George Elliott Dodds CBE (4 March 1889 – 20 February 1977) was a British journalist, newspaper editor, Liberal politician and thinker.
He returned to England intending to read for the bar but was drawn instead to journalism, accepting the post of leader writer and literary assistant on the Huddersfield Examiner in 1914.
However he was clever and tribal enough to recognise the electoral value of such policies and politically nimble enough to reconcile it with his own position by placing it in the several strands of liberal thought around which the party needed to coalesce.
They could withdraw from politics, they could defect to other parties or they could "allow distrust of Lloyd George to be outweighed by sympathy for the new thought and daring programme he was offering".
The report called for restoration of free trade, reforms of the rating system, and came out against state intervention in the economy except in the most extreme of circumstances.
[8] However Dodds was not one of those Liberals like Arthur Seldon, Oliver Smedley, Alfred Suenson-Taylor, 1st Baron Grantchester or S. W. Alexander who openly campaigned to build high the edifice of Gladstonian liberalism in the party to ward off the rising floodwater of William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes and who drifted away from mainstream party thinking to the right, into influential think-tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs or organisations such as the Society for Individual Freedom between the 1930s and 1960s.
[9] In 1957 Dodds wrote in the opening chapter of the book The Unservile State: Essays in Liberty and Welfare that he looked forward to the Liberals "re-establish[ing] themselves in their natural position as the acknowledged leaders of the Left...".