The Liberal Unionist Party: A History by Ian Cawood (review)

The most successful third party in modern British political history has been obscured and overshadowed by its two founders. Joseph Chamberlain, the radical who shattered both of the major parties over the course of his stormy career, was for nearly twenty years nicely offset by the steadily paced Whig leader, Spencer Cavendish, the Marquess Hartington and later eighth Duke of Devonshire. Together these Liberal Unionist leaders kept the Conservative Robert Cecil in power, first in a minority Conservative ministry and later in a full Unionist coalition. Intrigued by the anomalous alliance among these men, historians have treated the continuing support for the Liberal Unionists as an essentially parliamentary phenomenon.

Ian Cawood discredits that assumption. After a finely meshed trawl through Liberal Unionist party papers all over Britain, Cawood proves beyond doubt that the Liberal Unionist electorate amounted to much more than the following of those Liberal Members of Parliament who rejected W. E. Gladstone’s proposals to give Ireland legislative autonomy, or Home Rule. Cawood shows that the Liberal Unionist party had an electoral base, or more accurately several bases, of its own. That electoral foundation was largely a geographic phenomenon, indigenous to and distinctive of regions crucial to the possession of political power in Britain. The biggest and most enduring of these strongholds lay in Birmingham and the West Midlands, but they also included the English southwest (Devon and Cornwall) and the west of Scotland.

“For the Liberal Unionists,” Cawood writes, “local political identity was far more important than either class or ideology” (212). The only issue on which all Liberal Unionists agreed was in their opposition to Gladstone’s Home Rule bills. Otherwise the national party lacked any ideological coherence, which Cawood underscores by trying and (in this reviewer’s opinion) failing to find any further set of ideas upon which most Liberal Unionists agreed. Each regional center of Liberal Unionist strength had its own ideological character, some better defined than others. The Liberal Unionists of Birmingham possessed the clearest set of ideas, laid out for them by their imperious leader. The lack of unifying ideas at the national level was not a serious deficiency—then, as now, most political parties were composed of loose alliances.

Whatever Liberal Unionists lacked in ideological coherence, they made up for through strength of organization. Here, as in every other way, the organization of the party was strong locally rather than nationally, reversing the pattern developed by the major parties. And once again the Liberal Unionists of Chamberlain’s “duchy” were the best organized, capable repeatedly of reversing the electoral tide in general elections elsewhere in the country. In the general election of 1892, when they lost ground everywhere else, the Liberal Unionists increased their majority in all six constituencies in Birmingham and the four nearby seats of Aston, Handsworth, Lichfield, and East Worcestershire. They were to repeat this achievement in the six Birmingham constituencies in even more spectacular fashion in the general election of 1906, when Unionist and Conservative candidates were almost wiped out elsewhere in Britain.

Cawood extends his analysis of the local organizations beyond that citadel of Liberal Unionism to every corner of the British Isles, including areas of weakness such as Wales. He also examines the support the party received locally from the press and nationally from auxiliary societies. They included the Nonconformist Unionist Association, which split the electoral power of the dissenting churches hitherto monopolized by the Liberal party. Still more effective was the Women’s Liberal Unionist Association under the leadership of Kate Courtney and Millicent Fawcett.

The electoral support garnered by this organizational machinery was impressive. Cawood garners fascinating observations—for example, on why agricultural constituencies turned to the Liberals in 1885 and then turned against them in 1886 when Gladstone concentrated his attention on satisfying the Irish demand for legislative autonomy. Cawood notes that few sections of the English country community suffered more from cheap Irish labor than farm workers. Scotland provided...