David Maddox: Liberal Democrat conference - the history men

An interesting fringe meeting took place on Friday evening hosted by the Liberal Democrat History Group. Its topic of discussion was: "Fighting Labour: the struggle for radical supremacy in Scotland 1885 - 1929."
It was a discussion in which the Lib Dems could look at their forebears with a great deal of pride and regret.
This was arguably the period when the old Liberals were at their height and the very zenith of their powers, following on from the legacy of Midlothian's most famous MP - William Ewart Gladstone.
It was Kelvinside boy, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (pictured left), who led them to power in 1905 and although he had to retire due to ill-health in 1908, he started the historic government which would lay the foundations for the welfare state. Its greatest achievement was the creation of the old age pension by David Lloyd-George, whose good work as we all know was partly destroyed for the private sector by Gordon Brown as chancellor.
Lloyd-George's great friend and cabinet ally was a Dundee MP, who would later as a Conservative become known as the greatest Prime Minister of them all, Winston Churchill (pictured right as Dundee MP in 1909).
But, anybody who has read George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England will see that in their height of success also were the seeds of the Liberals' fall.
Dangerfield's thesis was that a popular Liberal government found itself overwhelmed by three genuinely radical forces - mass trade unionism and general strikes, militant feminism led by the Pankhursts, and the struggle for Irish independence. He argued that the drive to the First World War was a deliberate move by the Liberals to channel their anger and energy in a different direction for a national cause.
Emerging from the war the Liberals were split between former Prime Minister's Herbert Asquith's supporters and Lloyd-George's, including Churchill, who had ended up allied with the Tories.
By 1929, even though the party was reunited, Liberalism was all but dead in England and just holding on in the so-called "celtic fringes" including parts of Scotland. It had largely replaced by Labour on the left and the Tories on the right. By then Churchill had been ousted as Dundee's MP by the only ever successful temperance MP in British history and returned to the Tories.
As Tavish Scott's speech at conference today eluded to, the defeat came despite a promise that the Liberals could end unemployment.
They have never recovered and their only brush with government was as Labour's junior partner in the first eight years of Scottish devolution.
And it is perhaps this ghost that was also lying behind the discussion. Because through the Scottish Executive partnership between 1999 and 2007, the Lib Dems became intertwined in the popular mind, particularly in Scotland, as being Labour-lite.
In his pre-election 2007 conference SNP leader Alex Salmond made a jibe about how they needed to become more than a means of propping up Labour.
What this fringe meeting was maybe trying to remind people was that the Lib Dems need to put a distance between themselves and their old enemy Labour, particularly as that party is on its way down, and remember that the two were in a life and death struggle of ideas when nationalism in Scotland was still just a lunatic fringe.
That is perhaps why leading Lib Dems have been hinting at alliances with the SNP for the last few weeks. But even this is an acknowledgement of history's cruel judgement, that as a force now they can only aspire to be a junior partner.