Conservative Liberals and a liberal Labour Party? The Identity Crisis of the British Liberal Party 1906 - 1924

The starting point for this paper comes from the questions that I have continually been asked by my students and the problems they have had with understanding exactly what the Liberal Party was and where to place it in the overall political framework of the time. These difficulties are added to by the frequent confusion between Liberal and liberal and the confusion between what liberal might mean in English and what it might mean in French. Questions are frequently asked such as ‘was it a par...