The Liberal Democrat History Group’s fringe meeting at conference featured a fascinating discussion of the historical roots and present meaning of Liberalism. You can catch up on the meeting, which included talks from Professor Jon Parry (author of Liberalism (Agenda Publishing, 2025)) and David Howarth, the former Lib Dem MP for Cambridge, here on the History Group website.

The meeting also launched our new booklet, Liberalism: the ideas that built the Liberal Democrats, an accessible guide to the key ideas underlying Liberal Democrat beliefs. The booklet opens with an introduction describing the six themes underlying British political Liberalism: liberty, equality, community, democracy, internationalism and environmentalism. It explores how these themes were expressed by different groups and in different contexts throughout the last three hundred years and more of Liberal history.

This includes sections on the three groups of MPs who joined together to form the Liberal Party in 1859. The Whigs first emerged in the late seventeenth century in resistance to the threat of royal absolutism, and came to assert the role of the aristocracy as the natural champions of popular liberties, and as the leaders of movements for political and religious reform. Radical activists in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were diverse in their politics and aims, but were unified in their pursuit of rights and justice for ordinary people. The Peelites, followers of Sir Robert Peel, who split the Conservative Party over the repeal of the Corn Laws, bequeathed a distinctive philosophical flavour to the Liberal Party; not only free traders, they also advocated peace, financial responsibility and steady, non-revolutionary, reform. 

The next section recalls Liberal support for free trade, the removal of barriers to international trade in goods and services, which played an important part in British politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For much of its life, the fortunes of the Liberal Party were closely tied to the strength of popular feeling for free trade. 

The meaning of the term ‘Liberalism’ has been subject to many changes and interpretations over time, explored in the next two sections. The terms ‘classical liberalism’ and ‘economic liberalism’ are often used by those who want to preserve the original ideas of liberalism, based on individual freedom, the rule of law and free markets; they generally support a reduction in the role of the state, particularly in economic and welfare policy. In contrast, social liberals believe that the constraints on freedom caused by, for example, poverty, unemployment, ill-health, disability or a lack of education are serious enough that state action is justified to redress them. Since the New Liberalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British Liberal Party and Liberal Democrats can broadly be considered a social liberal party.

Since Liberals believe in personal freedom within a diverse and tolerant society, they naturally support women’s rights. However, historically, both partisan and paternalist reasons have limited their achievements. Generally, they have been stronger in advancing individual equality rather than in tackling more structural problems in society which, more radical feminists argue, disadvantage and marginalise many women. 

In sections on economic policy, we examine the challenge of Keynesianism to conservative, ‘classical’ economics. Keynes’ belief that governments could shape economies to maximise output and employment came to underpin the economic policies of Western governments for at least three decades following the Second World War, and is still hugely influential. Support for co-ownership was a feature of Liberal policy from the 1930s to the 1970s: distinct from socialism and traditional capitalism, this built on collaborative rather than adversarial relationships between different stakeholders in industry, and aimed to improve industrial relations, productivity and economic performance by fostering a more harmonious working environment.

Localism and devolution of decision-making from centralised institutions has been an important strand of Liberal ideology, expressed in different forms as political contexts have changed over the last two centuries; this includes the ideology of community politics which emerged in the 1970s.

Like other expressions, the term social democracy has varied according to historical circumstance. In British politics since the nineteenth century it has been associated with Marxists, democratic socialists, advanced Liberals, revisionist socialists in the Labour Party of the 1950s and 1960s – and, most importantly from our point of view, the Social Democratic Party of the 1980s.

Liberal internationalism aims to promote international cooperation, law and peace. The idea continues to represent a political and moral commitment to active engagement in international affairs and the pursuit of liberal values world-wide, most importantly individual freedom and human rights, democracy and the rule of law, and a market economy. 

Finally, environmentalism has been a feature of Liberal and Liberal Democrat politics since at least the 1970s: a political and ethical set of values that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities. 

The booklet proved popular at conference, and we hope you will feel encouraged to read a copy and explore further the key ideas that together built the Liberal Democrats. Copies can be purchased from the History Group website. 

* Duncan Brack is a member of the Federal Policy Committee and chaired the FPC’s working group that wrote Rebuilding Trade and Cooperation with Europe, passed by conference in spring 2022.