Liberal Unionists

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The Liberal Unionists ( English Liberal Unionist Party ) were a part of the party that had formed from members of the Liberal Party (English: Liberal Party ) in the United Kingdom in the spring of 1886. The reason for the break was an initiative of the liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone , who wanted to set up a self-government ( Home Rule ) in British Ireland . Sections of the Liberals, who recognized this as a threat to the union between Great Britain and Ireland , which had existed since 1800 , then left the Liberals and founded their own faction, the Liberal Unionists . This went a loose alliance with the Conservative Party (English: Conservative Party ) and brought together with the Conservatives Gladstone's repeated initiatives to case.

Most of the Liberal Unionists persisted until 1903, when another break occurred over the question of free trade and part of the Liberal Unionists returned to the Liberal Party, while the other, led by Joseph Chamberlain , drew even closer to the Conservative Party band and finally formally merged with it in 1912. For the British party structure, the break between Liberal Unionists and the Liberals meant a turning point: the Liberals lost their supremacy in the lower house that they had held for decades.

Formation of the Liberal Unionists

Gladstone introduced his Home Rule bill in the House of Commons debate on April 8, 1886.

The reason for the formation of the Liberal Unionists was the Home Rule Bill of the third government of Prime Minister William Gladstone , which in its conception allowed Ireland to be largely independent. Ireland had been linked to London in personal union since 1800 and was represented there by its own MPs.

After the general election of 1885, the Irish nationalists around the Protestant landowner Charles Stewart Parnell moved into the House of Commons with 86 seats and kept their balance there with their block of MPs. The great majority of them called for Irish self-government. Prime Minister Gladstone was convinced by the electoral success of the Irish nationalists that Ireland now deserved self-government and that a reform of the existing union between Great Britain and Ireland was appropriate. On the other hand, some of the Liberals were convinced that Home Rule for Ireland would ultimately lead to the dissolution of the Union and subsequently inevitably to Ireland's independence. Liberal party members around the Marquess of Hartington and George Joachim Goschen founded a “Committee for the Preservation of the Union”. In order to maintain the “Union of the Empires”, they allied themselves with an internal party movement around Joseph Chamberlain and John Bright . Chamberlain had briefly served as minister in Gladstone's cabinet, but resigned as soon as he glanced at Gladstone's Home Rule plans. Both groups first formed the Liberal Unionist Council and established contacts with the Conservatives in order to bring Gladstone's plans to failure in parliament. On April 8, 1886, Gladstone finally presented his plans for the Home Rule Act in the House of Commons. Chamberlain rose immediately and raised the concerns of the more radical unionists. The more moderate part of the Liberal Unionists also agreed to proceed outside of parliament and to organize public rallies against Gladstone's law together with the conservatives.

The House of Lords, late 19th century

The situation in the House of Lords was particularly serious for the Liberal Party . The Liberal Unionists had their supporters mainly in the upper strata of the Liberal supporters; In the British upper class and the upper middle class, the mood was almost unanimous against Home Rule, all the more so when it became known that Queen Victoria was against Gladstone's Home Rule plans. While the conservatives in the upper house had long held a majority, which in 1868 was around 60 to 70 seats, the bulk of the hitherto liberal peers now changed sides. The Liberal Group in the House of Lords shrank from a respectable minority to a total of 30 to 40 peers.

In the following new elections in July 1886, the Conservative Party was the strongest parliamentary group in the lower house, but could not achieve a majority of its own. The Liberal Unionists won 73 seats in the House of Commons ; Lord Salisbury invited the Liberal Unionists to form a coalition with the Conservatives. The Liberal Unionists subsequently supported Lord Salisbury's Conservative government , but ostentatiously kept their place on the opposition benches, where they continued to sit next to Gladstone's Liberals. The Liberal Unionists also retained their own structure and separate election campaign funds. After the resignation of the conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Randolph Churchill , Prime Minister Salisbury appointed Goschen as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, making him the first Liberal Unionist to hold a high office in a Conservative government.

In the general election in 1892, Gladstone's Liberals again won a majority, but were again dependent on the support of the Irish nationalists. Gladstone formed his fourth government and soon introduced a new bill on the Home Rule, which became more and more of a central political question for him. This successfully passed the lower house, but was rejected in the upper house by a coalition of conservative peers and the peers of the liberal unionists. In the 1893 vote, the House of Lords voted 419 to 41 against Gladstone's Home Rule bill. A permanent break between the Liberals and the Liberal Unionists now seemed inevitable. Goschen joined the Carlton Club , an exclusive London gentlemen's club open only to Conservatives, thereby formally indicating his transition to the Conservative Party. While the Duke of Devonshire advocated a merger with the Conservatives, the power-conscious Chamberlain was critical of it. Despite these disagreements, the unity of the Liberal Unionists remained until Chamberlain publicly called for a reform of customs policy in 1903 and advocated protectionism. Equivalent to a departure from the hitherto existing dogma of free trade, Chamberlain's push put a heavy burden on the Liberal Unionists, who now split again. Some of the Liberal Unionists returned to the Liberal Party, the Duke of Devonshire from that point on until his death in 1908 as a “crossbencher” in the House of Lords between the parties.

The remaining Liberal Unionists around Chamberlain, on the other hand, strengthened their ties with the Conservative Party and worked more and more closely with it until, in the course of time, both almost completely merged into one party. Especially after the 1906 general election , the Liberal Unionists around Chamberlain gained weight in their alliance with the Conservatives, who had been hit hard by the severe election defeat. Chamberlain himself suffered a severe stroke in the summer of 1906, which increasingly paralyzed him. The leadership of the Liberal Unionists now gradually passed into a small circle whose leading names were Chamberlain's son Austen Chamberlain and Lord Lansdowne . Lord Lansdowne had been Leader of the House of Lords since 1903

Merging with the conservatives

After the resignation of the conservative party chairman Arthur Balfour in November 1911, Austen Chamberlain was also one of the most promising candidates to succeed Balfour as chairman of the conservative parliamentary group. (The conservative factions in the lower house and upper house were each headed separately, the conservative leader in the upper house was Lord Lansdowne). However, in the run-up to the meeting of the Conservative House of Commons, Austen Chamberlain waived in favor of Andrew Bonar Law in the face of unclear prospects . A year later, Conservatives and Unionists were officially merged into a joint party, the Conservative and Unionist Party , as the Conservatives in Great Britain have officially called themselves ever since.

Significance of the Liberal Unionists for the British party structure

The formation of the Liberal Unionists and the initially hesitant, then increasingly clear rift between them and the Liberal Party marked a turning point in the British party structure. First the Whigs and later the Liberals as their successor party had been the natural governing party for most of the nineteenth century, spending at most brief periods in the opposition. Through the alliance of the Liberal Unionists with the Conservatives and the popular movement of young conservatives known as “Tory Democracy”, the Conservatives have now been able to reverse this relationship and dominate the last decades of the 19th century. On the other hand, the Liberal Party was not only weakened by the loss of the Liberal Unionists, but internal wing battles prevented its position from being strengthened. It was only through Joseph Chamberlain's large-scale initiative for protective tariffs that the liberals regained their strength, as they were committed to free trade as a party and now had another big issue with which they could survive in the election campaign. In addition, Chamberlain's advance also divided the conservatives, who wore themselves down in wing battles in the next.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Liberal Unionist Party  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gottfried Niedhart: History of England in the 19th and 20th centuries. CH Beck, Munich 1996, p. 131.
  2. ^ Robert Blake: The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law, 1858-1923. Eyre and Spottiswoode, London 1955. p. 41.
  3. ^ Ian Cawood: The Liberal Unionist Party: A History. IB Tauris, London 2012. p. 25.
  4. ^ Ian Cawood: The Liberal Unionist Party: A History. IB Tauris, London 2012. p. 26.
  5. ↑ RCK Ensor: England 1870-1914. Clarendon Press, London 1936, p. 207.
  6. ^ Roy Jenkins : Mr. Balfour's Poodle. Bloomsbury Reader, London 2012, p. 16 f.
  7. ^ Robert Blake : The Conservative Party from Peel to Major. Faber and Faber, London 1997, p. 159.
  8. ↑ Stephen Bates: Asquith. (20 British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century) . Haus Publishing Ltd., London 2006, p. 29.
  9. ↑ Stephen Bates: Asquith. (20 British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century) . Haus Publishing Ltd., London 2006, p. 30 f.
  10. ^ Roy Jenkins: Mr. Balfour's Poodle. Bloomsbury Reader, London 2012, p. 17.
  11. ^ John D. Fair: From Liberal to Conservative: The Flight of the Liberal Unionists after 1886. Victorian Studies, 1986. pp. 291 ff.
  12. ^ Robert Blake: The Conservative Party from Peel to Major. Faber and Faber, London 1997, p. 184.
  13. ^ Douglas Hurd , Choose your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2010, p. 260.
  14. ^ Robert Blake: The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law, 1858-1923. Eyre and Spottiswoode, London 1955. pp. 72 ff.
  15. ↑ ehh Green: The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the Conservative Party, 1880-1914. Routledge, London 1996. p. 2.
  16. ↑ ehh Green: The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the Conservative Party, 1880-1914. Routledge, London 1996. pp. 2 ff.