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This chapter begins by looking at long-term support in elections and in the polls for the Liberal Democrats, to see how it has evolved over the last half-century or so. This provides a context within which to judge the party’s future electoral prospects. The analysis of trends in Liberal Democrat voting intentions over a thirty-year period shows that the competitive situation between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is significantly greater than the competitive situation between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. It also shows that the party has to wait for its main rivals to make political mistakes and lose support before it can profit by winning over voters. This is described as the political equivalent of ‘waiting for Godot’, meaning that the Liberal Democrats are not the masters of their own electoral fate.

This chapter examines the political prospects of the Liberal Democrat Party. The big question is whether or not it can replace its rivals as the second, or even the first, party of British electoral politics. It begins with an analysis of the necessary conditions for the Liberal Democrats to replace one of the other parties as the second party of British politics. This leads into an examination of the likelihood that these conditions will be met in the foreseeable future. The evidence suggests that the party has a real opportunity to break the existing two-party hegemony at a general election in 2009 or 2010.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief history of the British Liberal Democrat Party, followed by an examination of the evolution of its policy goals over time. The Liberal Democrat Party was founded in 1988 from a merger of two hitherto independent but allied parties: the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party. The former had existed in different forms for more than 300 years, whereas the latter emerged from a split in the Labour Party in 1981. An overview of the chapters included in this volume is presented.

The relationship between the Labour Party and the Communist Party remained unresolved through most of the 1920s. Only in 1928, after several debates resulting in ambiguous decisions, did the Labour Party finally exclude all members of the Communist Party from its institutions. Keen ideological divisions could be emphasized by partisans. Clement Attlee did not share in the welcome for the Bolshevik Revolution. Questions of constitutional propriety and political feasibility were crucial both to the protracted debate and to its eventual outcome. In particular, these concerns focused on the relationship between the Labour Party and its trade union affiliates. The controversy was also shaped by the broader industrial and political contexts. The industrial struggles of 1921 and 1926, the conflicting reappraisals fostered by industrial defeats, electoral optimism and anxieties, the brief fact of the 1924 Labour Government — all were significant. Moreover, the shifting industrial and political strategies of the Communist Party, responding to both domestic and international pressures, left their mark especially on debates within the trade unions.

Chapter 3 looks at Scotland in the United Kingdom to explore the relationship between nationalism and social policy. It explains how the relationship between British nation-building and social policy emerged during the post-war era and outlines the particular importance of this process in Scotland, which depended more upon social benefits than did the South of England. It then explores the mobilization process favouring devolution for Scotland in the context of social policy retrenchment, and shows how these two issues meshed during Thatcherism. Finally, it analyses the impact of devolution on social policy development in Scotland and in the United Kingdom at large. Although it is too early to draw definite conclusions about the nature and extent of this impact, it is clear that the institutional and political transformations involved in devolution have affected policy processes and outcomes.

The social changes that occurred in Britain in the half-century from 1880 appeared to be registered most graphically through elections. A political system formerly structured around the vertical ties of religion and locality came to be replaced by one in which party allegiance was primarily determined by class. This shift is usually discussed in terms of the eclipse of a broadly progressive, pan-class Liberalism by a Labour Party committed to articulating the interests of the organised working class. This chapter explores electoral politics in the coal and cotton industries in Lancashire, testing the more influential arguments against the evidence garnered from Bolton and Wigan. Labour’s growth up to the outbreak of war in 1914 is considered, along with the impact of war and its aftermath, culminating in the restoration of conventional party politics in 1922. The extent to which Labour’s advance in the 1920s can be attributed to the adoption of neighbourhood-based welfarist politics is also examined.

The roots of the Labour Party lay not in its parliamentary organization, but in its extra-parliamentary institutions and affiliated bodies. Some basic party structures went back to the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. The foundation conference formulated the principle of affiliated bodies, their deliberations through a system of delegates in an annual conference, and a national executive whose structure would incorporate the range of affiliations. This party world was revised significantly by the constitution of 1918. Its procedures were subsequently affected by the electoral advances of the twenties, and the unexpected arrival in office. There developed patterns of authority, deference, and criticism; party institutions embodied a set of expectations within which a repertoire of tactical maneuvres became established.

When women challenged their assigned place in the Labour Party, and, at least by implication, their official identity as ‘Labour Woman’, their dissent was fuelled by specific and deeply felt disagreements over policy. The provision of information on birth control by publicly funded clinics proved to be highly controversial for British Labour in the 1920s. On this issue more than any other, conflict developed between the institutions specific to Labour women and the overall party. Wartime experiences had given many working-class women a sense of their own autonomy; a change which raised the possibility of family limitation as a desirable option. As familiar routines re-emerged after the war, depression in staple and well-unionized trades provided a powerful incentive for family limitation. Such sentiments were fired by a belief that the lives of working-class women did not have to be confined and damaged by successive and frequently difficult pregnancies, each adding to the pressure on already meagre household budgets. For the politically active, their involvement in the Labour Party's Women's Sections was a declaration against passivity and acquiescence.

The 1929 General Election was in formal terms a success for the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Of the fifty-six candidates sponsored by the party, thirty-seven were successful, more than doubling the previous number of sponsored Members. Many other MPs claimed to hold ILP cards and overall the potential membership of the ILP Parliamentary Group exceeded 200. The new Cabinet included neither John Wheatley nor Fred Jowett. Although both had sat in the 1924 Cabinet, they had been identified with the ILP's shift to the left. In contrast, Thomas Johnston and Emmanuel Shinwell, both active in the ILP and both critical of James Maxton, were appointed to posts outside the Cabinet. Although the Labour Party had not achieved a parliamentary majority, its advance since 1924 was impressive. For the first time, it was the largest party in the House of Commons. The Tory Opposition seemed demoralized; world recession had not yet hit the British economy.

The Labour Party meeting held in the spring of 1924 featured two new party recruits, Oswald and Cynthia Mosley. The inclusion of a woman was indicative of the degree to which the Labour Party was integrated into the dominant culture, an integration which limited any iconoclasm and involved an effective acquiescence in inequalities. In the election of November 1922, Labour gained three seats in Sheffield, a city where Liberalism was in confused retreat. These parliamentary successes were the prelude to a Labour majority on the city council four years later. In a heavily industrial city, these advances seemed indicative of the party's potential strength amongst specific working-class occupations. Yet none of Sheffield's Labour victors in 1922 came from the trade union movement. For some recruits, the Labour Party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden seemed attractive. In the 1920s, this pattern of recruitment seemed to highlight a shift in progressive politics that fitted into a broader vision of Labour's Forward March. This presentation simplified the complex routes by which Liberals crossed into the Labour Party.

In the 1920s, Margaret Bondfield had symbolized more than any other individual the status of women in Labour Party politics; she was a Member of Parliament in 1923-1924 and from 1926, a junior Minister in 1924, and the first woman Cabinet Minister in 1929. This was coupled with prominence in the trade union world, playing a key role in the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Her role in both industrial and political activities involved a discourse that played down and often denied the distinctiveness of women 's interests within the labour movement. Pre-1914, Bondfield had been a women's trade union organizer, an adult suffragist, and a prominent member of the Independent Labour Party. Later she marginalized and frequently criticized feminist concerns, her socialism became much more formal, and her union was absorbed into the National Union of General and Municipal Workers. Within both party and the TUC she became a stalwart of the Right, a keen supporter of Ramsay MacDonald and a strong anti-Communist.

As the Labour Party's political and industrial leaderships moved rapidly to define and to consolidate their position after the August 1931 collapse of the Labour Government led by Ramsay MacDonald, achievement of these objectives was hindered by accumulating tensions between Labour politicians and trade union leaders. Walter Citrine, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) General Secretary, had been central to the bargaining over delicate issues between the Labour Government and the TUC. Increasingly, he had become dismayed about what he saw as Government insensitivity towards legitimate concerns of trade unions. Trade union priorities were central to the post-MacDonald Labour Party and they were expressed most forcibly by Ernest Bevin, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union. This chapter looks at Bevin's approach to politics, loyalism, and iconoclasm as a union leader towards the Labour Party.