No abstract

The reasons for the decline of the Liberal party in Britain, and its replacement by the Labour party as the representative of the left, continue to be the subject of debate among historians of twentieth-century British politics. An important point at issue has been whether or not the Liberal decline had irreversibly set in prior to World War I; or if the war itself with the strains it placed on liberal ideology and the relationship among the party's most prominent leaders, and with the stimulus it provided for a more militant working class, was the catalyst for decline. There can be no question that the Liberal party was critically dependent upon the support of working-class voters for its viability as an alternative party of government.1 Thus, a major issue of contention among historians of Liberal politics has been the party's success or failure before August 1914 in retaining the allegiance of this crucial electoral base.

During the crisis that followed Austria-Hungary's ultimatum to Serbia on 24 July 1914, Yorkshire Liberals were unanimous in their belief that Britain 3 See Henry Pelling, Social geography of British elections, 1885-igw (London, 1967), chs. 11, '3-4 The evidence on Yorkshire liberalism is derived from eight Yorkshire Liberal newspapers. Apart from Middlesborough and York, they represent the principal Yorkshire parliamentary boroughs under the third Reform Act. Six of these papers are from woollen district cities -Bradford (2), Leeds, Dewsbury, Halifax, and Huddersfield -and among them they cover the political activities of the entire district. This region was the centre of greatest Liberal strength in the county. The other two represent opinion in Sheffield and Hull, the two largest Yorkshire parliamentary boroughs outside the woollen district. Most of the information on Liberal views comes from the editorial columns of these newspapers. Since Liberal political activity stopped for the duration of the war, there were few meetings and speeches. Furthermore, the Bradford Daily Telegraph ceased to publish leaders soon after the formation of the coalition in 1915; the Yorkshire Evening Mews (Leeds) stopped publishing them from September 1914 to March 1917; and the Eastern Morning Mews (Hull) tended to limit its comments to the progress of the war itself-though it commented often enough on political issues to make clear its political leanings. Thus, from the spring of 1915 to the spring of 1917, only five or six (depending on what the Eastern Morning Mews did) of the eight would editorialize on an issue raised by the war; from September 1914 to the spring of 1915, and from March 1917 to November 1918, six or seven out of the eight did so.

The Irish mythology of the Great Famine of the 1840s explained the failure of the British government to prevent the deaths of some one million people in terms of a Whig government and ruling élite driven by a commitment to laissez-faire ideology which left them indifferent to the loss of Irish lives. At its most extreme, this mythology attributed a wilful genocide to the English. The term myth as used here does not necessarily imply that the account is untrue. Rather, the myth comprises a combination of fact, fiction and the unknowable in a narrative of such power that, for the people who accept it, the myth provides a guide to future understanding and action. In this respect, Irish mythology about the English and the Famine is rooted in facts: the resistance of the Whig government to any interference with the market; the staunch commitment to ideology of central figures in the making of famine policy such as Charles Trevelyan (assistant secretary to the treasury) and Sir Charles Wood (chancellor of the exchequer) and shapers of liberal opinion such as the political economists Nassau Senior and James Wilson (editor of The Economist); and the indifference to Irish suffering, and indeed the hostility to the Irish, as demonstrated in the language of the radical M.P.J.A. Roebuck.

No abstract