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| international = | colours = Yellow | country = United Kingdom }} The Liberal Party was a liberal political party which was one of the two major parties in the United Kingdom in the 19th and early 20th century. The party arose from an alliance of Whigs and free-trade Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had formed four governments under William Gladstone. Despite splitting over the issue of Irish Home Rule, the party returned to power in 1906 with a landslide victory and introduced the welfare reforms that created a basic British welfare state. H. H. Asquith was Liberal Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916, followed by David Lloyd George whose premiership lasted until 1922 when the coalition the party had formed with the Conservative Party in World War I came to an end. By the end of the 1920s, the Labour Party had replaced the Liberals as the Tories' main rival. The party went into decline and by the 1950s won no more than six seats at general elections. Apart from notable by-election victories, the party's fortunes did not improve significantly until it formed the SDP–Liberal Alliance with the newly formed Social Democratic Party (SDP) in 1981. At the 1983 General Election, the Alliance won over a quarter of the vote, but only 23 of the 650 seats it contested. At the 1987 General Election, its vote fell below 23% and the Liberal and Social Democratic parties merged in 1988 to form the Liberal Democrats. A small Liberal Party was formed in 1989 by party members opposed to the merger. Prominent intellectuals associated with the Liberal Party include the philosopher John Stuart Mill, the economist John Maynard Keynes and social planner William Beveridge. == Ideology == During the 19th century, the Liberal Party was broadly in favour of what would today be called classical liberalism: supporting ''laissez-faire'' economic policies such as free trade and minimal government interference in the economy (this doctrine was usually termed 'Gladstonian Liberalism' after the Victorian era Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone). The Liberal Party favoured social reform, personal liberty, reducing the powers of the Crown and the Church of England (many of them were Nonconformists) and an extension of the electoral franchise. Sir William Harcourt, a prominent Liberal politician in the Victorian era, said this about liberalism in 1872: If there be any party which is more pledged than another to resist a policy of restrictive legislation, having for its object social coercion, that party is the Liberal party. (Cheers.) But liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right, (Hear, hear.) The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic Government tries to make everybody do what it wishes; a Liberal Government tries, as far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do as he wishes. It has been the tradition of the Liberal party consistently to maintain the doctrine of individual liberty. It is because they have done so that England is the place where people can do more what they please than in any other country in the world...It is this practice of allowing one set of people to dictate to another set of people what they shall do, what they shall think, what they shall drink, when they shall go to bed, what they shall buy, and where they shall buy it, what wages they shall get and how they shall spend them, against which the Liberal party have always protested.〔''The Times'' (31 December 1872), p. 5.〕 The political terms of "modern", "progressive" or "new" Liberalism began to appear in the mid to late 1880s and became increasingly common to denote the tendency in the Liberal Party to favour an increased role for the state as more important than the classical liberal stress on self-help and freedom of choice.〔W. H. Greenleaf, ''The British Political Tradition. Volume II: The Ideological Heritage'' (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 143.〕 By the early 20th century the Liberals stance began to shift towards "New Liberalism", what would today be called social liberalism: a belief in personal liberty with a support for government intervention to provide minimum levels of welfare. This shift was best exemplified by the Liberal government of H. H. Asquith and his Chancellor David Lloyd George, whose Liberal reforms in the early 1900s created a basic welfare state. David Lloyd George adopted a programme at the 1929 general election entitled ''We Can Conquer Unemployment!'', although by this stage the Liberals had declined to third-party status. The Liberals now (as expressed in the Liberal Yellow Book) regarded opposition to state intervention as being a characteristic of right-wing extremists.〔Liberal Industrial Inquiry, ''Britain's Industrial Future'' (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), p. 453.〕 After nearly becoming extinct in the 1940s and 50s, the Liberal Party revived its fortunes somewhat under the leadership of Jo Grimond in the 1960s, by positioning itself as a radical centrist non-socialist alternative to the Conservative and Labour Party governments of the time. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Liberal Party (UK)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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