Lancashire and the New Liberalism

Download or read book Lancashire and the New Liberalism written by P. F. Clarke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-26 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.