Author Archives: Neil Hughes

Neil Hughes

Opinion: A hundred years ago…

By Neil Hughes | Tue 26th August 2014 - 3:35 pm

Rt. Hon. H.H. Asquith (LOC)1910 was a momentous year for Liberals in UK government, with a long-desired end to bitter struggles with the Conservatives over House of Lords reform arriving at a  triumphant conclusion. Now a House of Lords of whatever persuasion would no longer be able to resist indefinitely progress for the vast majority of democratically drawn-up Parliamentary bills, and Asquith, Lloyd George & co could take much credit for this. Only four years later, however, the country slipped into a war, the wastage of human life caused by which remains unrivalled in the history of western and of European civilisation. What could have gone wrong?

1910 also marked the beginning of  – and 1914 the near-culmination of – a slide in Liberal fortunes which within a decade of the second date would see a national institution reduced to a crowd of irrelevant backbenchers. Asquith was still leader; did he any longer have any party to follow him?

Continue reading »
Posted in Op-eds | Tagged and | 9 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Peter Davies
    "“the majority of voters support tightening eligibility conditions” i.e. means-testing." - Not necessarily. They may well support more stringent testing of ...
  • Peter Davies
    "The taper can’t be abolished, but there could be more than one taper, with it being higher on higher earnings." There is. Income tax and NI effectively incre...
  • expats
    Farage says "We didn't actually take any money so we haven't done anything wrong"..... If only Guy Fawkes could have used that excuse, "We didn't actually blow ...
  • Michael BG
    Peter Martin, ‘A GBI and UBI are both intrinsically means tested by the application of a steeper “taper”.’ A Guaranteed Basic Income is mea...
  • Katharine Pindar
    Interesting, Jeff, and pleasant for a Left-leaning Liberal to read. But the question for us today, I think, is, whether when wars go on raging and the cost of l...