The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour: The Welsh Experience, 1885–1929

Abstract

The Welsh experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sheds a particularly revealing light on the fortunes of the Liberal Party. For politics and social change in Wales in this period pursued a markedly different course from that prevalent elsewhere in Britain. Recent Welsh politics have been dominated by two major characteristics — first, the completeness of the liberal ascendancy in Wales in the years down to 1914; and secondly, the unrelieved nature of the liberal decline ever since. Unlike much of England and Scotland, Wales has shown no consistent sign of a liberal revival since 1918, in the face of the mounting challenge from labour. There was no liberal recovery in Wales in the late 1950s or the early 1960s — no Welsh Torringtons, Orpingtons or Roxburghs. After the general election of 1966, the liberals retained only one seat in Wales, that of Montgomeryshire; the 1970 election brought no further success.’ The Liberal Party has long since been supplanted by labour in industrial south Wales. In the later 1960s the resurgence of Plaid Cymru posed a new threat to what survived of Welsh liberalism in the rural hinterland also.