Crisis at Ettrick Bridge

William Rodgers

• A Short History of the Liberal Party 1900-88 by Chris Cook
  Macmillan, 216 pp, £9.95, August 1989, ISBN 0 333 44884 7
• Against Goliath by David Steel
  Weidenfeld, 318 pp, £14.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 297 79678 X
• Labour’s Decline and the Social Democrats’ Fall by Geoffrey Lee Williams and Alan Lee Williams
  Macmillan, 203 pp, £29.50, July 1989, ISBN 0 333 46541 5
• Penhaligon by Annette Penhaligon
  Bloomsbury, 262 pp, £14.95, September 1989, ISBN 0 7475 0501 2
• Citizens’ Britain: A Radical Agenda for the 1990s by Paddy Ashdown
  Fourth Estate, 159 pp, £5.95, September 1989, ISBN 1 872180 45 0

In the General Elections of 1951 and 1955, the Liberal Party won less than 3 per cent of the vote and ended up with six MPs. The party of Gladstone, Asquith and Lloyd George had joined the political fringe. But by 1974, despite the electoral system and an absence of credibility as a candidate for government, the Party had raised its share of the vote to 19.3 per cent and the number of its MPs to 14. It was clear that the death of Liberal England had been prematurely foretold.