'[1] The founding members were concerned that, in the years after the Second World War, under the leadership of Clement Davies, the party was falling unduly under the sway of classical, free-market liberals and was drifting to the right.
In 1948 the Liberal Party Assembly called for a drastic reduction in government expenditure and for a committee to be set up to recommend severe cuts.
'If there were no Liberal Party' he declared in a speech at Ruan Minor in Cornwall in March 1956, 'we might well be witnessing today the growth of some dangerous movement akin to that of M.Poujade in France.
[6] While most individual members remained card-carrying Liberals however, one former chairman of the Group, Eric Farquhar Allison decided to join the Labour Party[7] and one of its vice-presidents, the former MP for Dundee, Dingle Foot, openly supported Labour candidates in seats not contested by Liberals at the 1955 general election.
In 1955, The Western Morning News reported that Thorpe was proclaiming the gospel of his Radical Reform Group with the energetic support of university students from Exeter and Bristol.