The Liberals' Last Hurrah
York Membery looks back to the crunch 1920s election which saw the party of Gladstone narrowly pushed into third place – a position from which it has never recovered.
The 1906 general election gave the Liberals a landslide victory - 399 seats and an overall majority of 130, with the Unionist Party reduced to a rump of 156. The big issue had been the threat to free trade, which was championed by the Liberals, versus tariff reform, proposed by the Unionists.
Less than two decades later, the Unionists' decision to embrace protectionism (tariff reform by another name) triggered the general election of December 1923. Once again, free trade was the Liberals' rallying cry and they went to the polls hoping that voters would return them to their 'rightful pre-eminence' in British politics. This time, however, there was no 1906-style electoral breakthrough, even if the result was breathtakingly close. Subsequently the party went into its long decline. So what happened in those seventeen years up to 1923?
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