National League of Young Liberals

The National League of Young Liberals (NLYL), often just called the Young Liberals, was the youth wing of the British Liberal Party. It was in existence from 1903 to 1990. Its successor organisation is the Liberal Youth, the youth wing of the Liberal Democrats. The NLYL played a significant role in the development of Liberal thought and action, particularly from the 1960s until the end of the 1980s.

The NLYL was founded in 1903. By 1906 it had over three hundred branches.

In 1934 the NLYL called for David Lloyd George to lead a Liberal New Deal revival based on the Yellow Book.

One of the significant periods of the Young Liberals was the 1960s and early 1970s. The press coined the phrase the "Red Guard" to illustrate the radical nature of the youth wing. The public became aware of the "Red Guards" at the 1966 Liberal Party Conference in Brighton, when they sponsored an anti-NATO resolution. Over the next decade the YLs were active on a number of foreign policy areas. In particular they were at the forefront of the opposition to Apartheid and the Vietnam war. The YLs took a leading role in the Stop the Seventy Tour of South African Cricket and Rugby teams. Led in particular by an exiled South African Peter Hain (later to become a Labour Party Cabinet Minister), Louis Eaks (later to edit the Tribune), Hilary Wainwright (later to be editor of Red Pepper magazine), they took direct action when other Liberals were not doing so.

In his 2016 book The Left's Jewish Problem, Dave Rich fixes responsibility on Peter Hain and Louis Eaks for spreading, in the early 1960s - well before the Six-Day War, the idea that Israel is an illegitimate imperialist enterprise. Philip Spencer, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Kingston University, accuses the Young Liberals of, "the victims of the most murderous racism, were now the real racists, inverting the Holocaust."

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