During the 1920s and 1930s, although the Liberals attracted thinking men and women - such as the economist J M. Keynes and Lord Beveridge (the founding father of the Welfare State and Tawney's brother-in-law) - its political base would have totally disappeared without its traditional Christian support. In the Parliamentary Party of which I became a Member in 1979 a number of colleagues still had those ties. One of the most active is probably Alan Beith, the Berwick-Upon- Tweed MP, and a Methodist lay preacher. Geraint Howells, MP for Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire North preaches in the Welsh chapels; Richard Wainwright, the former MP for Colne Valley, in the Yorkshire Methodist chapels. Sir Cyril Smith is an active Unitarian, and after he won the Bermondsey byelection in 1983, Simon Hughes added the voice of evangelical Anglicanism. Jim Wallace, the Orkney and Shetland MP, is a member of the Church of Scotland, along with former leader, Sir David Steel. However, the Christian tap roots of the old Liberal Party have largely been dislodged. In the October 1990 edition of The Liberal Movement News, Tower Hamlets councillor, Stuart Rayment, writing about the Party's decision at that year's Annual Conference to support the repeal of the Blasphemy Laws wrote: 'The secular fundamentalists are, of course, in house, so theirs was the day.' At the same Conference delegates voted to abolish Christian school assemblies. Both of these decisions - along with the Paddy Ashdown's Policy Committee's support for a proabortion policy - will have distressed many Christians and others. Obviously perceptions about faith and politics differ but many old-time Liberals would have concurred with Ramsay Muir's description of the historic links. Muir was a Liberal thinker and historian who held the chair in contemporary history at Liverpool University, and who set out his beliefs in the 1920s publication The New Liberalism:50
I describe this belief as a 'faith' because ultimately it has a religious character. For many of us, at all events, it rests on the conviction that the Spirit Who has guided man in his toilsome struggle out of the mire of animalism is perpetually working upon every mind, goading it by means of those insatiable aspirations after rightness which are the torment and the glory of man ... These aspirations are the source of all advance.
Sixty years later, in 1987, when with John Gummer and Eric Heffer, Alan Beith compiled the election scene-setter Faith in Politics - Which Way Should Christians Vote51 the then Liberal Deputy Leader said: