History
It has long been active in Cambridge politics, with student members playing a role in electing David Howarth on a massive 15% swing in the 2005 election, when the student turnout was unusually and noticeably higher than that in the rest of the city.
The older of its founder societies, the CU Liberal Club, originally existed side-by-side with a discussion forum for radical Cambridge politics in the late 1880s, called 'The Rainbow Circle.' Alumni of this group relocated to London after their graduation, and helped found the Bloomsbury-based radical group of that same name in 1893.
Between 1886 and 1897, the club's founder Treasurer was Oscar Browning, a Fellow of King's and three-times Liberal candidate who was also Treasurer of the Cambridge Union. The society had varying fortunes as the Liberal Party waned in the mid-twentieth century.
The society today attracts numerous high-profile speakers - in recent months, Vince Cable, Menzies Campbell, Nick Clegg, Simon Hughes, Chris Huhne, and David Steel. During the United Kingdom general election, 2005 it helped organise a rally of 2,500 people with Charles Kennedy in Market Square.
Notable past speakers not normally associated with the Liberal Party have included Oscar Wilde (1889), Jerome K. Jerome (1912), W. H. Auden (1938), and Irish Prime Minister Sean Lemass (1961). A complete list of the society's past events from 1886 to the present is available here.
Read more about this topic: Cambridge Student Liberal Democrats
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)