ABSTRACT
THE exact significance of the immense Liberal majority at the polls in January 1906 has long been a lively source of controversy among historians. Even at the time there were commentators, especially within the new Labour Party, who regarded the electoral landslide as a political illusion, and the Liberals as essentially doomed. Among the later writers who popularized this theme was George Dangerfield in a brilliantly written but basically misleading work published in 1936, The Strange Death of Liberal England. In this volume, which has had a totally disproportionate influence upon later writers, Dangerfield argued that the new challenges, economic, social and ideological, of the years 1910–14 really marked the death of the moral imperatives upon which the Liberal Party was founded. The future replacement of the Liberals by the Labour Party as the major spokesmen for the British Left was thus an inevitable process, for which the conflict between Asquith and Lloyd George in 1916 merely supplied the occasion rather than the cause. From a different standpoint, some recent historians, most notably Paul Thompson and Henry Pelling, have concluded that the middle-class character of Edwardian Liberalism made it basically incapable of accommodating its working-class support, either at the levels of local constituency organization or of national policy, and that the eventual triumph of an increasingly militant Labour Party was inexorable. Mr Thompson, basing his analysis on the situation in London, sees the electoral triumph of 1906 as essentially fortuitous, based on the accidental coincidence of a revival of political nonconformity and the temporary re-alignment of the working-class Liberal vote. Radicalism in the 1900s, he has written, was ‘increasingly an outdated political concept’. 1 Dr Pelling, the leading authority on the rise of the Labour Party, has added that it, and 39not the Liberals, was equipped ‘to take advantage of twentieth-century political conditions’. 2
