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Third Parties and Voters' Decisions: The Liberals and the General Election of 1945*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Bentley B. Gilbert
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Extract

Political history is the record of the pursuit and exercise of state power. In a democracy the search for such authority usually begins with the contest of elections. Elections, as a consequence, are of great importance and their systematic analysis, particularly the extrapolation of conclusions about popular attitudes from their results, has achieved in the last few years the status of a separate scholarly craft.

Historians have their own way of explaining elections. Traditionally, they tend to concentrate upon comparisons of programs and of party leaders. They assume the electorate made a choice between platforms and personalities and they tend to explain observable results in terms of most easily demonstrable causes. In dealing with the British General Election of 1945, for instance, they argue that the Labor party won because voters found its program more believable than that of the other party. This explanation, of course, is tautological. One is reminded of Calvin Coolidge who explained his victory in the race for governor of Massachusetts by saying that he received the most votes.

Yet of all elections in the twentieth century, the poll of 1945 needs critical investigation. The importance of its results have obscured the complexities of the election itself; historians have been so fascinated by what Labor did in office that they have ignored how the party got there. Labor's victory was as unprecedented as it was unexpected. As neither Churchill nor the leaders of the Labor party could believe, even in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that the electorate would dismiss the man who had led Britain through the war, the mystery of the election derives not from the Labor victory but from the breakdown of understanding between the leaders of the nation and its citizenry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , May 1972 , pp. 131 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1972

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Footnotes

*

This study is a revision of a paper read at the Midwest C.B.S. meeting in Urbana, Illinois, on November 1, 1970. It derives from research for the third volume of the author's history of British social policy.

References

1. See for instance: G. D. H. Cole's frequently quoted article “Why Britain Went Socialist,” Virginia Quarterly, XXIII (Autumn, 1947), 509–20Google Scholar. See also Cole, Margaret I., “How Labour Came to Power,” Antioch Review, VI (June, 1946), 167–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Basically the Coles argue that Britain had been socialist for a long time, but duped by Tory tricks. In 1945 the British voter finally saw the light.

2. This fact seems always to be missed in general histories of modern Britain, which earnestly discuss competing programs, the war of pamphlets, the sober mood of the electorate compared with 1918, the service vote for Labor, and the baleful influence of Lord Beaverbrook and Harold Laski. See for example: Medlicott, W. N., Contemporary England, 1914-1964 (New York, 1967), pp. 467–72Google Scholar; Taylor, A. J. P., English History 1914-1965 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 595–97Google Scholar.

3. In a careful survey of 453 seats which survived major boundary changes between 1950 and 1956 Jorgen Rasmussen found that 77 per cent remained in the hands of one party throughout the entire period. Rasmussen, Jorgen, “The Implications of Safe Seats for British Democracy,” Western Political Quarterly, XIX, iii (September, 1956), 517–18Google Scholar.

4. The basic statement on the relationship of voters to candidates finally elected in the British party system was first enunciated by James Parker Smith before the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems in 1909. Royal Commission on Systems of Election, Minutes of Evidence, 1910 (Cmd. 5352), 80-1. Smith stated that the relationship of votes to seats could be expressed in the formula A:B=A3:B3, in effect if the relationship between the party votes is 9,000,000 to 10,000,000 the proportion of seats achieved will be as the product of 9 × 9 × 9 is to the product of 10 × 10 × 10, or 728 to 1000 or in terms of a House of Commons of 630, 260 to 370 seats. Since 1945, with the exception of 1950 and 1951 the cube theory has fitted observed election results within one per cent.

5. By far the best statistical analysis of the election, written immediately after the event, appeared in the Economist on August 4, 1945. Although it scoffed at the “easy popular assumption” that the Literals split the anti-Tory vote, the journal's own figures in fact confirm the thesis of this study. It noted that of 137 three-cornered fights between Liberal, Labor and Conservative and in which the winner was also elected on a minority vote, the Conservatives won 76 and Labor 60 with the Liberals winning one. Labor's success in three-cornered contests where the Liberals were serious contenders therefore was only 43.8 per cent whereas their national percentage was 62.4 per cent. More important, the Economist recognized the geographical contrast in the distribution of the Liberal vote. Its conclusion, however, was that rural Liberals tended to be “left-minded” and urban Liberals the opposite. In effect, the journal was saying that rural Liberals split the radical vote and so helped the Tories. It did not comment on the large changes in the electorate.

6. A British Institute of Public Opinion Poll of March 1, 1943, found that while there was, to be sure, substantial interest in social conditions after the war, 27 per cent of the population was satisfied with the Government's virtual rejection of the report and another 24 per cent did not even know about it. In effect only a minority of the population, 47 per cent, were dissatisfied with the Churchill Cabinet's failure to obligate itself to the Beveridge recommendations, Cantril, Hadley (ed.), Public Opinion, 1935-1946 (Princeton, 1951), p. 361Google Scholar.

7. See: The Times, December 7, 1943, et. seq. See also: Beveridge, W. H., Power and Influence (New York, 1955), pp. 329–33Google Scholar.

8. This was manifested in such things as the booing of the King and Queen in the East End, reports of which were stifled by censorship but which seriously frightened men like Harold Nicolson. Nicolson, Nigel (ed.), Harold Nicolson, The War Years, 1939-1945 (New York, 1967), pp. 114–15Google Scholar.

9. A series of British Institute of Public Opinion Polls begun in June, 1943, and continued through to the election showed that from the beginning Labor, even in the midst of a great war with Winston Churchill an international hero, held an eight per cent lead over the Conservatives on the question, “If there were a general election tomorrow, how would you vote?” Cantril, , Public Opinion, p. 196Google Scholar. More surprisingly this lead grew wider as the war moved toward an end.

10. “At the present moment what we have to do on poster and leaflet is project Sir William as widely as we can.” Beveridge Papers, A. Everett Jones to G. M. Chambers, April 10, 1945, bundle 27, unsorted.

11. Manchester Guardian, October 14, 1944.

12. News Chronicle, July 4, 1945.

13. A very comprehensive survey by the BIPO on August 26, 1945, immediately after the announcement of the election results asked Labor voters why they had voted as they did. About 70 per cent gave the expected partisan answers: “They're my people,” “My husband and I have always voted Labour,” or, within the same percentage but very much in the minority, issue-oriented Unswers: “Better housing or foreign policy.” More significantly about 30 per cent answered with anti-Tory statements: “Time for a change,” “Hate Tories,” “Churchill not the man for peace.” Cantril, , Public Opinion, 197Google Scholar. One may deduce from this that about 4,000,000 of the approximately 12,000,000 Britishers who constituted the Labor vote in 1945 were in fact voting against the Tories. Actually Labor won few votes. Rather the Tories lost votes.

14. A BIPO poll after the 1950 election showed that in the absence of a Liberal candidate 42½ per cent of Liberal voters would vote Conservative, 22½ per cent Labor and 35 per cent would abstain. A survey by the writer of the apparent disposal of the Liberal vote between the 1950 and 1951 elections based upon a sample chosen from constituencies in which the Liberal vote had been high in the 1945 election shows that in constituencies which failed to prbduce a Liberal candidate in 1951 the Liberals favored Conservatives over Labor in a ratio of about two to one although the abstention rate was nowhere near one-third of the total Liberal vote, perhaps one-sixth.

15. The Liberals had no real effect upon the 33 Labor incumbents they opposed. Labor lost only three seats in the 1945 election. Two were freak candidacies, but one, Carmarthen in Wales, was lost to a Liberal in a straight fight. Labor had won it in a three-cornered race in 1935. In 1945 there was no Conservative Candidate.

16. There were in addition nine seats in which Liberal intervention helped the Conservatives, although the Conservatives did not hold the seat, and five seats which the Conservatives retained despite the fact that the Liberals' appearance aided Labor.

17. These statistics apply only to Great Britain. The Liberals ran no candidates in Northern Ireland in 1945.

18. Polls on the subject indicate that fewer than one per cent of regular Labor voters say they would vote for a Liberal candidate if one were available.

19. West 24 Seats

Liberals help Conservatives in 19 of which Conservatives hold 16

Liberals help Labor in 5 of which Conservatives hold 2

Of 16 Conservative victories with Liberal help, 13 have a stable electorate or large increases

Of 5 seats in which Liberals help Labor 5 show large increases

North 20 Seats

Liberals help Conservatives in 12 of which Conservatives hold 10

Liberals help Labor in 8 of which Conservatives hold 2

Of 10 Conservative victories 9 have stable electorates or large increases

Of 6 Labor victories 3 show large decreases in electorate

Southeast 24 Seats

Liberals help Conservatives in 14 of which Conservatives hold 11

Liberals help Labor in 10 of which Conservatives hold 1

Of 11 Conservative victories with Liberal help 9 show stable or large increase in electorate

Of 9 Labor victories with Liberal help 3 show large decreases in electorate

In twelve constituencies, 4 in the west, 4 in the north, and 4 in the southeast the Liberal vote, although substantial, did not appear to affect the outcome.

20. A comparison between the pairs of elections of 1950, 1951 and 1964, 1966 tends to confirm this hypothesis. In the first election of each pair the Liberals undertook to play a large part and on each occasion their first intervention appears to have operated in favor of the incumbent, impartially Labor or Conservative. In the second election of each pair their activity declined allowing the former opposition party to win a comfortable majority. See: Butler, David E., The British General Election of 1951 (London, 1952), p. 271Google Scholar. Butler estimates that the decline of Liberal activity between 1950 and 1951 gave the Conservatives between one-third and two-thirds of their majority in the second election. For 1964 see: Berrington, Hugh B., “The General Election of 1964,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, CXXVIII A (1965), 48Google Scholar.