A Liberal Revival ?
Liberals are professing a growing confidence that a notable revival of their party is in sight, and that an intensive effort in the constituencies will yield striking results at the General Election. It is with this conviction that they have launched a. public appeal for an election fighting fund of £2oo,000, and are intending to put between 400 and 500 candidates in the field. If one asks what are the grounds for this confidence, many replies have been given. It is held to be not without significance that among the candidates already adopted 128 are young men serving in the Forces. Perhaps the circumstance which tells most in favour of Liberals is the intense eagerness apparent in all classes of the community for a progressive policy of social reform and reconstruction which exists side by side with diminished interest in ordinary party politics. The war has accustomed people to think in terms of the nation, and has stimulated them to demand generous measures of reform which many people will not expect from the Conservative Party, nor yet from a Labour Party which, as now organised, is too subservient to the sectional interests of the trade unions. If one asks what is it that has captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of men serving in the Forces or the workshop, the answer is " Beveridge " and all that that stands for ; and it is significant that Sir William Beveridge himself is a Liberal Member of Parliament, and that the Security and Full Employment policies that he has framed are exactly in the tradition of the great social reforms which were initiated and carried out by the Liberal Party from 1906 to 1914. Sir William Beveridge is manifestly a substantial asset to the party, not merely by reason of his constructive and ingenious mind, but because he is the spokesman of a school of constructive thinkers which has always been with us. Those thinkers are Liberals, and it is arguable that they have always stood for the characteristic British mode of progressive democracy, though they have been eclipsed during the last twenty years owing to the mistaken impression that all their objectives had been won and that their work was no longer needed. Hitlerism has proved that there is always a need for a militant Liberal Party.
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