ABSTRACT

The single greatest change in English politics in this century was the replacement of the Liberal party by the Labour party as the party of the Left after the First World War. The cause of the decline of the Liberal party after reaching the height of its power in 1906 has never been investigated in detail. Only recently have historians begun to examine the specific social and political changes which caused the decline. But one explanation of this development, at least, can now safely be abandoned. This is the charge made by Harold Laski that Liberalism declined as the result of an intellectual and political failure to meet the problems of an advanced industrial state. As he wrote, Liberalism

refused to confront squarely the fact that this changed world demanded, especially in the economic sphere, massive social controls if the freedom it deemed the supreme good was to have meaning in the lives of the multitude; and it refused, also, to confront the fact that social control means social planning. It embarked upon half-hearted concessions; it did not re-examine its constitutive principle. 1