leader in 1956 by Joe grim ined and Greenland was to give the Liberal Party a new strategy and a new direction now Gribben believed that the Liberal Party was in decline because it seemed to have no place in a system of class politics and that was because the Liberal Party had no social base and some argued it was therefore irrelevant but grimmons said this lack of a social base was not a weakness but a source of strength because class identity was beginning to decline in the affluent Britain of the 1950's and that was that why the Labour Party lost votes in every general election held during that decade after the third conservative election victory in 1959 Harold Macmillan the prime minister declared that it showed that class war was over and in grimmons view voters were becoming more concerned with issues and with policies rather than seeing their class identity represented in Parliament grimmons judgment was perceptive it weakness was that it failed to appreciate the glacially slow rate at which class alignments were weakening and the great residual strength which existing class alignments still gave to labour and conservative parties it would not prove easy for the Liberals either to displace one of them or to secure a realignment of parties in which they might play a major part grim and insisted that the Liberals were not a party of the center equidistant between the Conservatives and labor but a party of the left but a different sort of left from the status left represented by the Labour Party which so Gribben believed was shackled by its fundamentalist socialist element the Labour Party was committed to the extension of public control in the full nationalization and it was reliant on the trade unions the Liberals proposed an alternative set of policies in place of nationalization they favored coke partnership in industry and above all constitutional reform including Home Rule for Scotland and Wales and in British entry into the European Community under grim and for parties seemed to recover from its previous torpor and loss of direction it also enjoyed an electoral revival and gun to win by-elections culminating in a sensational triumph at Orpington in 1962 when a conservative majority of nearly 15,000 in the 1959 general election at which the Liberals had been third was converted into a liberal majority of nearly eight thousand one opinion poll even showed at the next election night even yield a Liberal government but this proved the first of many false dawns and in the 1964 general election Liberal representation increased from just six to just nine MPs now according to grim on strategy the liberal aim should be to replace labour as the main party of the left and become once again a party of government but grimmons accepted that the Liberals would be unlikely to achieve this aim in one fell swoop right grimmons says in his memoirs in telling the party that it could not by some miracle of pathogenesis spring from six MPs to a majority in the House of Commons it would have to go through a period of coalition and what grim and hoped for was a realignment of politics a new Lib lab alignment leading to a party of the left after Labour's third election defeat in a row in 1959 he wrote I have always said that we should have a new Progressive Party and it would have to attract many people who present lean towards the Labour Party we should try and have a new alternative to the Conservatives a radical non socialist alternative in 1962 he declared the divisions in politics for in the wrong place the natural division should be into a Conservative Party a small group of convinced socialists in the full sense and a broadly based progressive party it is the foundations of the last-named that the Liberal Party seeks to provide grim and believed that the ideological and economic interests behind the parties were gradually being eroded with the decline of class conflict and the end of the ideological argument between capitalists and socialists what kept the party system together in his view were the forces of inertia and patronage as well as the absence of a clear alternative grimmons hoped supply that clear alternative he wanted to recreate a Progressive Alliance of the type that had governed Britain in the great days before 1914 but there was a fundamental difficulty with the grimmons strategy it did not correspond to the party's electoral profiles from the 1950s the party made its most spectacular by-election games such as that in or Penton in 1962 in conservative seats during period of Conservative government when the Conservatives were temporarily unpopular the Liberals made no by-election gains at all from Labour between 1929 and 1969 the Liberals were a focus for disillusioned conservatives not for radical labor voters opposed to their party's position on nationalization and its reliance on the trade unions and that disillusioned conservatives did not seem to remain disillusioned for very long they tended to register protest votes for the Liberals in by-elections only to return to the conservative fold during the general election these disillusioned conservatives could certainly not be relied on as a solid block of liberal support still less of the nucleus of a new progressive party since some of their views were not particularly progressive so the disillusioned conservatives were hardly an electoral constituency from which a realignment of the Left could be created one could not realign the left by winning conservative seats conceptually therefore the liberals might be an alternative to labor but sefa logically they were an alternative to the Conservatives moreover the strategy of realignment was based on the premise that the labour party could not win a majority on its own and would therefore need liberal supports to form a government that seemed a reasonable prognostication after Labour's third successive electoral defeat in 1959 when the party and the leadership of Hugh Gates kill seemed about to tear itself apart on the issues of nationalization and unilateral nuclear disarmament and then again between 1983 and 1992 when labour was again losing elections and appeared incapable of fully modernizing itself but on both occasions labor did recover securing overall majorities in 1964 and 1997 helped him part by the votes of liberals who had won seats from disillusioned conservatives and this seemed to render the strategy of realignment futile nevertheless grim and ended the period of liberal decline and reversed it liberals under his leadership moved forward under each Conservative government and then back again under Labour when the Conservatives were the main opposition but the back would move still left them in a better position than they had been before 1955 the last election before grim and leader was proved a low point in liberal fortunes in 1959 it's vote doubled and in 1964 it nearly doubled again by 1979 its vote was six times what it had been in 1955 now although grimmons searched for realignment proved abortive hopes of an agreement between the two parties were really resurrected during the period of the Lib Lapp Act of 1977 2/8 secured under the leadership of grimmons successor as Liberal leader David Steele then after Labour's election defeat in 1979 there was an even greater opportunity with a breakaway from a lame of party in 1981 the formation of a new party the social democrat party SDP which formed an alliance for liberals and this breakaway had been foreshadowed by Roy Jenkins the first leader of the SDP and a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer and leadership contender who in 1979 had called for what he describes a strengthening of the radical Center a reiteration of the grimmons strategy now these SDP formed in 1981 was led by 4x labor cabinet ministers Jenkins himself Shirley Williams David Owen and Bill Rogers and at the beginning there were hopes of this new alliance formed with the Liberals might sweep all before it in November 1981 one opinion poll put it at 50% and economists cover heralded the new alliance as her majesty's opposition but it was not to be the conservators recovered partly as a result of the Falklands factor following the victorious Falklands War in 1982 but probably more in my opinion as a result of economic improvement slow though it was while labour held together in the general election of 1983 the Liberal SDP Alliance did perform remarkably well suit when tea 5% of the vote by far the best performance for a third party since 1929 and in England it secured a higher vote than labour overall there were two percentage points behind labor which gained 27% of the vote but the Alliance was cruelly victimized by the first-past-the-post system which rewards parties such as labor whose vote was concentrated in the traditional working-class area than in Scotland rather than parties whose support was more evenly spread as was the case with the Alliance the Alliance won just 23 seats for their 25% of the vote while labour with 27% of the vote won 207 a graphic illustration of the working of the electoral system the Alliance won numerous second places but that was no good and the election resulted in a conservative landslide there was another conservative landslide in 1987 when the alliance fell back slightly by one or two percent of the vote while Labour recovered securing 31% of the vote Labour had clearly reasserted itself as the main party of the left and the Alliance was all practical purposes dead the bulk of the SDP then decides to merge for the Liberals to form a Liberal Democrats and the first leader of the Liberal Democrats was Paddy Ashdown who renewed the grimmons strategy of realignment and as the 1992 election approached Ashdown made it clear that his party would not prop up John Major if the conservative leader failed to retain his overall majority but this allowed major to claim that a vote for the Liberal Democrats was equivalent to vote for labour and it seems that some conservative inclined Liberal Democrats swung to the Conservatives late in the campaign to avoid the dangers of the hung parliament and an unstable labour Liberal Democrat government led by Neil Kinnock nevertheless the Liberal Democrats continued to seek an accommodation with labour and indeed the inputs towards realignment seemed to accelerate after Labour's fourth election defeat in 1992 when it once more began to appear Labour might never be able to win a general election on its own in 1993 even before Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party he the leading moderniser in the Labour Party and after had agreed on the need for good relationships between the parties after John Smith died in 1994 and Blair succeeded the leadership then in Ashdown's words the relationship took off and we worked very closely together coordinating our campaigns including attacks on major Prime Minister's Questions coordinating our campaigns to a much greater extent than anyone has ever realized in a speech charred in 1992 ash town cold as grim endure done for a new forum for those wishing to see a viable alternative to conservatism and this speech fitted in with developing sentiment amongst Liberal Democrat voters until 1992 the British election survey showed they have seen themselves since 1974 as close to the Conservatives except for the time of a 1979 election held in the aftermath of a Lib lap pact but from 1992 Liberal Democrat voters came to be more evenly split and then closer to New Labour in May 1995 ash town declared that it surprised no one when we say that if the Conservatives lose their majority in parliament and seek our support to continue in office they will not receive it people must know that if they kick the Tories out through the front door we Liberal Democrats will not allow them to sneak in through the back by 1997 two-thirds of Liberal Democrats preferred Labour's of the Conservatives and in the election of that year 43 of the 46 Liberal Democrat MP s won their seats by defeating conservative challengers where labour was in third place the Liberal Democrats had clearly become an anti conservative not an anti labour party and on the day of the election Blair seemed to welcome realignment saying I am absolutely determined to mend the schism that occurred in the progressive forces in British politics at the start of the century but Blair won too large a landslide to make realignment possible he admittedly did his best to implement what Ashdown called the project of realignment indeed it appears Blaire went so far as to propose a merger of the two parties as Prime Minister he established a joint Labour Liberal Democrat Cabinet Committee on constitutional reform a remarkable constitutional innovation and an independent commission on electoral reform under Roy Jenkins promising to hold a referendum on its recommendations in 1998 the Jenkins Commission reported in favor of a limited proportional representation but it soon became clear that important sections of the Labour Party were opposed both to proportional representation and to the project and no referendums held in 1999 Ashdown despairing of the possibility of realignment resigned as Liberal Democrat leader and under his success of Charles Kennedy that joint cabinet committee gradually atrophied and ceased to meet but asked al although like criminals steel he had failed to cure realignment could claim some success for the project and that he had helped secure coalitions between labour and the Liberal Democrats in the devolved administration's in Scotland and Wales as well as proportional representation for elections to the European Parliament now the aftermath of the 2010 election which resulted in a hung parliament provided a further possibility for realignment Paddy Ashdown spoke on the radio on the Tuesday morning after the election arguing that labour and the Liberal Democrats could form a government and dare the smaller parties to vote them out though he later changed his mind and came to support the conservative Liberal Democrat coalition the trouble was the parliamentary arithmetic did not favour a coalition of the left the Conservatives had 307 seats labour 258 and the Liberal Democrats 57 labour had lost its parliamentary majority and was 49 seats behind the Conservatives so it seemed to many that Labour had lost the election and neither party had lost 94 seats the largest loss of seats by any government since 1931 the Liberal Democrats had lost 5 seats from their high point of 62 seats in 2005 and so an arrangement between labour and the Liberal Democrats would appear as a losers coalition a means of sheltering to parties that had been rejected by the voters the parliamentary arithmetic seemed to point not to a liberal Democrat labor coalition but to a conservative Liberal Democrat one which is what occurred there is an irony in all this in 1997 labour had been too strong to make realignment feasible in 2010 it was too weak the middle point had never been reached so the Liberal Democrats joined a coalition with the Conservatives in 2010 they were in Parliament in government for the first time since 1945 and in peacetime since 1932 but the decision proved fatal to them as a party Tony Blair said presently if you have attacked labour from the left for 13 years and then enter a coalition with the Conservatives you have questions to answer through the election campaign the Liberal Democrats had in fact opposed the main plank of conservative economic policy which was immediate and drastic cuts in public expenditure even so survey evidence indicated that though before the election most Liberal Democrats would have preferred a reign with labour they did strongly endorse the Liberal Democrat conservative coalition and if so s'more e-poll on 12 13th of May 2010 asked do you think that Nick Clegg was right or wrong to form a coalition with the Conservatives those who had said they'd voted Liberal Democrat seventy-four percent thought he was right than only 22 percent thought he was wrong now there was ideological sympathy as well as personal chemistry between Nick Cameron sorry Nick Clegg avoidance Nick nick clegg of a liberal leader and David Cameron because Clegg belonged to the orange book wing of the Liberals Liberal Democrats rather than its social wing now the orange book who was a volume of essays published in 2004 on future Liberal Democrat policy in which Clegg and some of his allies contributed one of the essays was called reclaiming liberalism by Clegg's Ally David Laws he quoted with approval Jo Grumman by 1980 had abandoned his earlier views on a realignment to the left and he cared that much of what mrs. Thatcher and say Keith Joseph say undo is in the mainstream of liberal philosophy law then went on to ask how it was that over the decades up to the 1980s the liberal belief in economic liberalism was progressively eroded by forms of soggy socialism and corporatism there had been he said a progressive dilution of the traditional liberal beliefs in the benefits of markets choice the private sector and capitalism we must laws insisted reject nanny state liberalism and this was a central theme of the orange book the social wing of the Liberal Democrats which had been dominant before Clegg became leader had looked to the left and to realignment the orange book Liberal Democrats by contrast believed the party had become too statist in its approach and that as a liberal party it ought to give more emphasis to the market which provided for a widening of choice and a greater freedom of the individual Nick Clegg then was an unusual Liberal Democrat leader more sympathetic to market economics than his predecessors Sam Ming Campbell Charles Kennedy Paddy Ashdown and David Steele and any of them a coalition with the Conservatives would have been much less likely and indeed Charles Kennedy cast a solitary vote in the parliamentary party against it to his critics Clegg seemed to have little understanding of the ethos or traditions of his party during their abortive negotiations after the 2010 election Gordon Brown warned Clegg against entering into a coalition with the Conservatives the Tories he told him will destroy you and they will pull us all apart on Europe that was a prescient warning in addition the Liberal Democrats alienated a social base that they had so painfully constructed since the 1970s a social base of middle-class public service professionals and students the Liberal Democrat 2010 manifesto had promised the abolition of student fees and Liberal Democrat MP s gave a personal pledge in support of this promise but in the event the conservative Liberal Democrat coalition tripled student fees it did not help much when Clegg confessed didn't that he had never really believed in the promise in the first place in the general election of 2015 the Liberal Democrats were destroyed they fell from 57 seats to 8 in 2017 they staged a mild recovery and secured 12 seats but they remained an irrelevant force in the House of Commons oddly enough they remain a powerful force in the House of Lords a body to which they're opposed having almost no having almost one eighths of the peers half a number of Labour peers and two-fifths of the number of conservative peers in the Commons the Liberal Democrats suffer from the absence of proportional representation in the Lord's they benefit from it the Liberal Democrats had hoped in government to reform the Lord's and secure other constitutional reforms they failed in 2011 a referendum was held on the alternative vote system the alternative vote is not a system of proportional representation and indeed it had been dismissed before the 2010 election by Clegg as a miserable little compromise and nevertheless he urged people to vote for it and it was the most that he could secure from the Conservatives who campaigned vigorously against any change the referendum was lost by a vote of two to 100 horizon return out of 42% Oxford Cambridge Camden and Islington voted for the change but few others House of Lords reform though Ford but the government ran to the sands owing to conserve the backbench opposition and half-hearted conservative ministry will support the general election of 2015 left the Liberal Democrats in their worst position since 1970 when they had won just six seats all the progress they had made in the intervening years through the Lib Lab pact Liberal SDP Alliance the joint talks between Ashton and Blair all this seemed to have been reversed three times in the 20th and 21st centuries for liberals had entered into peacetime coalition's with the Conservatives and each time it had proved disastrous from 1918 to 1922 they had been in coalition with the Conservatives under Lloyd George and that had ended their role as a party of government in 1931 they entered the conservative dominated national government and that ended their role as a party of opposition the 2010 coalition ended their role as a third party now once the Liberals were in decline in 1922 they'd find themselves impotence under normal circumstances when one party had a working majority in the Commons they could only exert influence say it would seem in a hung parliament or a situation such as that of 1964 to 6 or October 1974 when the government in office enjoyed but a small majority and was fearful of being forced to the country before it is ready to face the voters so the strength of the Liberals seemed dependent less upon their own efforts than upon the weakness of the other parties but the trouble was that as the Liberal SDP Alliance was defined campaign for a hung parliament is not a particularly inspiring electoral cry Margaret Thatcher had said in 1978 you cannot run for a hung parliament she was not quite right when she added how do people vote for a hung parliament in many constituents as a voter could help secure a hung parliament through tactical voting but this that sometimes require voting not liberal but for another party one would have had to vote Labour in 1983 and conservative in 1997 in many constituencies so the Liberal Democrats could not really campaign for a hung parliament so this would entail telling electors in some seats not to vote for the party's own candidates but even when hung pants did occur as in 1924 1929 to 31 1974 and 2010 to 15 the Liberals did not in practice seem to be able to exert leverage very successfully in such situations a minority party has to decide whether to ally with the government or the opposition whatever choice the party makes would annoy one group of supporters if the party allies with the Conservatives voters on the left to be alienated if allied to labour votes on the right would be alienated David Steele was once asked in a television interview which of the two major parties he preferred he said he felt like Cinderella being asked to choose between the two ugly sisters this was a skillful reply to a protic interviewer but hardly result of dilemma the fundamental problem was that under the first past the post electoral system was one liberal had presently noted as early as 1917 there are only two sovereign words when an issue is raised and those words are yes and no our leaders are apt to avoid saying yes and no and they are apt to try to reconcile the two significantly in the immediate post-war period two of the children of lloyd-george defected in different directions William Lloyd George became a conservative and was a Home Secretary in Antony Eden's government meagan Lloyd George on the other hand joined the Labour Party but even if the Liberals did join an alliance or coalition with another party that might compromise liberal independence the Liberals existed after all to achieve certain liberal aims might not cooperation with one of the two illiberal parties compromise those aims rather than helping to achieve them the party had to choose therefore not just between left and right but between cooperation and independence these have been the dilemmas which liberals and Liberal Democrats have wrestled with since 1918 it cannot be said that they have been successfully solved probably they cannot be resolved [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 26,936

Rating: 4.8571429 out of 5

Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, free video, free education, education, public lecture, Event, free event, free public lecture, free lecture, liberal democrats, The Liberal Party, liberalism, Gladstone, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, Lloyd-George, Clement Davies, Jo Grimond, paddy ashdown, Nick Clegg, politics, political history, history, Government, Political party, 1850

Id: 44ir_D_hD-M

Length: 61min 25sec (3685 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2017

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[u/zethien]

The second of a two part series speaking of the character, features, and origin of the conservative and liberal parties in the UK.

First part here: The (UK) Conservative Party - Professor Vernon Bogdanor