Decline of the Liberal party

This refers to the decline of the Liberal Party in Britain in the Late 19th Century and the early 20th Century. In particular the 1906 election which saw a triumph for the party has been selected as the point to assess its decline. The Liberal Party had been one of the dominant forces in British politics in the 19th century. But after the end of the First World War it faced a decline it failed to recover from. The historiographical debate on this has tended to focus on whether one could see the decline beginning before the war. This is what this essay seeks to discuss.
The issue of the decline of the Liberal party is complex and subsumes a vast part of late 19th and early 20th century history. This question asks whether the party was in decline before 1906 which is a rather strange way of viewing the politics relating to the Liberal party. 1906 ostensibly marked the triumph of the Liberal party in the election of that year under its largely forgotten leader Henry Campbell Bannerman wh...