Account for the Liberal landslide in the 1906 General Election

The Liberalises used Tariff Reform to reunite the party. They all seemed to agree that Tariff Reformer would lead to price increase and used propaganda to emphasise the point to the Public. So under the banner of free trade for all and the big loaf, little loaf slogan the Liberals gained supports from the working class. Free Trade was something the whole party seemed agree on and help rectify the split in the party caused by Irish home Rule. The Liberals made the Conservatives look distant from what the average working person in Briton at that time wanted and it seemed the Tory party wanted the rich to become richer and the working classes to become poorer. Whereas Free Trade that the Liberals where pushing kept thing’s the same and people at the time where happy with the way the country was going although they may not have realised that the imports where increasing and exports where decreasing.

Tariff Reform may have been a major reason for the demise of the Conservatives but the where over reasons for their demise such as their unpopularity. This unpopularity was mainly caused by the four following points.

By the time of the 1904 general election the Boer War had been over for two years but four years earlier in the 1900 general elections the conservative government claimed it was very close to success. They used this lie to help them win the election in a similar way Margaret Thatcher used the victory in the Falklands to help her win the 1982 General election. The public where very angry that the war had continued for another two years and many English lives had been lost in a war they had been told was almost over. The second reason for unpopularity was the Taff Vale case in 1901. The Taff Vale Railway because of an organised strike took the Amalgament Society of Railway Servants to court in 1900. The union lost and was forced to pay damages of £23,000. This had much wider implication as it meant no Union could strike without being worried that they would be sued. This left the government who failed to overturn this verdict very unpopular with workers and trade unions. The third cause of Tory unpopularity was due to Chinese slavery. After the British victory in the Boar wars attention went to the mines in South Africa but as the was a Labour shortage the government choose to use Chinese Coolies. The first reason for why the public disliked this was the conditions the slaves where kept in, people dislike the concentration camp mentality and worried that the slaves would get involved in ‘nameless practices’ because they where so cramped together. The second and more important reason people where scared that they could lose their job to a slave, once again it was the workers that the government seemed to angering. The fourth cause of the Tories unpopularity was the 1902 education act. The main point of the act, which angered people, was the fact education was to expand through Church schools, which would be funded by rates. But nonconformists did not like Church schools and where hoped that they would just disappear. Many nonconformists refused to pay the rates.

In 1903 a secret electoral pact was created between the Liberals and the LRC. The LRC agreed not to put candidates against Liberal candidates. This meant that the anti-Unionist would not be split and that the Liberal party would have access to £100,000 pounds of the LRC electoral funds which was much needed at the time as funds where running short in the Liberal Party.

I conclude that the Tory Party must have being expecting defeat due to the amount of mistakes they had made. Political trickery which lead the public to lose confidence and not trust the government also due to pendulum politics it was time for a change (people get bored with governments and look for a change). These are not the main reasons why the government would have been expecting defeat, the separation in to two groups left the party with no real policies. So in my opinion the Liberals where just in the right place at the right time and it was conservative mistakes such as losing most of the working class vote and situations which lead to there humiliating defeat and not a Liberal landslide.