'It was the Conservatives who lost the election of 1906, not the Liberals who won it.' Discuss.

In 1902, Salisbury retired as Prime Minister and was replaced by Arthur Balfour. Balfour was never a particularly good candidate for the job, but the party was desperate and he was the best of the available members. He did have strengths, he was good at debating with fellow members and the opposition but there were far more weaknesses than strengths. He took things for granted. He came into power whilst the party was on a high and assumed that it would stay this way if he did nothing and sat back and watched. People never really looked upon him with the respect that a usual Prime Minister would command. He never married which was seen as strange at the time and employed members of his own family. He lost any support from the working classes that Salisbury had managed to gain by only appointing lords into the cabinet.

Balfour closely supported the 1902 education act. Because of this, many people blamed him for the consequences. Non-Conformists in England defected back to the liberal party when it was announced that the government would fund Church of England schools. The Non-Conformists were offended by this and laid the blame directly on Balfour. He was also blamed for the Tariff Reforms, which were disliked by the working classes. They knew that higher taxes on food would mean that they paid more. The Conservative Party was divided over the policy. The free trade groups of the party strongly objected and were forced to leave the party. Although Balfour didn't actively support the Tariff Reforms, he was blamed for not changing it when he came into power.

The working classes were again angered when the owners of Taff Vale railway in South Wales sued their workers for going on strike. The owners won and all of the money belonging to the workers union was taken to compensate the owners. This was a turning point in Conservative Party popularity. Unions were now almost powerless and workers were afraid to strike. The Liberal and Labour parties came together to defend the working class and so stole a large amount of the Conservative vote.

Also, Chinese slavery in South Africa was making the government look bad because England ruled over South Africa. The citizens felt that the slavery should be stopped but the Conservatives did nothing about it. In the same area, the Boer war was splitting the Conservatives. The public blamed the government for the hard war in which many people died. The war united the Liberal party in their hate of the war.

Item 1 supports the idea that it was Conservative weakness rather than Liberal strength that turned the tide of voting. The huge increase in Labour and other party votes suggests that people defected from the Conservative party in favour of a mixture of parties but the Liberals were the largest and so got in. The percentage of Liberal votes didn't increase greatly but it was enough to change the government.

The Conservative downfall was the reason of Liberal success. The Liberal party didn't really come up with any new policies or schemes to pull voters, but instead made sure that they disagreed with most of the new Conservative ideas to the extent that people turned to them to avoid the new policies.