Abstract
‘There may have been a time,’ remarked a writer in a 1905 issue of the Labour Leader ‘when liberalism meant something.… Today it is merely an ante-room to toryism, a kind of lavatory where the parvenus tidy themselves up and change their garments as they press in amongst the old nobility.’1 The immediate cause of this damning indictment was the inability of the Liberal Party to produce a very positive programme on which to fight a general election which everyone knew could not be long delayed. When the election did eventually come, in January 1906, the liberals had still failed to come up with any substantial programme, other than that of reversing the major pieces of legislation enacted by the late unionist administration. The electorate apparently did not share the views expressed in the Labour Leader, however, for the liberals were returned with an overwhelming majority. Yet within twenty years of this great triumph the party lay in ruins, divided and dispirited, its place in the nation’s political edifice taken by the Labour Party. Henceforth the basic divide in British party politics was to be between collectivism as represented by the Labour Party and anti-collectivism as represented by the conservatives.
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Notes
A. J. P. Taylor, English History 19H-1945 (Oxford, 1965) p. 1. It was certainly unlikely that the average Englishman would have been unaware of the existence of local government institutions. If Mr Taylor’s statement is meant to apply to national government it is worth pointing out that the police were organised and controlled on a local basis.
G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (1965) p. 109. On the proliferation of government agencies see D. Roberts, The Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven, 1960) pp. 327–33. The philosophy underlying Victorian legislation has been the subject of a lengthy and by now rather pointless academic debate. It has been conveniently summarised by A. J. Taylor, Laissez-faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth Century Britain (1972).
A. Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (Leicester, 1970) p. 9.
F. Ponsonby, Recollections of Three Reigns (1951) p. 300.
Contemporary Review LXXXI (January 1902) p. 81. On this see B.Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain (1966) p. 21ff. The view has recently been challenged by G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (1971) p. 78.
C. F. G. Masterman, in J. T. Boulton (ed.), The Condition of England (1960) p. 59.
A. Briggs and J. Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History 1886–1923 (1971) p. 2.
D. Butler, ‘Electors and Elected’ in A. H. Halsey (ed.), Trends in British Society Since 1900 (1972) p. 227.
G. D. H. Cole, ‘British Trade Unions in the Third Quarter of the Nineteenth Century’, reprinted in E. M. Carus Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic History (1962) vol. 3, p. 220.
A. E. Musson, British Trade Unions 1800–1875 (1972) p. 58.
B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1971 ) p. 68.
H Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Pelican edition, 1963) pp. 89–90.
H. Pelling, ‘The Working Class and the Origins of the Welfare State’, in his Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (1968) pp. 1–18.
P. Snowden, ‘The Labour Party and the General Election’, Independent Review, VII (1905) p. 143.
for example, C. Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1949) pp. 212–26; D. Nicholls, ‘Positive Liberty, 1880–1914’, American Political Science Review, 56 (1962) pp. 114–28.
D. G. Ritchie, The Principles of State Interference (1891) p. 64.
H. Samuel, Liberalism (1902) p. 28.
H. Cox, Socialism in the House of Commons (1907) p. 8.
Bristol Right to Work Committee, Annual Report 1908, p. 2.
T. Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935 (Fontana edition, 1968) pp. 20–1. In ‘Some Reflections’ for this edition of his book Professor Wilson admits that his metaphor was perhaps a little rash because it has so taken the attention of readers that other explanations of the party’s downfall, ‘including the possibility that the apparent victim may have been at death’s door anyway’ have been overlooked.
R. Douglas, The History of the Liberal Party, 1895–1970 (1971) p. 3.
G. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England 1910–1914 (Capricorn edition, 1961) p. 8.
H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics 1892–1914 (Cambridge, 1973).
P. Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour. The Struggle for London 1885–1914 (1967) esp. pp. 294–8.
P. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971 ).
C. F. G. Masterman, ‘Liberalism and Labour’, Nineteenth Century, LX (1906) p. 706.
There has, of course, been a considerable amount of work on the Conservative Party and its politicians. For a recent bibliography see G. D. M. Block, ‘On the State of Conservative Studies’, Swinton Journal, 14 (1969), pp. 32–6. For a fuller list see the same author’s A Source Book of Conservative Studies (1964) pp. 13–62.
S. Salvidge, Salvidge of Liverpool (1934) p. 271.
M. Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920–1924. The Beginning of Modern British Politics (1971) p. 1.
F. Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs (1911) vol. 1, p. 316.
A. White, The Views of Vanoc: An Englishman’s Outlook (1910) p. 310.
R. Tressall, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Penguin edition, 1940) p. 33.
H. Macmillan, The Winds of Change, 1914–1939 (1966) p. 249.
R. A. Church, ‘Profit-Sharing and Labour Relations in England in the Nineteenth Century’, International Review of Social History, XVI (1971) p. 2.
B. Webb, My Apprenticeship (Penguin edition, 1971) p. 59.
E. H. Phelps Brown, The Growth of British Industrial Relations (1959) pp. 211–15.
K. D. Brown, ‘Conflict in Early British Welfare Policy: the Case of the Unemployed Workmen’s Bill of 1905’, Journal of Modern History, 43 (1971) pp. 615–29.
J. Chambers, Unemployment and Politics (Oxford, 1972) pp. 105–6.
Quoted in R. J. White, The Conservative Tradition (1950) p. 88.
G. R. Jones, ‘England’, in H. Rogger and E. Weber (eds), The European Right (1965) pp. 29–30.
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Brown, K.D. (1974). Introduction. In: Brown, K.D. (eds) Essays in Anti-Labour History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-02039-3_1
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