I recently visited the 3 boxes full of old term cards, event posters, and Lib Dem propaganda that together form the Liberal society archives, held by the Bodleian Library’s John Johnson Collection of Ephemera.
They are available to view at request in the Weston Library, and offer a treasure trove of information. It would be remiss of me not to detail some of my findings for the most avid of blog-readers.
I started with the most recent box, running from roughly 1989 to present and was immediately met with a plethora of ‘Newspaper’ style Lib Dem leaflets from the leadership of Paddy Ashdown into that of Charles Kennedy. Given these ‘Focus’ brand of leaflets are the lifeblood of campaigning for the party today, it appears the Lib Dem’s know when they are onto something. What also appeared on each and every leaflet was the Lib Dem promise to abolish the tuition fees introduced by Labour in 1998. The 2015 massacre in this context makes all the more sense, as the identity of the Lib Dem’s for young people was number one: tuition fees, and then everything else for well over a decade. To give some credence to the party in that period, they did succeed in abolishing tuition fees in Scotland when in coalition with Labour – a position that still stands today – helped dare I say by the SNP. I was also struck by the line, “many young people are horrified by the prospect of William Hague as Prime Minister,” given his recent election as Chancellor of this very university. Indeed, he took the time to visit the stall of this very society at the SU Freshers’ Fair. With such reversals in history since those heady early 2000’s for the Lib Dem’s, you’d be forgiven for thinking today’s student politics is all change. But no! The immortal line: ‘Young people are unimpressed with Labour’ rings as true today as it did then (perhaps more so) as does the assertion that the Lib Dem’s are gaining in Oxford, Cambridge and Liverpool. The first two were subject to County Council takeovers this May, whilst the latter is on the agenda surely whilst Carl Cashman remains Liverpool leader for the party.
Reading various articles of the previous incarnations of this very blog gave me varying impressions of what Liberalism meant. Perhaps my favourite came from James Moore, in the ‘AdLib’ era (other iterations include The Liberal View, Fringe etc.) who argued that cheap slogans were the wrong approach to politics, as Lib Dem’s do not, “promote our party as one would a washing powder.” In fact, the party was not, “wishy-washy centrists but the most radical of political forces, the most militant opponents of repression and the most passionate defenders of individual liberty.” Is this not the path to beating Reform? Whilst they mess about with headline-grabbing announcements, the Lib Dem’s can exist to offer a vision of hope whilst calling out dangerous misinformation pervading from the populist right, and standing up to the authoritarian grabs of liberty by our Labour government. The party needs to remind itself how to be radical, and how to be heard.
Given this is not even an attempt at a history of the society, but more a collection of what took my interest, some historical gaps can be filled in by the article of James Rattue from Trinity Term 1995 – from the same edition of the Liberal View that claimed that Kennedy had no leadership ambitions – a particularly un-fortuitous assessment. It is claimed that OULC was, in its heyday, a ‘full-scale gentleman’s club with its own rooms, serving three meals per day’ – before it died along with the Liberal party by the early 30’s. It was in 1935 that the society was rejuvenated by a ‘particular triumvirate’ including Harold Wilson – thus the club could claim its first future PM (I look to the Labour club for their empty list of PM’s). So significant was the club by the late 40’s that it succeeded in re-writing Liberal international policy alongside THE William Beveridge – casually the Honorary Vice-President of the club; it persuaded Liberal Leader Clement Davies not to join Churchill’s cabinet in 1951 and it helped to re-invigorate derelict constituencies around the country in a role that helped keep the party in existence. Its power days were not totally behind them as the society ran the OUSU from 1984-87 in tow with the SDP: a time which included the ‘great All Souls’ demonstration’ against the attendance of Mrs Thatcher at a dinner in 1984, before playing a role in the refusal of her honorary degree.
Events in the 90’s appear to have been strong in the society, as a semi-regular Laser Quest challenge against the Labour Club seems a regretful loss in 2025. I also enjoyed reading the account of ‘the first ever footballing encounter between representatives of Labour and the Liberal Democrats from Oxford University,’ where the society had to ‘overcome the early blow of ex-President Liz Truss failing to turn up, because she thought the match was on Sunday.’ Such a story illustrates the approach our other future PM took to her duties. I wonder whether that ever changed?
As I opened the next box of archives, I was met with the impressive leaflet advertising the upcoming visit of a certain David Lloyd George to the society on May 10th, 1932 – a meeting held in the Union’s debating chamber. It makes a humble President-Elect wonder how such a visit could ever be arranged, given how hard speaker events seem to organise in today’s age of email and Instagram. I would, I admit, pay a handsome sum to hear what his answers were to some of the questions said to have been posed to him: ‘what prospects … for the formation of a new progressive party of the ‘left-centre;’ ‘What [are the] essential immediate reforms for the economic, social and political reconstruction of this country;’ and ‘How would Mr. Lloyd George handle the present situation in Ireland?’
Delving slightly further into the future presents me with the impressive termcard of a certain J.J. Thorpe, who albeit not a future PM did achieve a certain degree of infamy for his political career. If it was a stacked term card I was looking for however, I would look no further than Michaelmas 1954 which included: Lord Beveridge, Tony Benn, Clement Davies, Lord Pakenham and Jeremy Thorpe – this on top of an Annual dinner, Halloween Party and visit to Cambridge. It seems it is hard to overestimate the significance of the society within the wider party within the 50’s. The decade also boasts a particularly enviable series of internal elections with no less than 4 separate candidate vying for treasurer. I shall hope the absence of this today is not that students are less liberal, but simply that they are fairly disillusioned with politics and discouraged from going as far as joining a party. The period of mass membership is long since over … I look to the Greens and Your Party to prove me wrong. Panel events of the 50’s also caught my eye as I notice that ‘Electoral Reform’ has been a discussion within the party since then (and of course before given the expansion of the suffrage led by the Liberals in the 19th century), but also free trade, Anglo-American relations, comprehensive schools, local government and the future of the railways. These are all conversations I could see the party having today demonstrating that a strong thread of liberalism has run throughout British Political History. Trinity term 1960 also strikes me as a particular strong one for the society, as future socialist journalist Paul Foot was Returning Officer whilst Black Hole theoriser Stephen Hawking occupied the role of External Relations Officer. Whilst they went in two very different directions, the society alumni is a list quite hard to match in its diversity of achievement.
Whilst haphazard, I hope this article goes some way to showing that a narrative of modern Britain is never too far away from the Oxford Students Liberal Association and its many predecessors. We have hosted some of the great thinkers of modern British politics – including the architects of the Welfare State and the various leaders of what has become the Liberal Democrats. Perhaps there are things that today’s party can learn from the students of its past – there is a need for Liberalism today as much as in any of those times before. Populism presents on all sides, with the ‘eco-populism’ of Zack Polanski and the conspiracy whisperings of the Reform Party, whilst the Labour government derelicts its duty for responsible government in the interest of the majority of tax-paying citizens of the UK. To preserve freedoms, and treat today’s social ills, there is a need for the cause we propagate in OSLA – as we have done since 1913.