Liberal Party (UK)
자유당 (영국)
A liberal party that, with the Conservatives, was one of the two major parties of the United Kingdom in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning as an alliance of Whigs, free-trade Peelites and reformist Radicals in the 1850s, it formed four governments under Gladstone and, after its landslide in the 1906 general election, passed reforms that created a basic welfare state. The split between Asquith and Lloyd George from 1916 brought a rapid decline, and in 1988 it merged with the Social Democratic Party to form the Social and Liberal Democrats, renamed the Liberal Democrats the following year.
In depth
The Liberal Party grew out of the Whigs, who originated as an aristocratic faction in the reign of Charles II and favoured reducing the power of the Crown and increasing that of Parliament, and out of the early 19th-century Radicals. Under Earl Grey the Whigs carried the First Reform Act in 1832, and as early as 1839 Lord John Russell adopted the name of “Liberals”. The party was a loose coalition of Whigs in the Lords and Radicals in the Commons; free trade, championed by Radical leaders such as John Bright and Richard Cobden, was for a century the one cause that could unite all Liberals. Its formal foundation is traditionally traced to the meeting at Willis’ rooms in London on 6 June 1859, when the remaining Peelites, Radicals and Whigs agreed to vote down the Conservative government, and the National Liberal Federation of 1877 made it a national membership organisation.
For the next 30 years Gladstone and Liberalism were synonymous. Gladstone was prime minister four times (1868–74, 1880–85, 1886 and 1892–94); his first government passed the Elementary Education Act 1870, introduced the secret ballot, legalised trade unions and disestablished the Church of Ireland in 1869. Irish Home Rule split the party, and the Liberal Unionists who broke away in 1886 eventually joined the Conservatives.
The Liberals returned to government in 1905 and won 397 seats in the 1906 landslide, the last time they won a majority in their own right. The governments of Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905–1908) and H. H. Asquith (1908–1916) passed reforms that created a basic welfare state, with David Lloyd George at the Exchequer and Winston Churchill, a recent defector from the Conservatives, at the Board of Trade.
In late 1916 Lloyd George replaced Asquith at the head of a coalition, but Asquith remained party leader, and the split between Lloyd George’s faction and Asquith’s official Liberals badly weakened the party. The increasingly Conservative-dominated coalition ousted Lloyd George in 1922; from 397 MPs in 1906 the Liberals fell to 40 in 1924, and their vote from 49% to 18%, as Labour absorbed most ex-Liberal voters. Lloyd George led the party from 1926 to 1931, but the National Government of 1931 produced a three-way split, and by the 1950s the party won as few as six seats.
When moderate Labour defectors founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981, the Liberals formed the SDP–Liberal Alliance, which won over a quarter of the vote in 1983 but only 23 seats. After the 1987 election the two parties merged in March 1988 as the Social and Liberal Democrats, renamed the Liberal Democrats in October 1989; a splinter group reconstituted a Liberal Party in 1989. Prominent intellectuals active in the party included John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge.