The British Constitution Association, founded in 1905 as the British Constitutional Association, was a pressure group designed to oppose increasing state regulation, whether from the Liberal Party's New Liberalism or Joseph Chamberlain's proposals for Tariff Reform.[1] It has been described as "a curious mixture of unionist free traders, orthodox poor law administrators, and followers of Herbert Spencer".[2]

Its first president was Lord Hugh Cecil, who was succeeded by Lord Balfour of Burleigh. Its supporters included the constitutional expert A. V. Dicey, Lord Avebury, Lord Courtney, John St Loe Strachey, Professor Flinders Petrie,[3] Thomas Mackay, and Hugh Elliott.[4]

Notes

  1. ↑ W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition. Volume Two: The Ideological Heritage (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 281.
  2. ↑ Kenneth D. Brown, 'The Anti-Socialist Union, 1908-49' in Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History. Responses to the Rise of Labour in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 239.
  3. ↑ Greenleaf, p. 281.
  4. ↑ M. W. Taylor, Men Versus the State. Herbert Spencer and Late Victorian Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 268.

Further reading

  • M. H. Judge (ed.), Political Socialism. A Remonstrance. A Collection of Papers by Members of the British Constitution Association (Westminster, 1908).
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