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THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY AND GWYNEDD POLITICS, 1900-20 THE effective monopoly of the Liberal Party in Gwynedd politics between 1900 and 1914 was the product of the marriage of noncon- formity and radicalism solemnized at the polls in the years following the election of 1868. From the 1870s on, Liberal Party progress was such that by the turn of the century organized Liberalism was to play its role in Welsh politics with a confidence born of its monopoly. No part of Wales showed greater evidence of this than Gwynedd, where, between 1895 and 1914, the merely formal opposition of Conservative rivals enabled Liberal Party candidates to be returned to Westminster from all five constituencies, whilst, on a local level, the expertise of an able and articulate middle class ensured Liberal control of local government councils. This apparent invincibility of the Liberal Party led many contemporaries to feel that, clad in its Welsh garb, and adjusting itself to the increasingly-voiced call for social legislation, their party was destined to become the permanent recipient of radical political energy. But politics is unkind to prophets, and the partisan, in failing to make full allowance for all the nuances of the democratic process, often confuses appearances with reality. Though their rivals failed to win a single Welsh seat in the general election of 1906, the confidence and optimism of the Welsh Liberals soon proved to be unwarranted, for beneath the facade of electoral success lay intra-party divisions which merely needed the right kind of stimulus to induce a fundamental re-alignment of party allegiances. Despite the generally fictitious nature of many popularly accredited historical watersheds, there seems little reason not to assert that the effects of the Great War of 1914-1918 led to so many fundamental changes in twentieth-century Welsh politics that its outbreak may be held to be an event of historical interruption and redirection. Some of the war's insidious effects proved to be des- tructive: the pressures it released destroyed the Liberal Party as an effective political force in Britain, whilst in Wales the stresses of an increasingly mobile wartime society eroded the sense of isolation that had previously suffused Welsh political life. On a deeper level, the war was to destroy that serenity of political outlook which, with its confidence and optimism, had so comforted the pre-war generation.