Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on capitalization
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Home Rule as a ‘crisis of public conscience’
- 2 ‘That great cause of justice’: Home Rule in the context of domestic Liberal and radical politics
- 3 Constitutional Nationalism and popular liberalism in Ireland
- 4 ‘Giving stability to popular opinion’? Radicalism and the caucus in Britain and Ireland
- 5 Joseph and his brethren: the rise and fall of Radical Unionism
- 6 Social radicalism and the revival of the Gladstonian ‘popular front’
- 7 Democracy and the politics of humanitarianism
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Social radicalism and the revival of the Gladstonian ‘popular front’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Note on capitalization
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Home Rule as a ‘crisis of public conscience’
- 2 ‘That great cause of justice’: Home Rule in the context of domestic Liberal and radical politics
- 3 Constitutional Nationalism and popular liberalism in Ireland
- 4 ‘Giving stability to popular opinion’? Radicalism and the caucus in Britain and Ireland
- 5 Joseph and his brethren: the rise and fall of Radical Unionism
- 6 Social radicalism and the revival of the Gladstonian ‘popular front’
- 7 Democracy and the politics of humanitarianism
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Gladstone in his old age seems to partake of the super-natural. I have seen him intimately during the last week, and I am daily more and more impressed with the greatness of his mind and character.
The budget was a fair budget. It was an honest Budget – it paid its way. It laid down the important and far-reaching principle that extra taxation ought to fall on those who can afford to pay. It removed the unjust privileges which landlords have possessed in the past. support the party which carried this democratic budget.
Liberalism must re-unite itself with the Labour interest. Until that is done we cannot look for much success … The programme of the Liberal party must, therefore, be so altered as to include those items of legislation for which the industrial classes are striving.
Radicals parting ways
Although Chamberlain was rapidly marginalized within the radical left after 1892, his ‘materialist’ approach to politics – the priority of social reform – and emphasis on parliamentary centralism, in the conviction ‘that the day of Local Parliaments and of small nationalities is past’, were to have enormous impact on twentieth-century radical politics. If ‘modern’ radicalism was about ‘the social question’, and if poverty was to be reduced by government action, then the country needed the rational reconstruction and empowerment of the imperial executive at its centre, rather than legislative devolution.
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- Chapter
- Information
- British Democracy and Irish Nationalism 1876–1906 , pp. 275 - 352Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007