History
The conception of the Liberal Democrat party can be traced back to the early 1980s when the Gang of Four, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rogers, split from the Labour party to form the SDP. Within months the new party formed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party and the two set about trying to supplant Labour as the main Left-wing grouping in the UK. The SDP/Liberal Alliance fought the 1983 and 1987 general elections achieving 26% (just one point behind Labour) and 23% respectively. Following the slight reversal in 1987 the decision was taken to merge the two parties in order to present the public with a simpler proposition and so the Liberal Democrats were born.
The formation of the Liberal Democrats can be seen as a healing of the split in the British liberal tradition created in the 1920s when a great many Liberal party members switched to Labour due to that party being seen as a more effective vehicle for social change at that time. The old socially liberal Labour right, to which Jenkins et al belonged, was shaped by Liberal defectors. In a way, the mass defection of the SDP was a return home.
The modern British liberal tradition, of which the Liberal Democrats are the main inheritors, can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century and the repeal of the Corn Laws. This measure split the Tory party into pro-free trade Peelites and the anti-free trade majority. In 1859 the Peelites (including William Gladstone) joined with the Whigs (an aristocratic grouping with identifiably liberal tendencies whose history can be traced to the mid-seventeenth century) to form the Liberal party. The ideas which drove this realignment can be traced to the Scottish Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth century and thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith (a professor at Glasgow University in the 1750s and '60s).
The connection between the Liberal Democrats and Glasgow University has been a long and glorious one. Both the present Lib Dem leader and his predecessor were members of GULD's forerunner organisations. Ming Campbell was President of Glasgow University Liberals in the 1960s and Charles Kennedy was President of the Glasgow University SDP in the early 1980s. Looking further back, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was a Glasgow University student in the 1850s. Campbell-Bannerman was responsible for reshaping the post-Gladstonian Liberal party taking it from a disunited shambles in the 1890s to it's largest ever election victory in 1906. He is considered by some to be the greatest Liberal Party leader.