the strange death of liberal england by george dangerfield

In politics, after all, winning is winning. Harold Wilson won by a tiny margin in 1964 but so did John Kennedy in 1960. (The number of Liberal voters varies, of course, with the number of Liberal candidates actually standing but it is a fair assumption that, had Liberal candidates been running in every constituency, the party's vote would have topped four million-some 15 per cent of the electorate.)ĭespite all this, however, it would be a mistake to underestimate the significance of the fall of Sir Alec's administration.

The real victors were the Liberals, who increased their share of the vote to over three million. But the Labour party failed to increase its share of the poll and got even fewer votes than it had in 1950-51. In actual votes, the Conservatives suffered a loss of one-and-a-half million, a clear verdict against Sir Alec Douglas-Home and his administration. The results of the election reflected pretty accurately a desire for change, but not for revolutionary change. The British people were plainly in no revolutionary mood. What is the relevance of this to Britain's recent, and rather unsensational, General Election and change of government? The Labour party, after all, won by the narrowest of margins. And with it fell that whole in-and-out, Whig-and-Tory, Eton-and-Harrow, Tweedledum-Tweedledee structure of British political culture that had lasted for over two centuries. The radical legislation of the pre-war decade should have enabled the Liberal party, like FDR's Democratic party twenty years later, to keep its grip on the working-class vote. Religious non-conformism had long been a powerful force. But Liberalism in Britain had had deep roots. How, people asked, did it happen? How, within ten years, could the triumphant Liberal party of the pre-1914 era, the reforming party of Lloyd George, Asquith, Haldane, Grey, and Winston Churchill, have lost out to the Labour party as the main champion of the British Left? There were, of course, reasons to hand: the bitter feud between the Lloyd-Georgeites and the supporters of Asquith, and the general increase in socialist strength and militancy in Europe that followed on the First World War. A generation ago, in an interesting book, George Dangerfield told the sad story of what he called “The Strange Death of Liberal England.” The collapse of a great political tradition is a solemn thing.

The strange death of liberal england by george dangerfield