June 2017: The General Election has returned an entirely predictable result. It is the Liberalsyet againwho emerged as the dominant force.

Prime Minister Nick Clegg, seemingly secure in office for a second term, has now entered the familiar round of coalition negotiations with the third partyLabour. The oddly popular socialist maverick Jeremy Corbyn, no natural soul mate of the PMs, leads a party with 85 seats. The leading radical left Liberal, deputy leader Yvette Cooper, is leading the coalition negotiations with Corbyn, with defence and welfare policy expected to be the biggest sticking points. But no one doubts that in the end a deal will be done as it has been done so many times before over the last century. Speaking on Question Time, the long-serving Liberal MP for Kirkaldy, Gordon Brown, son of the Manse and self-appointed heir of Scottish Gladstonian Liberal moralism, has taken up his traditional role, growling that the impending Liberal-led coalition must have a moral compass.

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The Liberals have long been regarded as the natural party of government in the UK, indeed one of the most successful election-winning movements anywhere in the world. But it could have been very different: there have been moments when Liberal dominance seemed under threat. Back in the 1920s, division had nearly destroyed the party. There had even been an unsettling moment in the election of 1924 when it seemed possible that more Labour members would be returned than Liberals. An article in the Spectator that year, subsequently widely mocked, had even been entitledabsurdly as it now seemsThe strange death of Liberal England. But the crisis passed. After Stanley Baldwins Tory government presided over mass unemployment, the Liberals, once again under the leadership of the aging warrior David Lloyd George won the 1931 General Election in a landslide. The Liberal response to the Great Depression dished Labour in the phrase of the time by implementing a national system of health and unemployment insurance and by vast public works schemes all set out in a best-selling pamphlet called We Can Conquer Unemployment. Contrary to many predictions at the time rising class politics did not destroy the Liberal coalition as its non-conformist tradition was fused with socialist ideas and a commitment to full employment and trade union rights that kept a majority of the labour movement inside the Liberal tent.

In the run-up to the 1935 General Election, the first to be conducted under the Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies, the Liberals were bolstered by Labour defectionsincluding their former leader Ramsay Macdonald. The coalition government formed that year was dominated by Liberals but had the support of a faction of Tories known as the National Conservatives.

In 1940, a wartime coalition government was formed with the Liberals once again the dominant force. The Prime Minister Winston Churchill had sat as a Liberal MP since 1904, although his famous feud with Lloyd George and increasing discontent with what he saw as the creeping socialistic tendencies of his party meant he had remained on the back benches through the most of the 30s.

After a brief period of Tory government in the early 50s, another long Liberal ascendency under Hugh Gaitskill (Prime Minister 1955-1963) and Roy Jenkins (Prime Minister 1963-1974) transformed Britain: negotiating entry into the Common Market, presiding over decolonization, reforming divorce and abortion law and driving a massive expansion of Higher Education. A new multicultural society was emerging, leaving the opposition Conservative Party divided between unreconstructed reactionaries and modernisers, some of whom later split to form the niche Free Market Party to campaign for a smaller state. In the wake of their third successive election defeat in 1970, the leading Tory Lord Hailsham wrote a famous book called Must Conservatism Lose?

The answer, it turned out, was no. Commonwealth immigration, a more militant labour movement and a new radical youth movement, all drove a polarization of politics that soon generated the greatest postwar threat to Liberal electoral dominance. In 1972, driven in part by the Jenkins governments attempts to rein in the power of Trade Unions, the so-called gang of four (Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Peter Shore and Barbara Castle) defected to form a new Socialist Party. The Tories, now led by charismatic Enoch Powell, gained the largest number of seats in the 1974 election and led a minority government that was soon beset by strikes that shutdown the railways and the power stations, and by race riots in the cities. New Left intellectuals gravitated towards the new Socialist Party, which took a leading role in extra-parliamentary protest in a way that the old Labour Party, still with its roots in working-class communities in the North West and central belt of Scotland never did.

Yet despite frequent predictions of their decline, the Liberals endured and prospered, topping the polls in elections in the 1980s under Michael Heseltine and 2000s under Tony Blair. The secret of the Liberals success has been their ability to appeal with optimism to a sense of fair play and social justice. Unencumbered by a historic attachment to a particular interest group, willing to use state power pragmatically, polls have consistently shown the Liberals to be the party most Britons trust with the economy and are most likely to regard as on their side. Over the years, pundits have had fun mocking the vacuity of the Liberals famous campaign slogans: Liberals Will Get Things Done (Jenkins in 1966), For the Many Not the Few (Heseltine in 1987) or Forward Not Back (Blair in 2001). But they worked. The Conservative tradition in British politics has always been strong, but the Tories won only four General Elections since 1926: in 1950, when they were led by the moderate Anthony Eden, in the crisis of 1974, led by Powell, in 1992 when mild-mannered Douglas Hurd won the most unlikely victory against Heseltines by-then fractious Liberal party, and, most recently, William Hagues minority government from 2001-2004.

Liberals have had the knack of presenting themselves as non-dogmatic yet radical when it comes to tackling social injustice; and as both patriotic and internationalist. The partys most notable political tactic has been to steal its opponents clothes. The Gaitskill government borrowed the Labour policy of nationalizing gas, coal and electricity. Heseltine even co-opted some of the egalitarian language and willingness to use targeted state intervention pioneered by the Socialist Partywhich ended up merging with Labour in 1985. To the frustration of the Randian libertarians in the short-lived Free Market Party, Liberals have always been comfortable talking about deregulation and de-centralisation even while simultaneously increasing spending.

Snipers from the Left and the Right accuse the Liberals of being complacent establishment centrists. And it is true that Liberals have remained on the shifting middle ground of British politics, casting their rivals to left and right as ideologues. Unlike their rivals they have sensed the sweet spot of British public opiniona desire for everyone to have a fair chance in life, for government to be present but not controlling, for Britain to be open to the world yet proud of its distinctiveness. Yet at the same time the secret of the success of British liberalism has been its radicalism not its complacency: to embrace socially progressive causes, to take on vested interests whether they be over-mighty trade unions or over-mighty banks. The iconic brown and cream poster from the 1931 election with a scowling Lloyd George said it all: Hell get things in time of need!

Those moments when the party was in crisis in 1916, when it nearly split over the Lloyd George coalition, when Labour came agonizingly close to becoming the second party in 1924: how different the country might have been had it not retained its faith in the Liberals as the natural party of government

* Dr Adam Smith is an active Liberal Democrat member based in St Albans and a professional historian

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Liberal Britain a counterfactual history - Liberal Democrat Voice