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This book opened with Gladstone’s 1884 analysis of the essentially liberal character of the Victorian state. In recording Gladstone’s words in 1903, his biographer John Morley noted that the years since 1884 had seen the reversal of the Liberal ascendancy, ‘notwithstanding the enlargement of direct popular power’.1 By 1939 it would be still clearer that the Tories had done well out of democracy. Conservative governments or Conservative-dominated coalitions had held power for 37 of the 54 years since 1885.

If it was obvious that war had transformed the political landscape, it was less clear what that transformation implied. The war had accelerated the growth of the state. It had brought interventionist responses to pressing social problems — rent control, fuel and food rationing — along with the public control of key services and punitive taxation of war-inflated profits. It had drawn politicians into uninhibited promises of a better post-war world, to retain the loyalty of the troops at the front and civilians at home. It had brought the extension of the franchise and the liberation of the Labour Party. It had created a mass army waiting to be demobilised. Returning conscripts with votes could not be left at the mercy of the market in an unpredictable post-war economy. J.A. Hobson’s belief that the war ‘had advanced state socialism by half a century’1 appeared justified.

The 1906 result ensured that the departure from Victorian values which had been beckoning since the Boer War came not in the form of Chamberlain’s protectionist economic nationalism but in the shape of Liberal welfare reform. The tariff debate had emphasised that while international free trade was an indispensable Liberal value, domestic laisser faire was not. Chamberlain’s pensions proposals, however nebulous, underlined the need for a Liberal social programme: younger Liberals, Campbell-Bannerman was told in 1903, were ‘not content to be passive Free Traders’.1 Two-thirds of Liberal candidates made social reform pledges in their election addresses.

The Coalition’s collapse inaugurated a period of three-party competition in conditions of near-universal suffrage. The Conservatives started with several advantages: the fragmentation of the Liberals, the immaturity of Labour and the disappearance of the southern Irish seats from Westminster after the formation of the Irish Free State. They would, indeed, dominate inter-war politics, but to suggest a continuous Tory hegemony is to impose a false unity on the period. After 1931 Britain was virtually a one-party state, under a Tory-dominated National Government with massive majorities and clear policies. In the 1920s the Conservatives were less secure.

The decision of 2nd August 1914 to send British troops to the Continent if Germany invaded Belgium completed the transformation of British diplomacy since the 1890s. For most of the nineteenth century Britain had considered her vital interests to lie outside Europe, but the expansion of British commitments in the late nineteenth century had made this isolationism more difficult. The colonial ambitions of other European powers underlined the point: ‘now that they have ceased quarrelling about provinces in Europe & have turned their eyes to distant places, they find us in the way everywhere’, the Liberal Imperialist Edward Grey wrote in 1895.1 British policy-makers faced the realities that would persist until the 1930s: that Britain possessed a vulnerable empire in a hostile world, and that concentration upon the defence of one territory might invite a predatory attack elsewhere. As Foreign Secretary in 1892–4, Rosebery had acknowledged that unilateral defence of the empire might mean fighting forty wars at once.

Addressing an Edinburgh audience in August 1884, the Prime Minister William Gladstone claimed that his Liberal Party embodied the ‘solid and permanent opinion’ of the British nation, at least since reform of the parliamentary system in 1832. Since then, Gladstone argued, ten out of twelve parliaments had had a liberal majority. The eleventh, that elected in 1841, had begun as a Tory parliament but had evicted a Tory government for a Whig-Liberal one in 1846. Only the 1874 parliament had been irredeemably Tory, and its Tory majority had been caused by Liberal divisions. In the age of reform the Liberals — and their Whig predecessors — had been the natural party of government.1