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THE NEW LIBERALISM AND THE CHALLENGE OF LABOUR: THE WELSH EXPERIENCE, 1885-1929 THE decline of the Liberal Party seems to have supplanted the rise of the gentry as the major area of contention for historians of modern Britain. An abundance of new sources is available; a variety of new techniques is being applied. This theme has generated a series of controversial works ever since Dangerfield postulated the 'strange death' of Liberal England back in 1936. In the past few years, the debate has gathered momentum, as attention has moved from the centre of politics to the periphery. Regional investigations have raised new questions about popular involvement in the con- stituencies and its social and cultural bases; in particular, major studies of politics in Lancashire, London and the east Midlands have made crucial contributions to the debate on late-Victorian and Edwardian Liberalism.1 The Welsh experience in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries sheds a particularly revealing light on the fortunes of the Liberal Party in this period, for politics and social change in Wales pursued a markedly different course from that prevalent elsewhere in Britain. Recent Welsh politics have been dominated by two major characteristics-first, the completeness of the Liberal ascend- ancy in Wales in the years down to 1914; secondly, the unrelieved nature of the Liberal decline ever since. Unlike much of England and Scotland, Wales has shown no consistent sign of a Liberal revival since 1918, in the face of the mounting challenge from Labour. There was no Liberal recovery in Wales in the late 1950s or the early 1960s-no Welsh Torringtons, Orpingtons or Roch- dales. After the general election of 1966, the Liberals retained only one seat in Wales, that of Montgomeryshire; the 1970 election brought no further success.2 The Liberal Party has long since been supplanted by Labour in industrial south Wales. In the later 1960s the resurgence of Plaid Cymru posed a new threat to what survived of Liberalism in the rural hinterland also. 'P. F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (1971); Paul Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour (1967); Janet Howarth, 'The Liberal Revival in Northamptonshire', Historical Journal, XII, I (1969). There is also much helpful material on regional politics in Henry Pelling, The Social Geography of British Elections, 1885-1910 (1968). 2 In the 1966 general election, the Liberals put up 11 candidates in Wales: their total poll was 89,108. In the 1970 general election, 19 Liberal candidates fought Welsh seats; but their poll was only 103,747, a drop of over 2,000 in the average vote.