The prevailing historiographical orthodoxy about British politics in the generation before the Great War, as it bears upon the subject of this book, seems to me to be reducible to the following propositions:

That the late nineteenth century saw a form of class politics, but one which was inherently unsatisfactory; so that the Labour party (which represented working-class interests) offered an ultimately irresistible challenge to the Liberal party (which did not). Moreover, that Labour (perhaps in spite of itself) acquired an ideological cutting edge which Liberalism lacked; that Liberalism, resting on laissez faire (of which Free Trade was the highest expression), could not come to terms with the modern state; and that the ‘new Liberalism’ was the pious palliative of a few intellectuals who had no influence on the men of power. That the ‘Radicals’ failed to shift the party to the left, and instead the ‘Liberal Imperialists’ kept it to the right; so that, in remaining a bourgeois creed, Asquithian Liberalism lost touch with the workers; and conversely that such popular strength as it could command came from Nonconformity. Hence that the Edwardian Liberal revival was illusory, based as it was upon three freakish election results in 1906, January 1910 and December 1910; but that a disinterested observer could have seen before 1914 that Liberalism was played out and that only with its displacement by the Labour party would class find its proper expression in politics.

This book will suggest that these propositions are at best inadequate and at worst false. In order to make sense of what happened in north west England in the early twentieth century I had to adopt a different interpretative schema.