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This article is about the historic Liberal Party. For the party formed by the 1988 merger with the SDP, see Liberal Democrats. For the Liberal Party formed by those opposed to the 1988 merger, see Liberal Party (UK, 1989).

The Liberal Party was a liberal[2] political movement that formed one of the two major political parties in the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its influence then waned, but not before it had moved toward social liberalism and introduced important elements of Britain's welfare state.

The party arose from an alliance of Whigs and free-trade Peelites and Radicals during the 1850s. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had formed four governments under William Gladstone one of the party's most significant leaders although they were punctuated by heavy election defeats. Despite becoming divided over the issue of Irish Home Rule, the party returned to power in 1906 with a landslide victory and, between then and the onset of World War I, Liberal governments oversaw the welfare reforms that created a basic British welfare state. During this time, the party's other two most significant leaders came to the fore: Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916; and David Lloyd George, who followed Asquith as Prime Minister for the rest of World War I and thereafter until 1922.

1922 marked the end of the coalition the party had formed with the Conservative ("Tory") Party during the war and the last time the party was, in government, anything more than a junior coalition partner. By the end of the 1920s, the Labour Party had replaced it as the Tories' primary rival and the party went into a decline that, by the 1950s, saw it winning no more than six seats at general elections. Apart from a few notable by-election victories, the party's fortunes did not improve significantly until it formed the SDPLiberal Alliance with the newly formed Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. At the next general election, in 1983, the Alliance received over a quarter of the overall vote, but only secured 23 of the 650 seats contested. After the 1987 general election saw this share fall below 23%, the Liberal and SDP parties formally merged in 1988 to form the Liberal Democrats. A small splinter Liberal Party was formed in 1989 by former party members opposed to the merger.

Two of the most prominent intellectuals associated with the Liberal Party were the economist John Maynard Keynes and social planner William Beveridge.

During the 19th century, the Liberal Party was broadly in favour of what would today be called classical liberalism: supporting laissez-faire economic policies such as free trade and minimal government interference in the economy (this doctrine was usually termed 'Gladstonian Liberalism' after the Victorian era Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone). The Liberal Party favoured social reform, personal liberty, reducing the powers of the Crown and the Church of England (many of them were Nonconformists) and an extension of the electoral franchise. Sir William Harcourt, a prominent Liberal politician in the Victorian era, said this about liberalism in 1872:

If there be any party which is more pledged than another to resist a policy of restrictive legislation, having for its object social coercion, that party is the Liberal party. (Cheers.) But liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right, (Hear, hear.) The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally thisthat a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes; a Liberal Government tries, as far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do as he wishes. It has been the tradition of the Liberal party consistently to maintain the doctrine of individual liberty. It is because they have done so that England is the place where people can do more what they please than in any other country in the world...It is this practice of allowing one set of people to dictate to another set of people what they shall do, what they shall think, what they shall drink, when they shall go to bed, what they shall buy, and where they shall buy it, what wages they shall get and how they shall spend them, against which the Liberal party have always protested.[3]

The political terms of "modern", "progressive" or "new" Liberalism began to appear in the mid to late 1880s and became increasingly common to denote the tendency in the Liberal Party to favour an increased role for the state as more important than the classical liberal stress on self-help and freedom of choice.[4]

By the early 20th century the Liberals stance began to shift towards "New Liberalism", what would today be called social liberalism: a belief in personal liberty with a support for government intervention to provide minimum levels of welfare.[5] This shift was best exemplified by the Liberal government of Herbert Henry Asquith and his Chancellor David Lloyd George, whose Liberal reforms in the early 1900s created a basic welfare state.[6]

David Lloyd George adopted a programme at the 1929 general election entitled We Can Conquer Unemployment!, although by this stage the Liberals had declined to third-party status. The Liberals now (as expressed in the Liberal Yellow Book) regarded opposition to state intervention as being a characteristic of right-wing extremists.[7]

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