Abstract
This article revises the traditional account of the Popular Front in Britain, which has been too narrowly focused on disputes between the Labour Party and the Communists and I.L.P. It shifts the emphasis to what many contemporaries saw as a more realistic form of Popular Front - co-operation between Labour and the Liberals. The article analyses the obstacles involved and the extent to which the Liberal Party adopted a Popular Front strategy under the leadership of Sir Archibald Sinclair between 1935 and 1939. It argues that by means of by-elections and regular advocacy in the News Chronicle a de facto popular Front developed despite the opposition of the Labour leadership and reservations among some leading Liberals; and it explains why the strategy had not been sufficiently effective by 1939 to have swept aside all the resistance in the party hierarchies. It concludes that at a peacetime general election a Popular Front involving the Labour and Liberal Parties would have operated in certain regions, notably in the West Country, though not in others.
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