Plausbility Check: UK Liberals remain Gladstonian post-1900

Pipisme has a superb TL detailing the Liberals' survival as the major party on the centre-left opposed to the Tories post-1923. The Liberal reforms of 1906 marked the end of classical, Gladstonian liberalism in the party and they transformed into progressive centre-leftists. What POD would be required for the Liberals to remain Gladstonian, or would it need to be a pre-1900 POD?
 
The Gladstonian wing of the Liberals never really went away RB, throughout the 1905-1915 government, Campbell-Bannerman managed a careful balancing act between radicals like Lloyd-George and Churchill and the old Gladstonians who remained very much a major influence on the party (one of the reasons why Lloyd-George wasn't more radical with his pension reforms and the like was that the backbenchers wouldn't allow more state funding and taxation). This is one of the main reasons for the split of the Party during the war.

However, a possible PoD would for Sir Edward Grey to become leader instead of C-B (who was, rather like Atlee, seen as an interim choice). Grey wasn't a true Gladstonian, but he was a far more classically Liberal than others in the leadership before he moved to the left later in his career. If he becomes head of the party. It is possible than Joe Chamberlain could find himself leading the Conservative and Unionist Party in order to recapture the spirit of the "One Nation Toryism touted by Disraeli and Churchill Snr.
 
Would this splot remain permanent, or would it be like Lab and the Tories IOTL? Lab with the New/Old Lab division and the Tories with their Thatcherite/One National division? Then the Tories would be ideologically squeezed out- similar to Lib v. Lab in the 1920s from my admittedly limited understanding- to the Liberals' economic left but to the social right of both Lib and Lab. There will have to be a merger at some point or one of the three will become extinct. So let's say Grey becomes Liberal leader and PM. Does he win a majority in 1910 or is there another hung parliament with a Lib-Nat pact as per OTL?

P.S.: I'd kill to see this as a TL idea someday.
 
How would you define Gladstonian Liberalism?

On the economic side, it would be Thatcherism. Low taxation (Gladstone once campaigned on abolition of the income tax), balanced budgets, free trade and minimal government intervention in the economy. Socially, Gladstone pushed meritocracy which is why the aristocracy despised him. Gladstone managed to push through a bipartisan economic consensus- Salisbury (like Bush I, a foreign policy guru) and Balfour did not alter the equation until the Tories split on free trade in 1906 under Balfour and the Liberals returned to power.
 
So, once aristocratic privilege stops being an issue, does this mean that Gladstonian Liberalism is pretty much Thatcherism?

Not entirely. Thatcher was neo-conservative as well as monetarist. Gladstone found interventionist foreign policy abhorrent from a moral and financial point of view. However, they would have found a great deal of common ground on the domestic front (aside from some social issues perhaps).
 
Economically speaking yes. Without privatization- since without a welfare state that the Liberals jump-started (similar to TR in the US) there would be nothing to privatize. ;) Also, without the Parliament Act 1911 triggered by the People's Budget (the source of the first Liberal reforms IOTL), the Lords would remain a co-equal House of Parliament with powers of veto over Commons legislation. A Prime Minister would still be able to serve from the Lords throughout his tenure as Salisbury did IOTL. Then there is Taft Vale, which created a legal precedent many consider to be the source of trade union power, then abuse of power, which Thatcher permanently destroyed with the coal strike in 1984-5. To avoid that, Grey would appoint less socially progressive justices to the High Court than Campbell-Bannerman did IOTL.
 
Disraeli was the Imperialist IOTL- Gladstone was a non-interventionist who despised Disraeli's propping up the Ottomans in particular. Disraeli was a master practitioner of realpolitik- you have to be to outmaneuver Bismarck himself. Gladstone saw such things as amoral. Both Disraeli and Bismarck sneered at him for doing so.
 
The Liberal Party was pushed to the left after 1900 by the strong influence of the 'New Liberal' ideas of people such as Thomas Henry Green, L.T. Hobhouse and John A. Hobson, and by the perceived need to come to an agreement with the nascent Labour Party. Here is an excellent article entitled The New Liberalism: http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_single.php?item_id=85&item=history .

The pact agreed in 1903 between Herbert Gladstone and Ramsay Macdonald meant that Liberal and Labour candidates in parliamentary elections would not compete with each other. It broke down before the 1918 general election during the First World War.

The article The New Liberalism identifies the disastrous result for the Liberals in the 1895 election, when they lost over 100 seats, as a contributory factor to the rise of New Liberal ideas in the party. The 1895 election happened because the 1892 election resulted in a Liberal minority government with Irish Nationalist support. By 1895 Lord Rosebery's government had lost the will to live and Rosebery used the defeat on the relatively unimportant issue of increasing the budget to buy cordite for explosives for the army as an excuse to resign.

So if in 1892 the Liberals won an adequate majority without needing to depend on the Irish Nationalists, they would be able to stay in office for a full term, which was legally seven years, but in practice five or six years. So that would be until 1898 say. If the Unionists (Conservatives and Liberal Unionists) win an 1898 election with a good majority, but not a landslide as in OTL and the Boer War happens as in OTL, the Unionists would be very unlikely to call a general election in 1900, as they did in OTL, because it would look to much like taking partisan advantage of the war. So the next election would be in 1903 or 1904 with either a Liberal or Unionist victory.

I don't know what proportion of Liberals elected in 1906 were 'New Liberals' (NL) and what were 'Gladstonian Liberals' (GL) and to what extend retiring GLs were replaced by NLs.
 
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