1918-2019: A Century (well, roughly) of UK General Elections

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Thought these deserved a thread of their own.

1918

The parliament elected in December 1910 would, despite passing a bill reducing its own term from seven to five years, go on to sit for nearly eight, the longest-lived parliament since the English Civil Wars. The cause for this is obvious to us: in 1914, the First World War broke out. The parties in the House of Commons, deciding a general election would not be helpful to the war effort, formed a Coalition Government and suspended general elections until the end of the war. True to that promise, Prime Minister David Lloyd George announced the dissolution of Parliament three days after the armistice went into effect, with elections scheduled for the 14th of December, 1918.

By then, quite a lot had happened. Not merely with the war, which was too long and eventful to cover here, but in the British body politic as well. The Parliament Act had reduced the parliamentary term to five years and greatly reduced the House of Lords’ power over legislation. The Government of Ireland Act had provided for Irish home rule, although its implementation had been put on hold due to the war. And the Representation of the People Act had given the vote to all men above 21 and women above 30, the latter due to fears that the death toll from the war would put women voters in the majority.

The latter Act also provided for a massive restructuring of parliamentary constituencies, a necessary measure after thirty years of urban growth and population shifts. The House of Commons was expanded from 670 to 707 seats, the largest it had ever been or would ever be. Of course, 105 of those seats were in Ireland, where Home Rule would’ve meant a large reduction in representation if it had gone into effect.

The wartime Coalition, originally made up of members of the Unionist, Liberal and Labour parties, had shrunk significantly over its lifetime. When David Lloyd George replaced H. H. Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916, the latter took a significant chunk of the Liberal Party with him into Opposition, and the Labour Party left at the end of the war (though a few of their members formed a new "National Democratic Party" to let them carry on supporting the Government). This left the Coalition consisting of the Unionists plus whatever Liberals backed Lloyd George over Asquith, which was usually enough to ensure a stable majority, but hardly the type of national unity that had been seen in 1914.

Lloyd George and Unionist leader Andrew Bonar Law still felt their work was unfinished, and when the election was called, they arranged for a Coupon (a form letter of endorsement signed by both leaders) to be sent to one candidate in each mainland constituency – hence the 1918 election’s common nickname, the “Coupon Election”. Unfortunately, the Coupon was private correspondence, and no unified record was made of who received it. It was up to each individual candidate to publish their Coupon and use it for their own election campaign, and some of them (mainly Liberals) disowned it while others may have simply chosen not to mention receiving it. In addition, all Unionists elected sat on the Government benches, but not all had been elected with the Coupon, so that makes it even harder to figure out how to count Coupon and non-Coupon candidates.

Whatever the exact numbers, it is however clear that the Coalition won a blowout victory. If we trust Wikipedia’s numbers, 523 out of 707 MPs elected supported the Government, with only 36 seats for Asquith’s Opposition Liberals and 57 for Labour (still their best result to date).

The biggest opposition party would be neither of these, but instead Sinn Féin, the face of radical Irish republicanism. The situation in Ireland had hardened after the 1916 Easter Rising was brutally suppressed by British force of arms and all but one of its ringleaders executed (the exception being Éamon de Valera, whose dual US citizenship made Dublin Castle fearful of causing a diplomatic incident). The decision to introduce conscription in Ireland in early 1918 did nothing to help, although a campaign led by Sinn Féin succeeded in quashing the idea before any Irishmen were conscripted. It was a tense situation by autumn 1918, and in the end, Sinn Féin were able to win 73 out of 101 Irish seats, including all but two seats outside the divided province of Ulster. The party had announced beforehand that its members would not take their seats in Westminster, instead forming a new Irish parliament out of their own number, and this was what happened. The 69 members of Dáil Éireann (the Assembly of Ireland) met in Dublin on 21 January 1919, and declared the independence of the Irish Republic.

Meanwhile in Ulster, those Protestants who had declared that they would fight any attempt to take Ireland out of the United Kingdom readied themselves for exactly such a fight, and the British Government prepared to defend the rule of law from what they saw as a treasonous rebellion. The war with Germany might be over, but peace wasn’t quite yet in sight…

 

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1922

The Coalition, which by now consisted only of the Unionists and the half of the Liberal Party who still followed Lloyd George, spluttered on for another three and a half years. It fell apart because, well, there was very little left for it to agree on after the peace was secured. Lloyd George wanted to use the massive mandate given to the Coalition in 1918 to enact sweeping social reforms, to which his coalition partners said "um, what part of 'Conservative and Unionist Party' do you not understand". It was really sort of astonishing in light of this that it went on as long as it did, and its collapse only came about after it was revealed that Lloyd George had used his position as Prime Minister to sell baronetcies and knighthoods to Liberal kulaks.

The cash for honours scandal combined with the Chanak Crisis, where Lloyd George nearly provoked war with Turkey against the will of the war-weary armed forces, to force an election in autumn 1922. Unionist leader Austen Chamberlain was still cautiously willing to campaign as a Coalition, planning a joint speaking tour with Lloyd George, but on the 19th of October a meeting of Unionist MPs at the party-affiliated Carlton Club in London voted against continuing the Coalition by a three-quarters majority. Chamberlain resigned and was replaced by Andrew Bonar Law, the previous Unionist leader in the House of Commons, who had led internal opposition to the Coalition within the Unionist Party. The Unionist backbenches, newly empowered, formed a committee to discuss political matters independently of the party leadership, and over time this morphed into the '1922 Committee', the modern Conservative Party parliamentary group.

With the breakdown of the Coalition, a unified Unionist Party went to the country under Bonar Law's leadership seeking a mandate for a single-party majority. However, Lloyd George still held out hope for a new Coalition, and took about half the Liberal parliamentary party with him into a new "National Liberal" organisation. The National Liberals (not to be confused with the 1930s-50s party of the same name) campaigned on carrying on the Coalition, even though it was patently obvious that this wasn't going to happen. They still won about fifty seats, nearly as many as the main Liberal Party (theoretically led by a very tired and irrelevant H. H. Asquith) - largely because the two parties only stood against one another in about thirty constituencies.

In general, the culture of "everyone stands everywhere" was a lot less developed in 1922, and most seats were two-way contests between any two of the three major parties. There were a few places where the Liberal vote split allowing Labour to squeak through the middle, and in general, Labour had a very good election. They won 142 seats on just under thirty percent of the vote (about the same as the two Liberal factions combined), and formed the Official Opposition for the first time. J. R. Clynes, who led the party into the election, was replaced as party leader in the House by Ramsay MacDonald, who'd been out of favour up until this point because he opposed the war. Within eighteen months, MacDonald would be Prime Minister.

Oh, and the Irish thing happened. In 1920, the Irish Government Act had divided the island into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. The idea was for these to be temporary units, with an all-Ireland cooperation body called the Council of Ireland set up to facilitate cooperation and eventual merger into a united home-rule Ireland. But by this point there had been all-out war between Dáil Éireann and the Crown for a couple of years, and neither side was too keen on trusting the other side with any sort of authority over them. So, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which came into effect in March 1922, allowed Southern Ireland to go its own way, merge with the Dáil authorities and become the Irish Free State, while Northern Ireland opted out of the Free State and carried on as an autonomous part of the UK.

Confused yet? Well, it doesn't quite stop there, because Northern Ireland also had its parliamentary representation reduced, and for some reason, decided to go back to 1868-1885-style constituencies. Solidly Protestant counties Antrim, Down, (London)derry and Armagh became constituencies of their own, while the more marginal Tyrone and Fermanagh became one single massive two-seat constituency. Belfast, meanwhile, was brought back to its old four-seat division. All these seats were unopposed in 1922 except Derry, which was won by the Unionists on a huge margin, and Tyrone-Fermanagh, which was narrowly carried by the husk of the IPP. The Irish Nationalists also held Liverpool Scotland, an overwhelmingly Irish Catholic part of the city.

 

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1923

Andrew Bonar Law, who had just ridden a backbench revolt all the way to 10 Downing Street and led his Unionist Party to an overall majority in the House of Commons, would end up a footnote in history. After just over six months in office, the 64-year-old Prime Minister was diagnosed with throat cancer in May 1923 and resigned from office. He would die that autumn.

Law's resignation caused a leadership struggle between Foreign Secretary the Earl Curzon of Kedleston and Chancellor Stanley Baldwin. The choice would formally be up to the King, who appointed a Prime Minister on advice from a "Magic Circle" of Unionist grandees who then confirmed his choice as leader of the party. Curzon, a nobleman and old-school Tory, believed himself to be Law's natural successor, but the choice of the Magic Circle fell on the more middle-class Baldwin, who came from a prosperous background but had made his own fortune and political career. In an age where working-class resentment was clearly rising, the upwardly-mobile MP for Bewdley (his actual hometown, no less) simply looked better as the face of the Unionist Party than the brash, divisive and aristocratic Lord Curzon.

Baldwin proved a good choice, and despite only being a few years younger than Law and Curzon, had an image as a "new man" who understood the tools available to modern politicians. In his fourteen-year stint at the head of the Conservative and Unionist Party, Baldwin would massively expand the party organisation, transforming it into every bit as much of a mass party as the Liberals and Labour, incorporate films and radio broadcasts into campaign strategy, and raise millions of pounds for the party war chest.

For now, however, Baldwin focused on his legislative agenda, and one item topped the list: tariff reform. Baldwin was a convinced protectionist, believing higher tariffs would help curb unemployment by encouraging British industry, but in 1922 Law had promised the electorate that no new tariffs would be raised without fresh elections. So it was that Parliament was dissolved and fresh elections called for the 6th of December, 1923.

As it turned out, neither the Unionist Party nor the people were decisively behind Baldwin's protectionist agenda, and the Unionists lost eighty-six seats and their majority in the House of Commons. They remained the largest party in the House by some margin, and the House of Lords retained a safe Unionist majority, but Baldwin was nevertheless voted out of office when the new Parliament opened. Labour, still the second party in the House despite the Liberals reuniting, formed a shaky minority Government with Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister. It was a new age indeed...

 

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1924

The MacDonald ministry marked a turning point in British political history. For the first time, a socialist party formed the government, and besides MacDonald himself, ten other cabinet ministers came from working-class backgrounds. The ministry's main priority was to reassure the country that, despite this, they would govern responsibly and were not about to overturn the apparatus of the state. In this they were fairly successful, but their rule would still be short-lived.

The main achievements of the MacDonald administration in domestic politics were the extension of benefits and state pensions, long-held Labour goals, and the Wheatley Housing Act, which extended state subsidies for council housing and enabled the construction of half a million new affordable homes. A high tempo of reform was carried on throughout 1924, but the Labour ministry would soon be overtaken by foreign affairs.

The Soviet Union, which had been founded in 1922, had still not been formally recognised by the UK when MacDonald entered office. Though far from a communist himself, the new Prime Minister wanted to settle any diplomatic conflicts with the new country, and to this end recognised them as one of his first acts in office (he was Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister). In February, negotiations were started on a treaty which would open up international trade between the two countries and settle debts owed to British bondholders who had invested in the pre-revolutionary Russian government. The Soviets, conscious of their difficulties trading abroad, wanted to include a loan in the treaty, which caused both the Unionists and Liberals to balk, and the non-Labour majority became increasingly united against the Government as negotiations carried on.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the Campbell case, a trial brought against Communist newspaper publisher J. R. Campbell in August for an open letter to all British servicemen published in his Worker’s Weekly. In this, Campbell called on soldiers and sailors to defy any order to open fire on striking workers, and instead “turn their weapons on their oppressors”. This was considered incitement to mutiny, a felony under British law, but to Labour MPs it was a flagrantly political affair. Under pressure from his backbenchers, MacDonald’s Attorney General withdrew the charges against Campbell within a week of their announcement. The House of Commons passed a censure motion in response, and MacDonald, considering the matter a confidence question, resigned and requested the dissolution of Parliament. The election was set for 29 October.

The Unionists, having found a strong line of attack, continued to accuse MacDonald of being a closet Communist throughout the campaign. On the 25th of October, just before the election, the Unionist-supporting Daily Mail published the now-infamous Zinoviev letter. The letter, purportedly sent by Comintern chairman Grigori Zinoviev, called on British communists and Labour Party members to fight for the ratification of the Anglo-Soviet treaty as soon as possible, and said this would “make it possible for us to extend and develop the ideas of Leninism in England and the Colonies”. Today, it is mostly agreed that the letter was a complete forgery, but it became the culmination of the 1920s Red Scare in Britain and remains a byword for red-baiting.

The short-term effect of the Zinoviev letter on the campaign, however, was probably not significant. In any case, Labour increased its voteshare compared to the previous year and held on to three quarters of their seats. What caused the great Unionist landslide that the 1924 election produced was the collapse of the Liberal Party. It had been in dire financial straits since the end of the Great War, and Lloyd George’s questionable financial dealings had only slightly extended its lease on life. Three general elections in two years, however, had taken a toll, and in 1924 the Liberals were only able to raise deposits for 339 candidates, or just over half the seats on offer. Of these, they won forty, a loss of three-quarters compared with 1923, and party leader H. H. Asquith lost his seat in Paisley to Labour. The ongoing realignment to a Unionist-Labour duopoly carried on apace, and there would in fact never again be a Liberal Prime Minister.

The great winner, then, was Stanley Baldwin, who could return to Government with fully two thirds of the House of Commons behind him. Whereas the 1922 parliament proved short-lived, the 1924 parliament would serve out its full five-year term, and by then, the situation was hardly recognisable.

 

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1929

Stanley Baldwin's second ministry, backed as it was by over four hundred votes in the House of Commons, would last a full parliamentary term, the first five-year parliament since the War. Most of the Constitutionalists went into the Unionist Party after the 1924 election, and Winston Churchill would serve as Baldwin's Chancellor of the Exchequer. Austen Chamberlain was made Foreign Secretary, his brother Neville Minister of Health, and Arthur Balfour Lord President of the Council - all former Coalition supporters, and all supportive of Baldwin's goal of moving the Unionist Party into a new age. In 1925, Parliament passed the Pensions Act, which provided for widows and insured workers to receive ten shillings a week (about £30 in today's money, not accounting for changes in purchasing power) out of state funds. This represented a sea change from the attitudes of earlier Conservative and Unionist governments, and this willingness to engage in constructive reform to improve ordinary people's lives made Baldwin's administration hugely popular.

There was a dark side, however. Serving as Home Secretary for the entire period was William Joynson-Hicks, a Conservative of the old line and observant evangelical Christian who believed in moral and strict governance. Hicks led the charge against nightclubs and "indecent" literature, both of which were flourishing in the post-war London environment, and his stance made him the enemy of large parts of the cultural scene. He also opposed the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, which required parliamentary approval by tradition, and his forceful arguments against "creeping papistry" ensured that the revision was rejected, leading to an outcry from the Church of England and serious talk of disestablishment.

Most significantly, the middle years of the 1920s saw a rising crisis in the coal industry. British coal had enjoyed a few good years after the end of the War, but the double shock of the Dawes Plan of 1924 (under which Germany was forced to export coal to France and Italy at low prices) and Churchill's introduction of the gold standard in 1925 (which artificially inflated the value of sterling and damaged British exports as a result) caused severe damage to the industry. Production fell, and to maintain their profits, mine owners slashed wages, which by 1926 were only two-thirds of their 1919 levels. When Baldwin came to power, he'd announced a wage freeze aided by state subsidies and a Royal Commission to investigate a long-term solution to the problem, but this ended up recommending a pay cut and extended hours for miners, and in response, the TUC announced a general strike.

The General Strike of 1926 lasted from the 3rd through to the 12th of May, and involved some 1.7 million workers. The Labour Party leadership were lukewarm about backing it, fearing for their reputation as a credible party of government, and while they eventually backed the strike, they kept their heads down for much of it. Instead it came to be seen as a conflict primarily between the unions and the Government, who were determined to fight the strike from the beginning. Baldwin called it “the road to anarchy” in the official government newspaper, and Churchill took a similarly hard line, saying “it is a very much more difficult task to feed the nation than it is to wreck it”. The Government recruited special constables to maintain essential services, and the Army was sent out to keep order in the streets.

While figures like Churchill and Hicks were willing to use force to end the strike, Baldwin and the King were both more conciliatory, and in the end, there was very little violence at all. The general strike was called off on the 12th, and the miners went back to work over the following months. The TUC had decisively lost, but the strike soon came to be seen as a trial by fire for the British labour movement, one that it had passed. Unity had been maintained between trade unions representing vastly different types of worker, and the movement had displayed its combined power for the first time.

As such, it was an empowered Labour Party that went into the 1929 campaign, still led by Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald had gotten into arguments with his constituency party in Aberavon, who expected their MP to help deal with the serious troubles facing the constituency, and to avoid the spectre of defeat or deselection, he stood down and moved to Seaham in County Durham, an ultra-safe Labour seat even in 1924. Its MP was Sidney Webb, one of the key intellectual leaders of the early Labour Party, who was rewarded with a peerage after giving his seat to MacDonald.

They were further helped by continuing high unemployment – one of the solutions to the mine productivity crisis was mass lay-offs, and many other parts of the British economy were still reeling from the after-effects of the War. Also possibly benefitting the opposition (though we’ll never know for sure) was the Representation of the People Act 1928, another moderate Unionist reform package, which finally gave women the right to vote in general elections on equal footing with men. The influx of young women electors would give the 1929 election its popular nickname, the “Flapper Election”.

The result was disappointing for Baldwin and the Unionists – they narrowly won the popular vote, but lost eight percentage points and a hundred and fifty seats compared with 1924. The major benefactor of this loss were the Liberals, back under the leadership of David Lloyd George, who gained six percentage points but only went up to 58 seats. Instead it was Labour who reaped the benefits and, for the first time ever, became the largest party in the House of Commons.

Ramsay MacDonald was back. And if his first ministry had been turbulent, that was nothing compared to the whirlwind that would be the 1929-31 Parliament…

 

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1931

MacDonald’s second administration, like his first, was a minority, but this time Labour were at least the largest party in the House of Commons. David Lloyd George was happy to give passive support to a Labour ministry, and so Labour once again entered Government. MacDonald made sure not to repeat the mistakes of his first term, and declared that his Government’s first priority would be to deal with unemployment and the worsening standard of living of the British working class. Veteran trade unionist J. H. Thomas was appointed Lord Privy Seal (effectively a minister without portfolio) and given extensive power to investigate and propose legislation to deal with the employment, and in 1930, Labour passed laws to clear slums, raise unemployment assistance and stabilise the situation of coal miners (the root cause of the 1926 general strike).

If MacDonald had looked forward to a quiet term in which to carry out the Labour programme, however, it was not to be. In October 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, ending a near-decade of continuous economic growth. It took a while for the effects to reverberate in the less interconnected global economy of the time, but through 1930, Britain’s economic situation became worse and worse. The Labour Government, like most other governments of the day, was totally unprepared for this, and faced a dilemma as to how to resolve it. There was a rising clamour for interventionist state spending, led by Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes, but those ideas were extremely radical for the time. Chancellor Philip Snowden, a classical liberal at heart, refused to countenance deficit spending, and clung to austerity as the only acceptable course of action.

Opposition to this was swift and harsh from the Labour backbenches. One of the leading Keynesian voices in Parliament was Oswald Mosley, MP for Smethwick and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (another de facto minister without portfolio), who wrote up the “Mosley Memorandum” outlining a policy of protectionism, nationalisation and extensive public works. The Memorandum further called for a synthesis of government, business and organised labour, in order to “obliterate class conflict and make the British economy healthy again” – a view that contrasted quite sharply with those of most Labour and Unionist MPs. Mosley would resign from Cabinet in May 1930, launching the “New Party” with the goal of uniting the left and right behind the programme laid out in the Mosley Memorandum. Because of its corporatist orientation as well as Mosley’s increasing respect for Benito Mussolini, the New Party would soon drift toward fascism, but the process was not yet complete by the 1931 election.

Mosley, the Unionists, and indeed Labour were all overtaken by events in the summer and autumn of 1931, as Britain further sank into economic depression and the standing of the pound sterling became more and more threatened. Hitherto, the pound had been backed by gold, which aided international trade and was useful as long as Britain’s economy remained strong. In times like this, however, when the British economy was weak but the value of gold remained high, it was incredibly risky – the pound couldn’t adapt to changes in the economy, and became the target of speculation, reducing available gold reserves and further threatening the economic stability of the Government. Snowden, true to form, refused to abandon the gold standard, and instead plans were made for massive austerity measures in the 1931 budget, including cuts in public-sector wages and unemployment assistance. While a narrow majority of Cabinet backed the budget, a large minority did not, and threatened to resign if it were carried out. Seeing a split that would likely doom his government anyway, MacDonald decided to instead submit his resignation as Prime Minister on 24 August 1931.

The King wanted nothing more than to avoid chaos and division in this time of crisis, so in place of sending for Stanley Baldwin, he encouraged MacDonald to form a new government – a grand coalition, with ministers from across the political spectrum. This “National Government” would be able to take firm action, backed by thumping majorities in both houses of Parliament, to see Britain through the crisis and restore the pound to a solid footing. MacDonald liked the idea, and as it turned out, so did both Baldwin and most senior Liberals. The only party that was not convinced, embarrassingly for MacDonald, was Labour – to the unions and the Labour backbenches, this “National Government” sounded a lot like a plot to get austerity through behind their backs even though they’d just won the election.

The Labour executive, shortly after rejecting MacDonald’s plan for government, removed MacDonald himself from the leadership and replaced him with Arthur Henderson, a former party leader who had led opposition to the austerity plan inside Cabinet. When MacDonald accepted the King’s invitation to head the National Government over his party’s objection, he was expelled from the Labour Party altogether, and Snowden and Thomas as well when they joined his new Cabinet.

MacDonald and his allies immediately formed a new party, the National Labour Organisation, to support the National Government. No trade unions backed it, leaving it essentially at the mercy of the other Government parties, of which the most powerful by far was the Conservative and Unionist Party – the label “Unionist” was gradually replaced with “Conservative” over the course of the interwar period, and it’s hard to pinpoint a date when one name definitively overtook the other. For our purposes, though, the creation of the National Government is as good a place as any. The Scottish branch of the party would carry on using “Unionist” until centralising reforms in 1965, while the Ulster branch would never change names and eventually spin off into a separate party altogether in the 1970s (already being essentially independent from partition onward).

The formation of the National Government was transformative for all three major parties, but the Liberal split was probably the deepest-seated and most disastrous in the long term. The party had been rudderless ever since Lloyd George’s Coalition fell apart, and would split into three factions for the 1931 election. The first, under Deputy Leader Herbert Samuel, went into the National Government hoping to advance the Liberal programme of free trade and public spending, while a minority under John Simon drifted towards the Conservative protectionist position. Simon had resigned the whip as early as June, and with his participation in the National Government, a rival Liberal faction was formed dubbed the Liberal Nationals (changed to National Liberals after 1945). Finally, there was David Lloyd George, who remained leader of the Liberal Party through all of this, although a wounded prostate kept him hospitalised through most of the fateful days in August. He initially gave the National Government his support, but later pulled out and formed his own “Independent Liberal” party, which famously stood six candidates in 1931, four of whom were related to Lloyd George by blood or marriage (the other two were junior minister and future Evening Standard editor Frank Owen, who had been elected as MP for Hereford at age 23 and remained Baby of the House, and science-fiction writer Edgar Wallace, the only Independent Liberal candidate who wasn’t a sitting MP).

Most expected the National Government to sit for a few weeks, sort out the economy, then disband and return to normal party politics. This was probably also its goal, but it would soon turn out that the economic situation was far more dire than anyone had expected. The public-sector pay cuts advanced by Chancellor Snowden included a pay cut for Navy personnel of between 10 and 25 percent. On 11 September, the Atlantic Fleet pulled into harbour at Invergordon, in the Scottish Highlands, and its sailors received the rude shock of reading about the pay cuts in the previous day’s London newspapers. The Fleet was due to sail again on the 15th, but only one capital ship actually left port – on the others, the sailors mutinied and refused to set sail unless the pay cut was rescinded. The Invergordon Mutiny lasted about thirty-six hours, and caused panic both in Cabinet and on the London Stock Exchange. Banks continued to hoard gold, and the pound continued to plummet, until Snowden was finally forced to concede defeat and take the pound off the gold standard on the 21st.

The National Government now found itself without its key policy promise, and Britain found itself in uncertain economic waters. Both the Conservatives and MacDonald now wanted an election, and one where the National Government would go to the country as one unit, as the Coalition had in 1918. There were two major stumbling blocks: the end of the gold standard meant the major unifying factor in the Government was gone, and the Liberals still disagreed with everyone else on trade. The solution was childishly simple: the National Government would not campaign on any policy promises, instead seeking a “doctor’s mandate” to do whatever it deemed necessary to restore the economy to good health. Individual candidates were free to support protectionism or free trade, and protectionist Conservatives were frequently opposed by Liberal candidates, making 1931 not quite a full “coupon election”.

Despite the vagueness of its platform, it can’t be denied that the National Government did extremely well out of the 1931 election. Held on 27 October, six weeks after Invergordon and just over a month after the end of the gold standard, the election saw Labour reduced to just 52 seats, its worst result since the war, although its voteshare remained relatively healthy at 30.6%. Nearly all the rest of the votes went to the National Government, however, including the Conservatives, who won an outright majority of the popular vote for the last time (to date) in British political history. The National Government would take over ninety percent of seats in the House of Commons, and the Conservatives alone won a three-quarters supermajority.

As in 1924, the biggest losers in terms of votes were not Labour but the Liberals. The three factions of the Liberal Party increased their share of seats compared to 1929 (indeed, they won more seats put together than Labour did), but because of the National Government electoral pacts, there were only Liberal candidates in some 150 constituencies. Everywhere else, the local party branches had nothing to fight for and no funding, and the once-proud Liberal ground organisation continued to atrophy.

The National Government, intended to last a month or so, would continue in one form or another until 1945.

 

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1935

With a huge majority in hand, the National Government carried on under MacDonald’s leadership for four years. However, MacDonald himself was in his late sixties, and increasingly showed the signs of twenty-five years in national politics, in addition to which his National Labour group only controlled thirteen seats. So in practice, the majority of government policy was controlled by the Conservatives, who would’ve been able to comfortably govern alone if they’d wanted.

Stanley Baldwin, as Lord President of the Council, increasingly became Prime Minister in all but name as the National Government carried on, and was responsible for a great part of the Government’s policymaking. He negotiated with Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade and high-profile Liberal National, to secure a tariff increase to 10%, which stopped short of what Conservative protectionists wanted but was also a move away from the free-trade policy of the 1920s. The other major achievements of the National Government were all in foreign policy. The 1931 Statute of Westminster secured legislative independence for the Dominions (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Newfoundland and the Irish Free State), and the Government of India Act 1935 began (or was supposed to begin) the transition to Dominion status for India, reducing the power of British officials and increasing the power of elected assemblies.

Most infamously in hindsight, the Government pursued a policy of disarmament. In 1932, Baldwin made a speech in which he used the phrase “the bomber will always get through”, which was taken to mean that any air defences were considered futile, and while Government policy was always a bit more nuanced than that, it did continue to push for disarmament at international conferences through 1932 and 1933. Policy changed somewhat after October 1933, when Germany withdrew from the League of Nations, its new leader Adolf Hitler considering it a waste of resources and an affront to the German people. Hitler openly stated his desire for war and revenge for the humiliation at Versailles, and this evidently did cause the British Government to sit up and take notice. Baldwin seems to have believed that some rearmament was necessary, however, he and the Government were scared into inaction by the Fulham East by-election later in October, when the Labour candidate defeated the pro-rearmament Conservative on a swing of nearly thirty percentage points.

Labour, of course, bears its share of blame for the foreign policy of this era, which needs to be seen against the background of the First World War being in recent memory. Britain had been seriously affected, its working classes especially so, and many were desperate to avoid another war like it. This included Labour leader George Lansbury, a staunch socialist and pacifist who represented Bow and Bromley in the East End of London. Lansbury had an impeccable record as a campaigner for poor law reform, women’s suffrage and workers’ rights, and had participated in the Poplar Rates Rebellion of 1921, all of which made him attractive to a party in need of direction after the disaster of 1931. His activism would also be the major problem with his leadership, however, as he’d been an opponent of both the Boer War and the First World War, and now pledged to fight anything he saw as movement towards another great power conflict. This pacifist stance sent him on a collision course with the trade unions, which were bastions of anti-fascism above pacifism and supported rearmament. At the 1935 party conference, TGWU chairman Ernest Bevin slammed into Lansbury for failing to support rearmament in a way above and beyond the normal policy disagreements expected in such a context, and Lansbury resigned soon after the conference, to be replaced by barrister and Limehouse MP Clement Attlee.

By the time Lansbury went, MacDonald had already stepped back from the premiership. He and Baldwin switched places, Baldwin becoming Prime Minister and MacDonald becoming Lord President, a position now reduced to its ceremonial role of chairing the Privy Council. As he’d done in 1923, Baldwin decided that it would be best to call an election to cement his mandate, and this was announced for 14 November. Senior Conservative figures including Neville Chamberlain (Chancellor of the Exchequer and widely seen as Baldwin’s right-hand man) urged Baldwin to campaign on rearmament or risk being seen as a pledge breaker when it was inevitably implemented, but Baldwin refused, and made commitment to the League of Nations a central plank of the National Government campaign.

The result was perhaps more surprising at the time than it seems in hindsight. Essentially, the 1924 situation was restored, with the Conservatives on a significant but not 1931-huge majority, Labour as the uncontested opposition, and the Liberals (now outside the National Government) in third place. National Labour was reduced to eight seats, MacDonald losing his own seat of Seaham to trade union stalwart Manny Shinwell. The labour movement in Scotland was fracturing somewhat, with the ILP breaking off from the main Labour Party and taking four seats in Glasgow with them, while the Communists won the mining seat of West Fife. In spite of this, it was a huge victory for Clement Attlee, who secured his leadership of the Labour Party after only a few weeks on the job and saw his parliamentary party increased by over a hundred seats. Labour also beat their 1929 voteshare by nearly a percentage point, and at 38%, achieved their best vote ever up to that point – of course, their opponents were also more united than ever under the National Government.

The Parliament elected in 1935 would outlast even the 1910-18 one, sitting for nearly a full decade until July 1945. Because once more, war was looming over Europe…

 

[Ares96]

1945

The events of the 1935-45 Parliament are far too numerous to account for, and many of them are so famous that every schoolchild knows them – particularly so because the Parliament sat through nearly the entire Second World War. The years of privation, horror and death as the UK and its allies faced down the threat of Nazi Germany changed the country inside and out, as nearly half a million people died and millions lost their homes. In the end, the Allies were victorious, but at enormous cost – it remains the deadliest conflict in human history.

The needs of war had brought Labour into Government. They held about a third of the posts in Government, roughly proportionate to their seat share in the House of Commons, but Winston Churchill only really cared about the war effort, so most domestic issues came to be delegated to the Lord President’s Committee, chaired by Labour leader Clement Attlee. In recognition of his key role in the administration, Attlee was made Deputy Prime Minister in 1942 – the first time that title had ever been used. Though not a charismatic man, he was recognised as an effective administrator and Cabinet minister by his peers in both major parties.

By 1944, the defeat of the Nazis was generally held to be inevitable, and discussions began on how best to shape the world after victory. One of Labour’s key objectives in Government was to create a plan for post-war economic development, and to this end it had appointed a commission in 1941 to write a report on social insurance. The resulting Beveridge Report, which took its name from the chairman of the commission, recommended sweeping changes to economic and social policy with the goal of eliminating the “five evils of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness”. Although Beveridge was a Liberal, and all parties claimed to support the Report on its release, it became strongly identified with Labour, and Attlee was only too happy to make this new thing called the “Welfare State” a key element of his party policy.

It was expected by everyone that an election would follow as soon as the war came to an end, but until then, the Government maintained unity for the sake of the war effort. General elections were, of course, suspended, and for by-elections there was a truce between the Government parties to nominate one candidate, usually from the same party as the departing MP, who would be endorsed by all of them. This policy of unity was generally not controversial, but in some by-elections there were minor-party candidates who opposed the Government candidate and did quite well. At the Grantham by-election in March 1942, Denis Kendall, a controversial local arms manufacturer who stood as an independent, narrowly beat the official Conservative candidate. Wallasey and Rugby were both won by ex-Labour independents the next month, all three by-elections being influenced by the recent fall of Singapore.

The most notable anti-Government force, though, was yet to arrive on the scene. Richard Acland, Liberal MP for Barnstaple, had been organising opposition to the all-party truce among the intellectual left. Acland was a Christian socialist by persuasion and a supporter of common land ownership, and he was joined by the writer J. B. Priestley and ex-Communist International Brigades veteran Tom Wintringham to form the Common Wealth Party in July 1942. The party, which Acland described as “not a Socialist party, but a party with Socialists in it”, supported public ownership and a moral renaissance in politics, but was otherwise deliberately vague. Composed of figures with wildly different politics, only the war really kept them together, and they embarked on a strategy of choosing strategic by-elections to make a show of opposition to the Government’s wartime conduct.

Just before the party was formally founded, a similarly-inclined candidacy carried Maldon, whose Conservative MP had died in May. The Government nominated another Conservative, who expected to be unopposed, but he had not reckoned with the entrance of Tom Driberg. Driberg, who was most famous as a society columnist in the Daily Express, was an idiosyncratic left-winger who had been in the Communist Party while at Oxford. He was also both a staunch Anglo-Catholic and an openly gay man who flaunted the social mores (and laws) of his time. Most crucially, he was the only candidate to live in the constituency, and this local connection secured him a landslide victory in the by-election.

Driberg would not join Common Wealth (indeed, he became the official Labour candidate for Maldon at the next general election), but further by-elections would secure them three gains by the war’s end. By then, their leading figures were falling out, and any hopes of becoming a major party were decisively ended when they could field no more than twenty-three candidates. The Communists stood twenty-one, and the ILP five.

It was Labour, then, who would secure the “change vote” as the 1945 general election campaign began. Their manifesto, titled Let Us Face the Future, borrowed heavily from the Beveridge Report, promising massive expansions to social services and nationalisation of a wide swath of the economy. The goal was full employment, and the elimination of the five evils identified by Beveridge. In the face of this, the Conservative campaign had very few concrete promises to make – their manifesto mainly seemed focused on convincing the voters they weren’t opposed to social reform at all, and Churchill made private comments about a Labour Government needing “some form of Gestapo” to carry out its reforms.

In general, the British public respected Churchill tremendously. Polls taken just after war’s end showed his approval rating at 83%, but Labour were ahead by 18% in voting intentions. Contemporaries blamed this on unreliable polling – it was still a new concept at the time – and took it as read that a man as popular as Winston Churchill would never lose the confidence of the nation he’d just saved from fascism. Churchill certainly believed so.

The election was held on 5 June, but the actual counting of the votes took until 26 July to allow servicemen stationed abroad to vote and have their votes counted. The electoral map had been redrawn for the first time since 1918, taking into account the population growth and movement of the past twenty-five years – however, the changes were extremely ad-hoc. Seats with more than 100,000 inhabitants were split, and the London suburbs were significantly rearranged, but rural constituencies were unchanged. One of the first tasks of any post-war Government would be to conduct a deeper review of the electoral process.

As things stood, however, the boundaries made little change to the result. The Labour landslide was a fact. 393 Labour MPs were elected, just over three-fifths of the new House, and the Conservatives were reduced to 197 seats with another 11 for the National Liberals (who were increasingly becoming an appendage of the Conservative Party). The Labour victory stretched beyond their traditional strongholds in working-class London and the coal mining regions, including large rural constituencies like Cambridgeshire and Stroud as well as nearly all of the West Midlands and half of the seats in Liverpool.

Less strikingly, though, it was perhaps the most two-party House since the previous war. The Liberals went down to twelve seats, with party leader Archibald Sinclair losing his own seat in the Scottish Highlands, and the Nat Libs lost two thirds of their seats to Labour. The trend of Labour-Conservative duopoly would be established in force by the next couple of elections, and go on at least until the 1970s.

Attlee himself was as stunned as anyone else to wake up on the 27th and find that he was now Prime Minister-designate. According to his biographer, when he went to see the King, who was himself not known as a man of many words, there was a moment of silence between the two men before Attlee ventured “I’ve won the election”, to which the King is supposed to have replied “Yes, I know, I heard it on the six o’clock news”. Whatever the truth of that, it was a new situation for both of them. Britain had won the war, and Labour had won a majority Government for the first time ever. A daunting few years lay ahead of both…

 

[Ares96]

This turned out to be quite a doozy to write up. Many thanks to @Comisario for straightening out some of the dynamics inside the Labour Party - ever its own worst enemy, it would seem.

1950

Hardly any five-year period in British history, bar perhaps the war years that preceded it, has been more transformative than the first term of the Attlee ministry. Coal mining, steel, gas, water, electricity, rail and the Bank of England were all brought into public ownership (or kept as such following wartime nationalisation). The New Towns Act of 1946 established a development process for building entirely new settlements on rural land to alleviate overcrowding in the major cities, and planning powers to build new housing in existing towns were extended significantly. Public employees’ salaries were increased, National Insurance benefits were provided for the sick and unemployed as well as those injured at work, and the British Empire was reformed by the decolonisation of India and the British Nationality Act 1948, which created a common citizenship status for all British possessions and established free migration between all parts of the Empire.

The most famous legacy of the Attlee Government, however, is undoubtedly the National Health Service. Created in 1946 and coming into effect on 5 July 1948, the NHS was nothing less than the wholesale nationalisation and tax subsidisation of the entire British healthcare sector, including hospitals, outpatient clinics, mental health and dentistry (social care remained a local council responsibility, and independent medical practices remained privately owned although subsidised under the NHS). Every service provided by the NHS was to be free at point of use, though exceptions were immediately made for treatments and appliances more expensive than the basic prescribed models, and would come to be extended over the decades. The NHS was the brainchild of Health Minister Aneurin Bevan, who was inspired to create it by his own experiences of mutual aid in the South Wales Valleys during the Great Depression. The work of creating the NHS would establish Bevan as one of the major heroes in Labour history in the long term and as the standard-bearer of the younger, more stridently left-wing generation of Labour MPs in the short term.

Foreign policy would create the major conflict line within the Party, as Europe settled into its post-war shape and the divide between the Western and Eastern Blocs began to crystallise. Most of the Government was committed to supporting the United States in its struggle against Communist influence in Europe. The Treaty of Brussels, signed in 1948, created a military alliance between the UK, France and the Low Countries, implicitly directed against the Soviet Union, and the next year the North Atlantic Treaty established a broader Western alliance dubbed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO for short, consisting of the Brussels Treaty signatories as well as Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Portugal, Italy, as well as – crucially – Canada and the United States. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had been a major trade union leadership figure in the 1930s, an experience which hardened his anti-Communist convictions, and for him the struggle to keep Communists out of power across Europe was a continuation of his pre-war struggle to keep them out of power in the British trade union movement.

While Bevin’s Atlanticist foreign policy was popular in leadership circles, the 1945 election had brought in a new class of Labour MP, younger and more radical than most of their forebears, who thought Britain’s role needed to be more than playing second fiddle to the Americans. The Keep Left manifesto, co-written by Richard Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Mikardo (all 1945 intakes to the House of Commons) and released in 1947, called on the Labour Party to act for a “third force” of democratic socialist European countries that would act as a counterbalance to American capitalism and Soviet communism. The publication of Keep Left, and its popularity on the Labour backbenches, was a constant source of worry for the Government whips, and when a group of backbenchers signed a telegram wishing luck to Pietro Nenni, an Italian socialist leader whose party was in electoral alliance with the Italian Communist Party, in advance of the 1948 Italian general elections, several of them had the whip removed as a disciplinary measure. In Government and in opposition, divisions over foreign policy would continue to plague the Labour Party for much of the following seventy years.

To the extent the public had turned on the Attlee government by the time of the 1950 elections, it was less because of foreign policy and more because of the economy. Even with the backing of an Empire that contained a quarter of the world’s population, six years of total war against the Axis Powers had driven Britain to the edge of bankruptcy. Although three billion dollars in Marshall Aid had helped stabilise the economy, it wasn’t anything like enough to restore the country to its pre-war economic position. The Labour Government focused its economic efforts on securing full employment, which it just about succeeded in – the need for economic and physical reconstruction meant work was in ready supply – but housing and production fared worse. Housing construction was set back by material shortages, and a chronic shortage of petrol and consumer goods meant that rationing had to be continued into peacetime. Bread rationing had needed to be reintroduced after bad harvests in 1946, and the ensuing harsh winter blocked railways and caused severe power shortages as fuel failed to reach power stations. The Government’s policy of food exports to war-ravaged European countries whose food situations were still worse than that of the UK led to complaints that the needs of British people were inadequately seen to by Labour.

So it was by no means a sure thing that Labour would get re-elected in 1950, despite its huge majority and sweeping reforms. Although Winston Churchill had a deep-set personal conviction that Labour’s reforms were harmful to a country at peace, he let himself be persuaded that they were generally still popular and focused the Conservative campaign on the issue of rationing. The key Conservative election promise was that all rationing would be phased out as quickly as possible, while Labour argued that maintenance of rations in the short and medium term would necessary for the security of the country.

One of the reforms carried out by Labour, whose effects were both profound and permanent while less striking than the NHS or the nationalisations, was the Representation of the People Act 1948. It had long been a Labour position that all voters should be represented equally, and that the system of plural voting that had existed until 1945 was opposed to this principle. As such, the Act abolished the university constituencies, which had after all allowed degree holders to vote twice if they so wanted, as well as the provision that allowed the City of London to designate “business voters” to vote for the City’s two MPs and represent commuting business employees (although this system persists to this day for local elections in the City). It also set up strict rules limiting electoral expenditures and regulating the use of broadcasting, postage and motor vehicles for electoral purposes. Finally, the Act required that the entire country be divided into single-member constituencies, and set up a system of Periodic Reviews, carried out by a nonpartisan Boundary Commission for each constituent country, to ensure that constituency boundaries were updated about every ten years to keep up with population movements. In essence, the Representation of the People Act 1948 created the modern British electoral system.

The first election held under the new legislation was carried out in February 1950, half a year before the expiry of the 1945 Parliament, and for the first time, the election was televised. Only London and Birmingham had television transmitters, and the footage was not recorded, but nonetheless, history was made. Richard Dimbleby hosted the coverage, which ran from 10:45 to a little over one o’clock in the morning – between him and his son David, every British general election until 2017 would feature a Dimbleby hosting the BBC election-night coverage.

All three parties had high hopes for the election, with the Liberals fielding 475 candidates – more than twice as many as in 1945. Party leader Clement Davies, who had replaced Archibald Sinclair when the latter lost his seat in the 1945 general election, was convinced the party needed to stand enough candidates to win a majority in order to be credible, and had taken out insurance with Lloyd’s of London to ensure that the £150 deposit lost by unsuccessful candidates (those polling below 12.5%) would be recouped. This would turn out to be a prudent move, as 319 Liberals did lose their deposits, and only nine were elected. It seemed the Liberals were not about to make a comeback, and over the 1950s the party would continue to atrophy.

The 1950 election would turn out to be one of the closest in recent memory, with the Conservatives making strides with their anti-rationing campaign even as Labour’s vote held up throughout its working-class heartlands. Attlee’s Government would end up being re-elected, but it was by a very narrow margin – the Government’s net majority in the new Parliament was only five. Labour had proved that its 1945 victory wasn’t a fluke, and that the Labour-Conservative duopoly was here to stay, but it was a precarious seat to be in for a leader whose party was known for infighting over foreign and security policy and who only needed three dissenting votes to lose a division. And across the world, in a country cut in half by the victors of the Second World War, the drums of war were beating once more. Ernest Bevin’s new foreign policy was about to face its most serious test to date…

 

[Ares96]

Labour's second term in power would only last about eighteen months. Even in 1950, the Labour Party seemed to be approaching a generational crisis - most of the Cabinet were men who had made their names in the factional struggles of the 1920s and 30s, and who now approached retirement age. Attlee was 67, Bevin 69, Shinwell 66, Cripps was only 60 but frequently incapacitated by stress-induced bowel troubles accrued during the war. The younger generation had few leading lights to speak of, at least ones whose views were palatable to the generation in power. Aneurin Bevan, the radical Health Minister who had overseen the rollout of the NHS, was popular in the country, but his radicalism made him more popular among the "Keep Left" generation than he was in the senior circles of the party. Aside from Bevan, the only true success story among the younger generation of MPs was Hugh Gaitskell, who in 1950 replaced the ailing Cripps as Chancellor. Gaitskell was a trained economist from a middle-class London background not too distinct from Attlee's, and had made himself a reliable agent of the austerity programme as Minister for Fuel and Power during the preceding three years.

Although signs of a recovery were beginning to be felt, Prime Minister Attlee and Chancellor Gaitskell would not be easing up the austerity policies, for one simple reason: the international situation. The anti-Communist alliances established during the previous parliament, NATO chief among them, would receive their first great test in 1950, when North Korean forces crossed the demarcation line of the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The new United Nations immediately moved to censure North Korea, and with a strongly-worded resolution in hand, a broad alliance of Western nations prepared to send forces to support the defence of South Korea. Britain was an eager participant, Bevin supporting the fight against Communism as strongly as ever, and some 14,000 British troops would participate in the Korean War over its course. The war in Korea came on top of a rising number of "east of Suez" conflicts that affected the British Empire in the post-war political climate, most prominently the Malayan Emergency. The conflict in Malaya was bloody and drawn-out, but less felt in Britain than that in Korea, largely because it involved mostly colonial troops led by British officers rather than conscripts. Still, there was a sense of malaise and decline, and a rising tide of disappointment with a Labour government that, yes, had delivered many of its promises and made some parts of life more equal, but also presided over six years of poverty and national humiliation. Churchill's line that socialism was "the equal sharing of misery" rang true with many in the country by 1951.

The Government was acutely aware of these feelings, and in an attempt to help return a sense of national pride, launched the Festival of Britain project for the summer of 1951. It was an auspicious date, coming at the hundredth anniversary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which had given London its Crystal Palace and was still fondly remembered. The Festival was largely the brainchild of Herbert Morrison, and Attlee happily let Morrison work on it, reasoning both that it could be a good idea and that it would keep Morrison away from other important matters for a while. For a summer, the South Bank of the Thames became a massive recreational space, where the latest in British technology, art, industrial design and scientific discovery was displayed and celebrated. The Festival was a smash success with the public, who flocked to London by the millions, held smaller satellite festivals in their hometowns, and came to see the Festival Ship, the converted aircraft carrier HMS Campania, tour Britain's ports displaying a smaller version of the Festival exhibit. In some sense, however, it was only welcomed because it felt like the only time the nation had enjoyed itself since 1939. Its popularity was not universal, however - Churchill called it "three-dimensional Socialist propaganda", and though Morrison had not intended for it to be overtly political, the Festival became associated with Labour in the popular imagination.

By the time the Festival wrapped up in September, Attlee was already preparing to call a snap election. Morrison believed that a snap election immediately following the Festival would allow Labour to capitalise on its success to increase their majority, but this was only one reason among many for Attlee's decision. There was the simple feeling that it was better to jump than be pushed, and that waiting for five years with a threadbare majority was taking a gamble Britain couldn't afford. And most importantly, the King had plans to go on a tour of the Commonwealth in the summer of 1952, and advised Attlee that it would be unwise to leave with the parliamentary situation still as unstable as it was in 1951. So Attlee's decision was influenced in part by a royal power calculus, but an early election would likely have been needed anyway.

The 1951 election is a classic textbook example of a "wrong-winner" result. Labour increased its vote in both percentage and raw vote total, and in fact their 1951 vote would be an all-time peak for the party until 2017, but their gains were largely from the Liberals, and the Conservatives gained even more. Not enough to win the popular vote, but enough to take 23 key marginal seats from Labour and win a small but workable majority. The Liberals, with 2.6% of the vote, reached their all-time low, with only 109 candidates standing and most failing to win significant support. Only six Liberals remained in Parliament, and along with the two Republicans and one Irish Labour MP elected in Ulster, they made the 1951-55 parliament the most two-party-dominated ever returned by universal suffrage - this was to be the pattern of post-war Britain.

Churchill was back, but he was even older than Attlee or Bevin, and the question of when he would leave office, and who would replace him, now hung in the air.

 

[Ares96]

Winston Churchill's return to government caused a great deal of consternation. While he remained personally respected, and quite a few voters had come to despise Labour after six years of post-war austerity, the reasons Churchill had been rejected so thoroughly in 1945 still lingered in the popular memory. There were many who feared that the Tories returning to power would mean not an end to rationing and austerity, but an end to the welfare-state experiment as a whole and a return to the misery of the 1930s.

As it turned out, these fears were largely unfounded - Churchill himself may have been sceptical of the Beveridge Report in 1945, but most of his party colleagues were committed to some form of economic interventionism. This applied especially to his new Chancellor, Rab Butler ("Rab" was short for his initials, Richard Austen Butler), whose policies were so completely indistinguishable from those of Hugh Gaitskell before him that an Economist article in 1954 referred to the Chancellor as "Mr. Butskell". From this came the term "Butskellism", which survives to this day as a name for the kind of consensus-driven centrist economic policy that characterised the 1950s and 60s in Britain - the Labour Right synthesised with the "one-nation" school of Toryism to produce a mixed economy with both a strong social safety net and a privately-owned production economy. Indeed, even most of Labour's nationalisations were untouched by the new Conservative administration, the only major exception being the Iron and Steel Corporation of Great Britain, which took over the entire British steel industry in 1948 and was then promptly broken up and sold by the Tories in 1951-52. But the NHS remained intact, as did British Rail, the nationalised utilities and the National Coal Board.

And where Labour had been forced to preside over six years of economic chaos and uncertainty, by 1951 the British (and more broadly Western European) economy was beginning to recover and head into what would turn out to be the longest growth period in memory. In 1953, rationing of sweets and sugar was ended, and in 1954, meat followed - Fuel Minister Geoffrey Lloyd held a meeting in his constituency of Sutton Coldfield where he ceremonially burned his ration book. This combined with the government's push for social housing construction - one of few domestic policy areas that interested Churchill - to create an optimistic mood in the country through the early 50s.

Labour were always going to have a hard time winning the next election, but matters were not helped by their continued infighting. Attlee continued as party leader past his seventieth birthday in 1953, largely because he despised Herbert Morrison and did not want to give him the chance to stand for the leadership. Of course, Morrison was just five years younger, and Attlee was joined by the majority of Labour MPs in feeling that he ought to be succeeded by a younger man. There were two main candidates - Gaitskell, the aforementioned ex-Chancellor and golden boy of the party right, and Aneurin Bevan, the architect of the NHS, who had become the standard-bearer of the party left after resigning from the Cabinet in a principled stand against Gaitskell's austerity programme. Attlee hated Bevan nearly as much as he hated Morrison, but on the backbenches and in the country, the two men were almost equally controversial, Gaitskell being heavily associated with austerity while Bevan was seen as disloyal and overly radical. The conflict between Bevanites and Gaitskellites continued to escalate, and in many ways still rages within the party to this day.

Nevertheless, both Attlee and Churchill were still in charge of their parties at the start of 1955. For Churchill, the succession question was even more acute, as he had spent a good chunk of 1953 recovering from a debilitating stroke. Any other Prime Minister would've probably resigned at that point, but for Churchill the issue was compounded by the fact that his designated heir, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, was himself recovering from botched bile duct surgery at the time. The other senior figure in his cabinet, Rab Butler, was far too controversial on the backbenches to fly as leader - everyone still remembered 1922 - and so only ever got to be acting Prime Minister while Churchill recovered (and even that was kept secret to avoid calls for Churchill to resign permanently). Still, after celebrating his eightieth birthday in 1954, Churchill decided it was finally time to retire. By that point, Eden was still in poor health and struggling with depression, but he was still the designated successor, and both the Magic Circle and the 1922 Committee agreed that he was the man to take over. On the 6th of April, 1955, the transfer of power finally happened, and Prime Minister Eden's first act in office was to dissolve Parliament for an election on 26 May.

The resulting snap election was completely predictable (in 2005, the BBC christened it the dullest election since the Second World War) and is mostly notable for two things: it was the first election held under Elizabeth II, whose father had died back in 1952, and it was the first election held after the first of the periodic boundary reviews set up under the Representation of the People Act 1948. Considering the Initial Review had taken effect just five years prior, this saw a surprisingly large amount of change, with 31 constituencies abolished and 36 new ones created, bringing the total up to 630. Compared to this riveting news, the actual election result was nothing to write home about - the Tories made modest gains, and unlike in 1951, actually led in the popular vote as well as the seat count. The Liberals held the exact same six seats they won in 1951, and again like in 1951, not a single seat in Great Britain went to any other party (the Liberal Nationals by now being little more than a name used by the Conservative associations in a couple of dozen constituencies). In Northern Ireland, however, there was a bit of excitement as both Mid Ulster and Fermanagh and South Tyrone fell to Sinn Féin candidates. Of course, these candidates were both currently in prison for treason, so it was not hard for their Unionist opponents to get them unseated on petition, making the first pure three-party House of Commons in the 20th century. Still, it showed the impotence of the mainstream Nationalist Party in the face of a more radical generation of republicans, and was a sign of things to come for Northern Ireland...

 

[Ares96]

Anthony Eden, it's fair to say, was not one of the UK's more successful Prime Ministers. He resembled Churchill in that he came to power well after the prime of his career, and also in that his interest in politics lay almost entirely in the diplomatic arena, leaving the economy in the reliable hands of Rab Butler. Unfortunately for him, the position of Britain in the world at the start of his career, the position in which he was expecting to be able to act in the premiership, bore very little resemblance to its position when he actually took power.

The symbol of this dissonance, and the thing popular memory associates Eden with above all else, was the Suez Crisis of 1956. The Suez Canal formed a key part of the shipping lanes connecting Britain with its colonies in Asia, and until this point it had been owned by a joint Anglo-French company. However, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had overthrown the pro-British monarchy in 1952, decided his modernisation efforts depended on securing the canal for Egypt, and in 1954 Nasser and then-Foreign Secretary Eden negotiated an agreement with the British and the French that would secure full Egyptian control of the canal by 1968. But a proxy conflict over control of Jordan in early 1956 led Eden to become convinced Nasser was a threat to British power in the Middle East, and after winning Egypt's first (questionably free) presidential election in June, Nasser decided a more dramatic move would be needed. On 26 July, having given the Army about a week's notice, Nasser announced the occupation of the canal zone and the immediate nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company.

Britain and France, both the governments and public opinion, were immediately up in arms. After some negotiations, the two, along with Israel, cooked up a scheme where Israel would invade the Sinai Peninsula, whereupon the British and French would use the pretext of peace negotiations to secure the canal as a buffer zone between Israel and Egypt. The invasion went ahead in late October, and Israel took the Sinai very easily, but Nasser responded by sinking a number of ships in the canal making it unusable for maritime traffic. It soon became clear that the invading side would not immediately gain their objectives, and efforts to follow up the Sinai operation with a broader invasion of Egypt were forestalled by the United States and the USSR. The Soviets had supported Nasser from the beginning, and their condemnation of the operation came as no surprise to anyone, but US warnings not to invade had not been taken fully seriously by the British and French governments. However, in November, President Eisenhower formally ordered the U.S. Treasury to sell all its sterling bonds, and although this was never executed, the mere warning (along with the fact that the Suez Canal was blocked) caused the Bank of England to lose $45 million overnight. The British, although they considered a wide range of options, didn't have any feasible choice except to withdraw, and a settlement was reached where Israel would withdraw from the Sinai in exchange for getting free shipping through the Straits of Tiran, and Egypt would compensate British and French shareholders for the nationalisation of the Suez Canal (which Nasser had intended to do from the beginning).

The Israeli operation had never been officially sanctioned by the British or French governments, and there was very much an intention that it should seem like a unilateral decision on Israel's part. However, it soon became clear that the British and French had goaded Israel on to invade Egypt from the very beginning, and a scandal soon began to brew over whether Eden had lied to Parliament about this when the invasion happened. Eden, who was just over sixty but had suffered from severe sleep deprivation and addiction to amphetamines, spent much of December at Ian Fleming's Goldeneye estate in Jamaica (yes, really) in hopes that the tropical climate would help his health, but the scandal did not die down when he got back. He spent Christmas in severe ill health, and when his doctors warned that he would die in office if he continued as Prime Minister, Eden decided to resign on 9 January 1957, having been in power for just over eighteen months.

Eden was succeeded by the same man who had succeeded Butler as Chancellor the previous year, Harold Macmillan (as in the publishing house, yes). Macmillan was actually older than Eden, but his ascent to power still marked a generational shift in the Conservative Party - the pre-war imperialist mindset embodied by Churchill and Eden was well and truly gone, and Macmillan aligned with Butler and the "Butskellite" policy of Keynesian economic interventionism. In a speech in July, Macmillan proclaimed that Britain as a nation had "never had it so good", and his focus on economic policy helped distract the country from the Suez blunder. The Clean Air Act, passed by Macmillan during his time as Chancellor, began the long process of making Britain's urban centres liveable, and the Housing Act 1957 continued to boost the rate of house building, and in 1959 the Government introduced a special allowance for orphaned children. Which is not to say that Macmillan neglected foreign policy - his administration took a number of steps to adapt Britain's foreign and defence policy to its new role in the world, including decolonisation, the abolition of National Service from 1959, and a push to expand Britain's nuclear arsenal that culminated in the acquisition of the Polaris nuclear missile system.

The Macmillan years are usually considered the peak of the post-war consensus in British politics, and the 1959 general election gives a good indication of this. Clement Attlee had retired shortly after the 1955 election, and as everyone had predicted, Hugh Gaitskell was chosen to replace him by a solid majority of the PLP. Gaitskell was, of course, half of the "Butskell" amalgam, and while on paper Labour continued to support the abolition of capitalism and full public control of the economy, in practice Gaitskell's short-term policy ideas weren't all that far removed from those enacted by Macmillan. During the Suez Crisis, Gaitskell had toed the Government line, wary of the strong public support for intervention, and he continued to follow a conciliatory line through the Macmillan years. His most famous soundbite came at the 1960 party conference, where he called on his allies in the party to "fight, fight and fight again" after the conference adopted a motion calling for unilateral nuclear disarmament. In general Gaitskell seemed to put more effort into fighting the Labour left than he did opposing the Government, which did little to convince the public that Labour were a credible alternative.

So it was that, despite the massive debacle that was Suez, the mood as Macmillan went to the country in September 1959 was more optimistic than at any time since the war. The Conservative slogan, "Life is better with the Conservatives, don't let Labour ruin it", was pretty much echoed by the result, which saw the Government gain another twenty seats, putting its overall majority at 100. For the last time ever, the Unionist-National Liberal bloc won the majority of votes across Scotland, although Labour won more seats, and in Northern Ireland the Ulster Unionists secured all twelve seats. The Liberals stayed put at six seats, although they lost Carmarthen to Labour while the young rising star Jeremy Thorpe narrowly gained the North Devon seat from the Conservatives. 1959 thus marks the absolute high-water mark of the two-party system in British politics: never again would Labour and the Conservatives so thoroughly dominate the House of Commons between them.

 

[Ares96]

The Parliament elected in 1959 would sit for its full five-year term, the first one since the war to do so (the 1950 election having been held about five months earlier than necessary). The strong Conservative majority meant that the Government was safe in its position, but that's not to say its term was uneventful - on the contrary. When Macmillan was interviewed later in life and asked what the greatest challenge in politics was, he's alleged to have responded "Events, dear boy, events", and while this quote is poorly attested, it's not hard to see where the sentiment would've come from.

As discussed in the previous part, Macmillan took power in the immediate aftermath of the Suez Crisis, and one of his main priorities as Prime Minister was to retreat from the staunch imperialism of his predecessors and embrace Britain's new role in the post-war world order. While military reforms such as the acquisition of Polaris and the end of National Service formed part of this strategy, its most famous expression is without a doubt decolonisation. Steps in this direction had already been taken under Eden, with the Gold Coast becoming the independent Commonwealth realm (later republic) of Ghana in March 1957, and Macmillan was insistent on continuing the process. Along with Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, Macmillan set out to prepare Britain's African colonies for independence, and in early 1960, the two men embarked on a tour of the continent. On 4 February, Macmillan addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town, and gave what is probably the most famous speech of his career. "The wind of change," he said, "is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact." Macmillan had in fact given the same speech in Accra three weeks earlier, but it failed to garner attention then because it was seen as uncontroversial in overwhelmingly-black Ghana. In South Africa, however, the white political elite didn't take kindly to the idea of Britain embracing majority rule, and the speech gave additional fuel to already-growing calls for a break with the British Empire.

Shortly after the Wind of Change speech, Macleod and the Colonial Office announced that the original, very gradual timetable for African decolonisation, which had called for the British presence to be ended by the mid-1970s, would be sped up by a full decade. The goal was now independence for the African territories as soon as practically possible, and Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Somaliland and Tanganyika were all given independence within a year of the speech. By the time of the 1964 election, only the Gambia, Mauritius, the Seychelles, the High Commissioner's territories surrounding South Africa, and of course, Southern Rhodesia, remained in British hands.

The end of direct colonial rule in Africa was, of course, an unambiguously good thing for the continent, but it is very important to note that the process was not without its dark sides, both for the former colonies and for Britain itself. In most cases, natural resources in the newly-independent states remained under the control of British (or otherwise European) companies, making it difficult for the new governments to establish a stable revenue stream, and while the idea of colonising powers "drawing random lines on a map" is somewhat exaggerated, there were a number of cases where new national borders cut across ancient ethnic divisions or left rival ethnic groups vying for the same territory. The most famous of these conflicts in former British colonial territory is probably the Biafra War, which lasted two and a half years and led to a famine that killed over a million people. In addition, part of Macleod's approach to decolonisation was a policy of systematically hiding and destroying records relating to British colonial administration, in part to protect natives who had collaborated with the British from reprisals but mainly to protest the British state from future embarrassment. Due to this, the abuses committed by British authorities in the later stages of its colonial empire remained obscured from history for decades, although investigation has resumed since the Foreign and Commonwealth Office admitted to the existence of tens of thousands of "migrated" records in 2011.

At home, the winding down of the British Empire led to a strong backlash from the political right. Macmillan's Wind of Change speech didn't just ruffle feathers in South Africa, it also enraged sections of his own party and led a group of young Conservatives with strong anti-communist and pro-imperialist views to found the Conservative Monday Club in January 1961. The Monday Club would continue to dog Conservative Prime Ministers for decades, and although its direct influence was limited outside of right-wing circles, its formation was undoubtedly part of a wider political shift in the country. As mentioned before, the British Nationality Act 1948 had given full British citizenship to nearly every resident of the British Empire, and over the 1950s this combined with general poverty in the colonies led to a surge in immigration to Britain, mainly by people of colour. By 1962, although Britain remained very ethnically homogenous (the 1961 census gives the foreign-born population as 4.9%), tensions were high enough that the Conservatives felt the need to introduce new restrictions on migration. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, while not altering the overall nationality framework put in place in 1948, repealed the free-movement clause and imposed strict immigration controls on all Commonwealth citizens (including citizens of British colonies) who didn't have a "relevant connection" to the UK, defined as either having been born there, holding a UK passport or being an immediate family member of someone who did. This law was hugely controversial when it was passed, with Hugh Gaitskell calling it "cruel and brutal" in Parliament, but Labour did nothing to undo it during their time in Government, in part due to the role that race relations played in the 1964 general election.

Of course, decolonisation and immigration weren't the only issues facing Macmillan's government. There was also a minor recession in 1960-61 that hurt the Conservatives' image as good stewards of the economy, and ongoing popularity issues caused Macmillan to sack a third of his Cabinet at a go in July 1962, an event dubbed the "Night of the Long Knives" by critics. The Government was also discredited in its rural heartland by the Beeching Report (formally titled The Reshaping of British Railways) of March 1963, which recommended "modernisations" to British Rail that would cut around half of all railway stations in the country and thirty percent of all lines. Macmillan himself was also starting to look more and more like a man out of time, and there were serious questions raised about whether a man approaching his seventieth birthday was fit to lead a country that wanted nothing more than to reject tradition and embrace modernity.

None of these things were what undid Macmillan, however. What undid him were a series of scandals that began in late 1962 with the unmasking of John Vassall as a Soviet spy, continued with the unmasking of Kim Philby as a Soviet spy, and culminated in the summer of 1963 with the Profumo Affair. This was a very complicated scandal with a very simple core: John Profumo, Macmillan's War Secretary, had had an affair with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old showgirl who was also involved with a Soviet naval attaché named Yevgeny Ivanov. There's an incredible amount of ephemera surrounding Keeler, her various partners and her alleged pimp, the osteopath and society figure Stephen Ward, but the meat of the scandal was the possibility that Keeler had obtained British military secrets from Profumo and then passed them along to Ivanov. An inquiry conducted by Lord Alfred Denning exonerated Keeler and Profumo in September 1963, but by then, Profumo had been out of office for three months after admitting he'd misled Parliament about the affair, Ward had taken his own life to avoid conviction, and Keeler's life had been upended by the publicity. The impression given was that the establishment had closed ranks to protect Profumo and the Government, and that Ward (and to a lesser extent Keeler) had been made an example of. None of this reflected well on Macmillan, who had survived a confidence vote in June (just after Profumo's resignation) by far too narrow a margin given the Government's majority, and after a cancer scare, he announced his resignation in October.

To everyone's surprise, the choice to succeed Macmillan fell not on Rab Butler, the man who had been Britain's next Prime Minister for at least six years by this point, but on Macmillan's Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, the 14th Earl of Home. An Old Etonian descended from an ancient Scottish noble family, Home cut a strange figure given the strong anti-establishment trends of the time, amplified by the Profumo Affair, and questions were immediately raised by his sudden ascension. Iain Macleod left Cabinet in response to Home's appointment, and took up a new job editing the Spectator, which at this time was a centrist publication largely aligned with Butler's faction of the party. In January 1964, he published a scathing review of a book about the leadership race written by Randolph Churchill, in which he (Macleod) blamed Home's selection on a "magic circle" of Old Etonians, including Macmillan as well as Home himself, who held absolute control over the Conservative Party's arcane leadership selection process. As a result of this controversy, the party would reform its election procedure to a straightforward ballot of the parliamentary party for the election after Home's resignation.

In any case, Home himself was certainly aware of his image, and very quickly decided leading a Government from the House of Lords was neither a good look nor a practical way to do politics. He was helped in this by the years-long struggle of Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, briefly the 2nd Viscount Stansgate and later a very significant figure on the Labour Left, for the right to renounce his peerage and continue to sit in the House of Commons. Benn had succeeded to the viscountcy in 1960, at which point he was automatically removed from the seat he’d represented in Parliament for ten years. At a by-election in May 1961, Benn stood again, knowing full well that his candidacy was invalid and that this would be a clear enough miscarriage of democracy to force a change in the law. He was proven right by this, winning his election by an almost 40-point margin, promptly being disqualified by an Election Court and seeing the seat handed to his Conservative opponent. In addition, a number of figures in the Government (including Home as well as Lord President Quintin Hogg, the 2nd Viscount Hailsham) were similarly interested in returning to the Commons, and this was enough of a confluence of interest to secure the passage of the Peerages Act 1963. Benn immediately disclaimed his peerage and was returned to the House of Commons with no Conservative opposition, and in November 1963, Home won election to the safe Scottish Unionist seat of Kinross and Western Perthshire.

By this point, the five-year term of the 1959 Parliament approached its end, and Labour were widely tipped to win the upcoming general election. Hugh Gaitskell, however, would not get the chance to win the premiership, as he died in January 1963 following a sudden bout of lupus. There were immediate conspiracy theories about this, especially given that he was succeeded by Harold Wilson, a former Bevanite stalwart who had resigned from Government alongside Bevan over the NHS prescription charge controversy. According to these theories (which have never been backed by any convincing evidence), the KGB had arranged to have Gaitskell poisoned so that Wilson, who was either to have been a KGB agent himself or simply Moscow’s preferred man, could attain the leadership and eventually 10 Downing Street. Once again, these were wild conspiracy theories with very little to back them up, but given this was immediately after the Vassall and Philby affairs, notions of Soviet infiltration at the top of government seemed more plausible than ever.

Nevertheless, Wilson would soon prove himself a skilled politician and an energetic campaigner, promising that a Labour Government would bring about a “white heat of revolution” that would propel Britain out of its post-war slump and into a new age of greatness through technological advancement. Having spent the past five years fighting internally over whether to abolish Clause IV (the commitment to nationalisation of industry), Labour under Wilson sidestepped the argument by promising greater state coordination of the economy without taking outright nationalisations any further than Attlee’s administration had. This seemed to work as a compromise position, or maybe it was just Labour’s tendency to come together whenever they smell blood in the water, because the party went into the 1964 general election in better shape than it had been at any point since 1950.

However, when polling day came on 15 October, Labour only gained enough seats for a threadbare majority, and hardly gained any votes compared to 1959. Instead, the big winner of the election in voteshare terms were the Liberals, who had begun to capitalise on discontent with the Conservatives in rural areas as well as middle-class suburbs. Notably, the party’s candidate Eric Lubbock won the March 1962 by-election in Orpington, a former Conservative safe seat in London’s southern suburbs. This was the first urban seat gained by the Liberals in a long time, and is commonly seen as marking the beginning of the slow Liberal revival that would continue over the following decades. Lubbock held his seat in the general election, and the Liberals gained another several seats on the “Celtic Fringe” to bring its total to 9, the first election since 1929 in which the party had made overall gains.

Another very notable constituency result was that of Smethwick in the West Midlands, where Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, lost his seat against the national trend to Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths. Smethwick was a working-class industrial town which had had some rough years leading up to 1964, with factories closing and social housing not keeping up with demand, in addition to which a large number of Commonwealth migrants (mainly Sikhs) had settled in the town. Griffiths capitalised on white working-class discontent by running an openly racist campaign that blamed Smethwick’s misfortunes on mass immigration, and argued Gordon Walker would champion further immigration as Foreign Secretary. His supporters were alleged to have used the slogan “if you want a n****r for a neighbour, vote Labour”, and while Griffiths never claimed the slogan as his own, he also made no real effort to distance himself from it. Although the seat was marginal and Gordon Walker’s voteshare had dropped at every election since 1950, the election of Griffiths nevertheless made ripples: racially-motivated threats and violence increased sharply, and in 1965, Malcolm X made a visit to Smethwick to show solidarity with local ethnic minority communities.

Labour’s overall majority following the election was just four, but that was enough for Wilson to be appointed the first Labour Prime Minister in thirteen years. The 1959 Parliament had lasted the full five years, but its successor was all but guaranteed not to.