The Liberal Party of South Africa (LP) was launched on 9 May 1953. Led by Margaret Ballinger, with Donald Molteno, Leo Marquard and Alan Paton in senior positions, and guaranteed to generate media coverage, the LP seemed to mark the culmination of the liberal activism of the 1940s and early 1950s, while speeches and party literature harked back to the Cape liberal tradition. For its founders, the launch of a party which freely expressed a ‘liberal’ race policy was a liberation from the constraints of working within the United Party (UP). Margaret Ballinger rather overstated the case, describing the new party as ‘the significant product of the history of the last forty years’.

The LP endorsed a qualified franchise, bound members to use ‘only democratic and constitutional means’ of opposition and, in its constitution, proclaimed its opposition to ‘all forms of totalitarianism such as communism and fascism’.With the formation of the LP liberals were, for the first time, forced to compete for popular support. Many in the South African Liberal Association (SALA), from which the LP emerged, and in the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), were unhappy with the idea of a new political party competing with the UP and refused to join the LP. Given its tentative political programme, the LP was attacked by the Congress movement, hampering its attempts to recruit black members.

The LP was an umbrella organisation, its members drawn from different political traditions and with varied political outlooks but united in opposition to the Nationalist Party government and in their belief in the need to ‘bridge the racial gap’ and to ‘win out against Communism’.Although non-racial the LP initially concentrated on parliamentary politics, and saw white voters as its main constituency – just what the African National Congress (ANC) had asked for, in some ways, though from a starting point too conservative for Congress to stomach.

Younger party members, however, believing the key function of the party to be to win black support, began pushing almost immediately for the founding policies to be changed. The LP became a vehicle through which liberalism was challenged, amended and developed throughout the 1950s.