Home Rule, Radicalism, and the Liberal Party, 1886-1895

Abstract

In 1887, Joseph Chamberlain wrote a letter toThe Baptistin which he blamed the preoccupation of Liberals and Radicals with Home Rule for delaying social reform. “Thirty-two millions of people,” he complained, “must go without much-needed legislation because three millions are disloyal.” Early in the 1890s, socialists and militant working-class spokesmen sometimes took up this cry to express their discontent with the Liberal party. And in later years, the Liberal-Radical commitment to Home Rule provided one of the main historical explanations for the founding of an independent working-class party; thus the dampening of Radicalism supposedly caused by Home Rule has been regarded as the source of the most important political transformation of recent British history. In the words of G. D. H. Cole:With Chamberlain's departure, and with the increasing preoccupation of Gladstone with Home Rule, the Radical impulses of the 'seventies had died away. Some attempt was made to revive them when it had become plain that Liberalism was in serious danger of losing its working-class support. But the attempt was made too late, and the Liberal ‘Newcastle Programme' of 1892 was only a very pale shadow of Chamberlain's ‘Unauthorized Programme’ of 1885.D. A. Hamer, in a recent article, takes essentially the same view, with some modifications. The Liberals, he says, took up Home Rule in a deliberate attempt to paper over confusion and disagreement within the party over other policies. In the 1880s, the Liberal party tended to be dominated by “faddists,” who could not agree on the precedence to be given various reform proposals.