This chapter re-examines a familiar subject: the precipitate decline and eventual recovery of popular Liberalism between the Home Rule crisis of 1886 and the landslide electoral victory of 1906. The aim is not to retrace the pre-history of‘New Liberalism’, but to study the Liberals' ‘wilderness years’ for their own sake. How did the party respond to electoral and ministerial failure, and how did these failures impact upon semi-detached sections of the Liberal coalition such as metropolitan Radicals and organised labour? In essence it is argued that the political defeats of these years proved decisive, not only to the growth of independent Labour politics, but also to shaping the whole political outlook of the socialist and Radical left before 1914.

The chapter begins by reiterating the argument that the great Liberal schism of 1886 helped Conservatives to demonize their political opponents as no more than a sectarian, ‘faddist’-dominated rump. Under the influence of political nonconformity, it was argued, the Liberals had turned their backs on the tolerant, freedom-loving traditions of their past in favour of the harsher instincts of the moral reformer. There is no doubt that the political voice of nonconformity was at its most strident in these years, but despite this even the nonconformist electorate seems to have wavered in its support for Liberalism at the polls. By the early 1890s there were clear signs of a revolt against the nonconformist moral agenda from within the Liberal party, but there were also signs of a growing pessimism about the prospects for democracy in Britain. Many interpreted the ascendency of jingoism and Toryism as confirmation of the inherently ‘irrational’ character of the mass electorate.