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Observations on liberals
Five years after the BBC conducted a search for the Greatest Briton of all time, the Liberal Democrat History Group is setting out to find the Greatest Liberal.
A shortlist of 15 has been drawn up by the group's executive committee and includes such giants from the party's history as the four-times prime minister William Gladstone and David Lloyd George (even if he split the party in 1916). Three other premiers also figure: Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Herbert Asquith and Lord John Russell ("the last Doge of Whiggism" or the first Liberal PM, depending on your point of view).
The list also features a number of Liberal thinkers: John Maynard Keynes, described as "the most influential and important economic thinker of the 20th century"; William Beveridge, "the father of the welfare state"; Richard Cobden, "who helped found the Anti-Corn Law League"; and the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill. It even includes John Locke (1632-1704) - "the patron saint of liberalism" - although, by my reckoning, he preceded the Liberal Party by 150 or so years.
Any such shortlist had to include a couple of modern Liberals or even Liberal Democrats, for the sake of appearances if nothing else. Step forward Jo Grimond, "the most important postwar Liberal leader" and, perhaps surprisingly, Roy Jenkins, the Labour deputy leader who co-founded the Social Democratic Party and then led the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords - or "the great Liberal prime minister Britain never had", as the History Group puts it.
Women, on the other hand, are thin on the ground: only Asquith's daughter Lady Violet Bonham Carter and Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett ("Britain's most important leader in the fight for women's suffrage") make the shortlist. The Journal of Liberal History does point out, however, that: "There are very few women in this list of great Liberals because until the mid 20th century, at least, politics was overwhelmingly a male preserve."
The list is also notable for the no-shows. Where, for instance, is Charles Dickens (number 41 in the BBC's Greatest Britons poll), whose campaigning journalism (he founded the Liberal newspaper the Daily News) and graphic depictions of poverty in novels such as Oliver Twist did so much to further 19th-century social reform? Or, for that matter, Winston Churchill, a Liberal MP for close to 20 years who played a vital part in pushing forward the New Liberal agenda during the 1906-14 Liberal governments?
Other figures who arguably deserve a place in any shortlist of "Great Liberals" include W E Forster (who was behind the Education Act 1870), T Hobhouse (who provided much of the thinking that underpinned the theories of New Liberalism) and the socially conscious businessman Joseph Rowntree.
Unlike the BBC's poll, this one is unlikely to make it to television, let alone prime time. However, the four highest-placed contenders in the poll (which, by the way, is open to History Group members only) will be championed by "leading historians and politicians" at a fringe meeting (19 September) to be held at this autumn's Liberal Democrat conference. Reserve your place now.
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