Labour's Rise and the Liberal Demise: A Quantitative Perspective on the Great Debate, 1906–1918

Abstract

It all started with George Dangerfield's classic description of the circumstances surrounding the demise of Liberal England prior to World War I. He summarily recognized “that the abandonment of respectable punctilios and worn conventions, which was such a feature of society after the war, had already begun before the war.” Though drawn largely within a social context, it was obvious that Dangerfield's portrayal, especially after the precipitate decline of the Liberal Party in the interwar period, was fraught with political implications. An incubation period of almost a generation followed, but by the early 1960s The Strange Death of Liberal England, by virtue of its brilliant style and sweeping interpretation, had gained international recognition and set the tone for historiography of the Edwardian era. In his 1985 assessment of Dangerfield's impact, Peter Stansky concludes that his “interpretation will not die; no matter how often it may be knocked on the head, it has shaped the way the period is viewed….There can be few works that are so vital after fifty years, as likely to survive for another fifty or as enjoyable to read.” At the outset of the new millennium, Strange Death has lost little of its incandescence.An important aspect of the book's magnetic appeal is the groundwork it provided for the great debate over the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberals. Did these phenomena occur suddenly as a result of the First World War or were they already well in place in the pre-war years, especially from 1910 to 1914? The foremost challenge to Dangerfield's thesis, thereby instigating the controversy, came from Trevor Wilson's 1966 study, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935, which ascribes Liberal misfortunes largely to a crisis of leadership during the war.