Lancashire and the New Liberalism

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Mar 26, 2007 - History - 488 pages
Why was there a Liberal Government in Britain from 1905 until the First World War? And why was the Liberal party replaced by the Labour party so shortly afterwards? These are the kinds of problems which Dr Clarke examines in his study of the Liberal revival in Lancashire. The vote in north-west England was largely responsible for bringing the Liberal Government into power and for maintaining its position, but it also produced almost half the new Labour MP's in 1906. Thus any satisfactory interpretation of electoral history in the early twentieth century must account for what happened in Lancashire. This book calls into question many of the conventional assumptions about British politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 

Contents

FORMATIVE INFLUENCES
25
THE TERMS OF THE CONTEST
101
27
108
The pale of the Constitution
129
The politics of the street
143
THE RECONSTITUTION OF LIBERAL LANCASHIRE
151
Fields of recRUITMENT
247
The rise and fall of the Free Traders
274
GOING TO THE COUNTRY
341
Edwardian Progressivism
393
A Voting in the north west
411
B The franchise
427
F Max Aitken and the Ashton Trades Council December 1910
437
Index
454
391
456
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