Liberal Unionist Party Research Articles

The Whips of the Liberal Unionist Party in the House of Commons

This note provides the most complete list of Liberal Unionist whips in the house of commons, thus contributing to our understanding of the history of the party in parliament over the entire period of its existence from 1886 to 1912, and charts the extent of the responsibility of the party whip for the organisation of the party outside the house of commons, which peaked during the tenure of Lord Wolmer as whip from 1888 to 1892. The note concludes by observing that the division of labour regarding organisation implemented in the Conservative Party in 1911 mirrors that adopted by the Liberal Unionist Party in 1892, and that this was likely the result of Wolmer, now 2nd earl of Selborne, serving on the committee that recommended the 1911 reforms.

The Liberal Unionist Party: A History, by Ian Cawood

The Liberal Unionist Party: A History, by Ian Cawood

The Liberal Unionist Party: A History. By IanCawood. London: I.B. Taurus. 2012. xi, 362, pp. £59.50. ISBN 9781848859173.

Parliamentary HistoryVolume 33, Issue 2 p. 383-385 Review The Liberal Unionist Party: A History. By Cawood, Ian. London: I.B. Taurus. 2012. xi, 362, pp. £59.50. ISBN 9781848859173. Tom Crewe, Tom Crewe Pembroke College, CambridgeSearch for more papers by this author Tom Crewe, Tom Crewe Pembroke College, CambridgeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 May 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/1750-0206.12101_12Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume33, Issue2June 2014Pages 383-385 RelatedInformation

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: The Liberal Unionist Party: A History

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: The Liberal Unionist Party: A History

Joseph Chamberlain: a most radical imperialist

Joseph Chamberlain was a dynamic orator, notable reformer and superb parliamentary tactician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his early political career Chamberlain was a radically minded Liberal Party member and a supporter of political reform, yet after the Liberal Split, his allegiance changed dramatically when his Liberal Unionist Party entered into alliance with the Conservatives. As Colonial Secretary in Salisbury's government, he was a prime instigator of the Boer War and an important negotiator in the attempts to build an Anglo-German alliance. Ultimately disenchanted with the Conservative leadership of Salisbury and Balfour, he played an integral role in the Unionist Split over the issue of Tariff Reform which ultimately led to Balfour's downfall. Travis Crosby here sheds light on an often-overlooked, but exceptionally influential politician. He argues that Chamberlain was driven primarily by a personal need for power and control - characteristics that went beyond political loyalties. Nevertheless, his accomplishments as chief spokesman for electoral and social reform, and his achievements as Colonial Secretary, were genuine and lasting. This book sheds new light on an influential character who played an important role in the development of British politics.

The Candidates of the Liberal Unionist Party, 1886–1912*

Historians have hitherto based discussion of the electoral performance of the Liberal Unionist Party on incomplete data regarding the candidates of the party, as published sources, including F.W.S. Craig's British Parliamentary Election Results, 1885–1918, the standard reference work, include a number of cases where the party label of a Unionist candidate (either Liberal Unionist or Conservative) is uncertain or incorrect. Utilising a wide range of primary and secondary sources, this article resolves a number of these cases, and thus creates the most accurate list of Liberal Unionist candidates available. The creation of this list allows for accurate analysis of the party's history, and the article makes some preliminary observations based on the data presented. Among these observations are that the Liberal Unionists comprised a consistent percentage of the overall Unionist Party in the house of commons, that the number of seats contested by Liberal Unionists remained steady through the January 1910 election, and that existing interpretations of the electoral pact between the Liberal Unionists and Conservatives may be flawed.

The 1892 General Election and the Eclipse of the Liberal Unionists

This article seeks to establish that the 1892 general election marked a major change in the relative positions of the parties in the Unionist alliance. Not only did it reveal the limitations of the Liberal Unionist Party's strategy and appeal in an age of increasingly organised, mass politics, but it also acted as a brake on the ambitions of the new leader of the Liberal Unionists in the house of commons, Joseph Chamberlain. It argues that the Liberal Unionist Party suffered a more severe setback in 1892 than has been recognized hitherto and that Chamberlain's attempts to revive his party both before and after the general election were now prescribed by the reality of the political position in which the party now found itself. Rather than regarding the fluid political circumstances of the 1890s as the outcome of an emerging struggle between increasingly polarised ideologies, it seeks to reinforce the significance of local political circumstances and the efficacy of party management in the growing dominance of Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour and the Conservative central organisers.

The Funding of the Liberal Unionist Party and the Honours System

The Funding of the Liberal Unionist Party and the Honours System

Irish Home Rule and the Social Basis of the Great Separation in the Liberal Party in 1886

Though Mr Gladstone was speaking of the opposition to home rule in the country, rather than in the parliamentary Liberal party alone in the statement quoted above, this has become the rather standard interpretation of the great separation in the Liberal party in 1886. As one modern historian of the Liberal disruption puts it, ‘a striking characteristic of modern British history has been the class alignment of political parties… The Liberal Unionist party (those who seceded on the home rule question) was a half-way house, which entertained for a time much of the wealth and territorial influence which had been Liberal and was to be Conservative.’ One of the most influential historians of late-nineteenth-century Britain puts the issue in broader terms. The origins of Conservative dominance as well as the leakage of the landed and business classes to the Conservative party, Sir Robert Ensor argues, are to be found in the undermining of English and Irish agriculture by the invasion of North American wheat. This produced, in turn, agrarian revolution in Ireland, the rise of violent nationalism in Ireland, the growth of social and political conflict, and, ultimately, the rejection of Irish political demands by the English. Yet another attributes the fall of Gladstone's third ministry to a general revolt against the Liberal party by railway directors and other businessmen who had been alerted to the dangers to property which the government's railway policies implied. This theme has been taken up and many have come to argue that class voting emerged in 1886 when the upper – and middle-class Liberals, taking home rule as an excuse, departed to the Conservatives in a reaction against growing social radicalism.

SCOTTISH CATHOLICS AND THE BRITISH LEFT, 1918-1939

At least up to 1918, the Liberal party was the chief repository of the Catholic working-class vote. Liberals advocated both Irish Home Rule and moderate social reform and so were an obvious pole of attraction to enfranchised and politically aware Catholic voters of Irish descent. Perhaps just as important, the only alternative in the two-party British political framework was the Conservative party (known after 1911 as the Unionist party in Scotland), which was antagonistic to both Irish national and Catholic interests. From 1885 down to 1914, only a minority of enfranchised Catholics were likely to vote regularly at elections. A community, the bulk of whose members were to be found at the lower end of the social scale, was hardly likely to be a deep depository of political consciousness. The everyday struggle for survival or else the flight from the harsh realities of life induced by alcohol or more benevolent opiates like sport sapped the energies of most working-class men in Scotland no less than elsewhere. Paradoxically it was the Irish issue which, in the first instance, drew working-class activists into Scottish and British politics. In the 1880s, their real loyalty was often reserved for the United Irish League (UIL), the British section of the Irish Home Rule Party, even though some campaigned for the Liberals in their home area during elections. Launched during the heyday of Charles Stewart Parnell in the 1880s, the UIL (initially known as the Irish National League) usually delivered the Catholic Irish vote to the Liberals, principally because they were thought most likely to grant Ireland home rule.1 In practice, little love was lost between Irish activists and their Liberal allies, who, in Scotland, tended to be less radical and more prounionist in sentiment than elsewhere, to the extent that a Liberal Unionist Party emerged in Glasgow during 1885-86.2 For three decades up to 1918, the UIL was a formidable force in several Scottish constituencies. Valuable political training was given to working-class activists who, in many cases, could put their skills to good use elsewhere. Without the intrusion of the Irish question into domestic British politics, it is unlikely that so many unskilled workers would have become involved in politics.3 Bodies like the UIL, along with social and recreational offshoots like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and football clubs, gave newly arrived immigrants an opportunity to display political and organisational talents which otherwise would have lain fallow. Another view might see the Irish question as a diversion and an irritant which replaced a working-class consciousness with a nationalist one and, as well as obstructing the rise of a socialist party, triggered off sectarian quarrels within the working-class. There must be some truth in this argument but, going by the lacklustre growth of socialism in areas where emigration or the Irish issue did not count as factors, one might just as easily conclude that, minus Ireland and its troubles, the end result would not have been a faster socialist breakthrough but instead a more stable and hegemonic Liberal party.

The Changing Context of British Politics in the 1880s: The Reform Acts and the Formation of the Liberal Unionist Party

In the summer of 1886, the conservative “Whig” wing of the Liberal party, led by Lord Hartington, together with a small group of Radical Unionists under Joseph Chamberlain, broke with the Liberal leader, Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, and formed the Liberal Unionist party. This not-unexpected event occurred in two stages. The first was the defection of ninety-three Liberals to the Conservative opposition on the second reading of Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill in June, resulting in its defeat. The second stage was the decision of Hartington, Chamberlain, and their followers to contest, with Conservative support, parliamentary seats against Liberals in the ensuing July election which Gladstone called on the issue of Irish Home Rule.The election of July, 1886 proved to be a critical juncture in British party alignment. The shift in the strength of the parties caused by the return of seventy-eight Liberal Unionists to the parliament of 1886-92 and their support of the Conservatives ended forty years of Liberal domination and began a generation of Conservative hegemony. The Liberal Unionists maintained a parliamentary strength of about seventy members and a separate identity until they merged with the Conservatives in 1912; few of the dissident Liberal Unionists returned to the Liberal party. The formation of the Unionist (Conservative and Liberal Unionist) coalition had long-term ramifications as well because it set the stage for the emergence of class politics shortly after the turn of the century.

The Changing Context of British Politics in the 1880s: The Reform Acts and the Formation of the Liberal Unionist Party

The Changing Context of British Politics in the 1880s: The Reform Acts and the Formation of the Liberal Unionist Party

The Liberal Unionist Party and the Irish Policy of Lord Salisbury's Government, 1886–1892

In the House of Commons on 23 May 1892, following a speech by Joseph Chamberlain in qualified support of Balfour's Irish Local Government Bill, Tim Healy assailed ‘our Birmingham Diogenes’ with considerable warmth for the manner in which such support was habitually rendered:What happens is this. The Government bring in a Bill. Its proposals are attacked, and the Government gets into distress, and then of course ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’. The Rt.hon.Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham gets up and makes a speech. I have heard him make a speech on the Coercion Bill of 1887 in almost identical terms, and also on the Parnell Commission Bill of 1888.