         
|
|
Department of History Fieldston School . The Birth of Modern Europe Timeline of British Prime Ministers: Regency to the First World War (With definitions of British Parties) From Britannia.com: http://www.britannia.com/gov/primes/
Tories and Whigs: After 1784 William Pitt the Younger emerged as the leader of a new Tory Party, which broadly represented the interests of the country gentry, the merchant classes, and official administerial groups. In opposition, a revived Whig Party, led by Charles James Fox, came to represent the interests of religious dissenters, industrialists, and others who sought electoral, parliamentary, and philanthropic reforms. The French Revolution and the wars against France soon further complicated the division between parties. A large section of the more moderate Whigs deserted Fox and supported Pitt. After 1815 and a period of party confusion, there eventually emerged the conservatism of Sir Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli, earl of Beaconsfield, and the liberalism of Lord John Russell and William Ewart Gladstone, with the party labels of Conservative and Liberal assumed by each faction, respectively. Although the label Tory has continued to be used to designate the Conservative Party, Whig has ceased to have much political meaning. Liberal Party After Britain's First (electoral) Reform Act of 1832, the mainly aristocratic Whigs were joined in the House of Commons by increasing numbers of middle-class members and by a smaller number of Radicals, who, from about 1850, tended to work together in cooperation with the Peelites (antiprotectionist Tories). By 1839 Lord John Russell was referring to "the Liberal party" in his letters to Queen Victoria. Russell's administration of 1846 is sometimes regarded as the first Liberal government; others reserve the distinction for Lord Palmerston's 1855 administration. The first unequivocally Liberal government was that formed in 1868 by William E. Gladstone, under whose leadership these various elements became a cohesive parliamentary party. After 1865 the personality and politics of Gladstone dominated the party, which held power under him for a total of more than 12 years between 1868 and 1894. The main achievement of the Liberal Party under Gladstone was its reforms. These included the establishment of a national system of education, voting by secret ballot, the legalization of trade unions, the enfranchisement of the working class in rural areas, reconstruction of the army (involving the abolition of the purchase of commissions), and reform of the judicial system. In 1886 the party was weakened by the defection of the Liberal Unionists, who disliked Gladstone's plan for Home Rule of Ireland and eventually joined the Conservatives. By the early 20th century the Liberal Party seemed moribund, but a Conservative split helped the Liberals to victory. The period 1906-15, during which the foundations of the British welfare state were laid, was the last during which the Liberals held power alone. In 1915, during World War I, the Liberal H.H. Asquith formed a national coalition government with the Conservative and Labour parties. However, during the war the Liberals clustered into two distinctly different camps, centred on the rival personalities of Asquith and his successor, David Lloyd George. Aligned with Asquith were those who felt that cherished Liberal beliefs were being threatened by such wartime exactions as military conscription, introduced in 1916. Allied to Lloyd George were those who sided with the Conservatives in seeking a more rigorous prosecution of the war. The Liberals' divisions became more firmly drawn after the postwar election of December 1918, in which Lloyd George's Coalition Liberals ran unopposed by their Conservative partners while Asquith's Independent Liberals were routed. In the years that followed, the party's internal conflicts exacted a terrible toll on it at precisely the time when the Labour Party was emerging as a coherent and effective source of reform in the country. In the general election of 1924, the Liberals' share of the popular vote was reduced to less than 20 percent and its parliamentary representation to 40. By 1933 the party was divided between Sir John Simon's Liberal National supporters of the Conservative-dominated National Government, Sir Herbert Samuel's opposition Liberals, and a small number of Independent Liberals who still clung to the aging Lloyd George. The Liberals' last experience of national government was provided by their participation in Winston Churchill's World War II coalition of 1940-45. During its period as a major political party, the Liberal Party was characterized by certain attitudes rather than a precise ideology. Central to Liberal attitudes was a trust in rationality, faith in the idea of progress, attachment to individualism, emphasis on human rights, and an eagerness to emancipate underprivileged groups. But Liberals' distrust of the enlargement of the functions of the state eventually came into conflict with the egalitarian political aspirations of the party, leaving it unprepared to adopt the role subsequently taken up by the emergent Labour Party. On the one hand, the Liberal Party championed individualism, free trade, and private enterprise, opposing what it saw as the centralizing and stultifying power of the state; on the other, it pursued policies of active social reorganization to prevent abuses of private power, to promote social justice, and to extend the role of the state in fields such as education, social welfare, and industrial relations. The Liberal Party always sought reform of the system of government, and Liberal reforms molded most of Britain's political institutions. In overseas policy, Liberal attitudes were pacific and internationalist. The party was wary of imperial expansion in the 19th century and supported the independence of colonial peoples in the 20th century. It constantly promoted international cooperation. Conservative Party The Conservative Party is the heir, and in some measure the continuation, of the old Tory Party, members of which began forming "conservative associations" after Britain's First Reform Act of 1832 extended electoral rights to the middle class. The name Conservative was first used as a description of the party by John Wilson Croker writing in the Quarterly Review of Jan. 1, 1830. The first Conservative government was formed by Sir Robert Peel, whose program, set out in the Tamworth Manifesto (1834), stressed the timely reform of abuses, the importance of law and order and of the police, an orderly system of taxation, and the importance both of landed interests and of trade and industry. Prospects of an extended period of Conservative rule disappeared in 1846 when the party split over the repeal of the Corn Laws, and, from that time until the formation of the Liberal-Conservative coalition government in 1915, political power alternated between the Conservatives and the Liberals. The party was reorganized by Benjamin Disraeli, prime minister for a few months in 1868 and from 1874 to 1880. Disraeli established a Conservative Central Office (1870), which merged with other elements of the party organization, resulting in greater unity and strength. At the same time, his emphasis on social reform to reduce the enormous disparity in the living conditions of rich and poor, combined with a strong, activist imperial and foreign policy, made a permanent impress on Conservative principles and programs. The party was further strengthened in 1886 when it allied with the Liberal Unionists, a faction of the Liberal Party that opposed the policy of Home Rule in Ireland put forward by the Liberal leader William Ewart Gladstone. Thus reinforced, the Conservatives held office for all but 3 of the next 20 years, first under the leadership of Lord Salisbury and then of Arthur Balfour. In 1906, however, a split over tariff policy caused them to lose the election in a disastrous landslide; they did not regain power until they joined a wartime coalition with the Liberals in May 1915. In 1922 Conservative backbenchers brought about the resignation of their leader, Austen Chamberlain, and forced the party's withdrawal from the coalition. This rebellion owed much to a personal revulsion that many of the backbenchers felt toward the Liberal leader and prime minister, David Lloyd George, and also to their unease over some of the more interventionist reforms introduced by Liberal ministers. A surprise election called in December 1923 by the Conservative prime minister Stanley Baldwin proved a miscalculation that briefly reunited the ailing Liberal Party and opened the way to a minority Labour government, but the Conservatives remained the largest single party and were able to regain power the following year. Apart from another brief Labour incumbency in 1929-31, the Conservatives dominated national office until 1945. Baldwin emerged as a popular figure and architect of what he referred to as the "new Conservatism," consisting of a modest movement away from the laissez-faire economic policies that the party had maintained since 1918 and toward the forging of a new appeal to the middle classes. |
Copyright © 2000.
Kirsch Computing/ECFS.
All Rights Reserved.
Duplication of any materials on this site without the express written
consent of
both Kirsch Computing & ECFS is strictly prohibited
Questions, Comments Problems? Don't Hesitate to contact us: webmaster@kirschnet.com