Challenge: Get the Liberals back to major party status after 1924.

[Turquoise Blue]

That is your challenge. (And no, I don't want a SocDem/Lib one. Just Liberals)

My suggestion... 1931. Have the Liberals have enough funding to run in more seats and Labour's vote fall even more, plus no Lib Nats.

So... it could be like this...

Conservative: 489
Liberal: 61
Labour: 40

 

[pipisme]

That is your challenge. (And no, I don't want a SocDem/Lib one. Just Liberals)

My suggestion... 1931. Have the Liberals have enough funding to run in more seats and Labour's vote fall even more, plus no Lib Nats.

So... it could be like this...

Conservative: 489
Liberal: 61
Labour: 40

A very interesting challenge. It would be difficult to restore the Liberals to major party status after 1924. If a National Government is formed in August 1931 and calls a general election in October, almost all the Liberal MPs would be elected without Conservative opposition. Therefore they would be dependent on Conservative votes.

Here is one possible scenario. In the 1929 general election there are say 65 to 70 Liberals elected [compared with 59 in OTL], but the Conservatives win the election with a small, but workable majority of 20 to 25 seats. Labour win a general election in 1933 or 1934 with a good-size, but not large majority, but the Liberals gain rural and middle-class suburban seats from the Conservatives, which pushes their seat total up to the 150s or 160s.

The Labour government enacts legislation providing for elections to be by the Alternative Vote, which benefits the Liberals.

Do you want the Liberals to replace the Conservatives or Labour as a major party?

 

[Turquoise Blue]

A very interesting challenge. It would be difficult to restore the Liberals to major party status after 1924. If a National Government is formed in August 1931 and calls a general election in October, almost all the Liberal MPs would be elected without Conservative opposition. Therefore they would be dependent on Conservative votes.

Here is one possible scenario. In the 1929 general election there are say 65 to 70 Liberals elected [compared with 59 in OTL], but the Conservatives win the election with a small, but workable majority of 20 to 25 seats. Labour win a general election in 1933 or 1934 with a good-size, but not large majority, but the Liberals gain rural and middle-class suburban seats from the Conservatives, which pushes their seat total up to the 150s or 160s.

The Labour government enacts legislation providing for elections to be by the Alternative Vote, which benefits the Liberals.

Do you want the Liberals to replace the Conservatives or Labour as a major party?

It depends. Lib vs. Lab sounds interesting, really.

 

[Makemakean]

It depends. Lib vs. Lab sounds interesting, really.

I believe that in Prime Minister Portillo there is actually a story in which the Liberals re-emerges on the right rather than the left (a story I've never actually read), and back in the 50s, there really was quite a number of free market liberals in the party. One of the founders of the IEA, Oliver Smedley, for example, was briefly Vice President of the party, and another, Arthur Seldon, was a longtime Liberal activist.

I discussed the idea with stefanbl of making a timeline where the Liberals re-emerges in a more free marketeer direction with a PoD in the early 1950s, eventually replacing the Tories as the primary opposition to Labour in the 1970/1980s, but nothing ever came to fruition. It would among other things have featured a Liberal Prime Minister Mark Littlewood in 2012.

 

[Thande]

How about WW2 is lost (no, I don't mean a successful Sealion, but the UK battered into submission by the Luftwaffe and a negotiated peace), Labour win the subsequent election and stay dominant for a generation, the Tories are discredited forever as the party of 'Guilty Men', and the Liberal Nationals rejoin the original Liberals bringing many Conservatives with them, and by the end of the 1950s the Liberals defeat Labour (now an out-of-touch gerontocracy) and become the new government? Only a small hardcore of crossbench Tories remain based on people who identify tribally with the party, though there is the possibility of them reinventing themselves in the future as wartime memories fade.

 

[pipisme]

If in the 1929 general election the Liberal vote had increased by 5%, the Conservative vote had decreased by the same amount and the Labour vote had remained the same, there would have been the following changes in seats:
Liberal gains from Conservative: 49
Liberal gains from Labour: 7
Total Liberal gains: 56.

Labour gains from Conservative: 17
Net Labour gain: 10.

Number of MPs elected:
Labour: 297
Conservative: 194
Liberal: 115
Others: 9

In Epping a further increase of 0.1% in the Liberal vote would mean that Winston Churchill would lose his seat. He won by a majority of 10.1% over the Liberal candidate.

Ramsay MacDonald would form a minority Labour government with Liberal support. With the Conservatives having their worst result since 1906, a Baldwin must go campaign results in his resignation as leader. He is replaced by Neville Chamberlain. But the new leader is less popular than Baldwin with non Conservative voters.

The Liberals make by-election gains from Labour in Shipley on 6 November 1930 and Islington East on 19 February 1931. In August 1931, negotiations for a national government of the three main parties break down because of Labour ministers hostility to Chamberlain. MacDonald forms a coalition with the Liberals. The Liberal Nationals and National Labour don't split from their parties.

The Labour/Liberal coalition stays in office until a general election in Autumn 1933 or Spring 1934. Voting is by the Alternative Vote as provided for by legislation enacted by the coalition. The Conservatives do well enough to secure a small majority of 10 to 15 seats. The Liberals do comparatively better than Labour, dropping to between 90 and 100 seats.

There is no general election in 1935 so the next one is not until October/November 1938, after the Munich agreement. In opposition to which a number of Conservative MPs, including Winston Churchill and Harold MacMillan, form a Progressive Conservative Party which allies with the Liberals. In the general election the Conservatives drop from first to third place, with thirty to forty Progressive Conservatives being elected. Labour win a small but workable majority.

In subequent years Labour and the Liberals are the two major parties. By the 1950s the Progressive Conservatives have joined the Liberals or returned to their parent party.