Remembering the Liberal – SDP Alliance and a stalwart Welsh Liberal MP
On 10 February 1982, as the heady days of the Liberal-SDP Alliance were being exchanged for dips in the opinion polls, the former Liberal MP for Merioneth (1945-51), Mr Emrys Roberts, wrote to the Times from his home at Dwy Dderden on the isle of Anglesey.
Emrys Roberts was politically close to Lady Megan Lloyd George. He, Lady Megan and Edgar Granville, Liberal MP for Eye in Suffolk, had formed a small group in Parliament to fight for what they saw as the Radical Liberal tradition. But this did not mean they opposed attempts at realignment of the left through arrangements with like-minded parties. In his letter to the Times, Roberts said he hoped to see an eventual merger of the Liberal and Social Democratic parties, with a single leader. He went on to recall that in 1951, he and Lady Megan had approached Herbert Morrison proposing a working relationship with the Labour government, with its small majority of eight votes and the parliamentary Liberal party which then had nine MPs. Morrison was apparently well disposed but Attlee decided to call a general election, which the Tories went on to win. Roberts looked back to the Lib-Lab pact of 1977-78, agreed by David Steel and Jim Callaghan with approval. Against the background of the seats negotiations disaster, but noting the optimism at the possibility of a left of centre government after the next election, Roberts made a case for strong, central control of the seats process by the party leaders and a move towards amalgamating Liberal and SDP constituency organisations on the ground to push forward moves towards a national merger of the two Alliance parties.
Roberts did not say if his approach to Labour with Lady Megan in 1951 had been approved by the party leader Clement Davies or would have been endorsed by all nine members of the Parliamentary Liberal Party. It seems unlikely that either is the case. Davies had no arrangement with the Conservatives in Montgomery but they did not usually stand candidates against him. A parliamentary pact with Labour would have threatened that. Bearing in mind the independent mindedness of some of his parliamentary colleagues, notably Rhys Hopkin Morris who represented Carmarthen, it also seems far-fetched to imagine the nine Liberals all voting to sustain an increasingly stale Labour government.
On the anniversary of the publication of Roberts’ letter however it is interesting to recall the politics of the Alliance, the arguments over merger (now all safely settled) and the earlier attempts in 1977-78 and 1951 to come to political agreement across tribal party lines.
