BLPES

Election poster for the Labour Party, probably from the mid-1950s.

The following two years were disappointing. The British economy was beset with difficulties and Labour found it almost impossible to implement coherent palliatives. The cabinet became beleaguered and divided. In the end, the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and some of his key colleagues defected to form a National government with the Conservatives. Labour appeared discredited, and when an election was called, suffered the consequences, ending up with 6.6 million votes but only 52 MPs, 235 fewer than in the previous Parliament. Henderson spoke of a 'serious electoral reverse' though he considered that in the circumstances the party had performed 'little short of a miracle'. The Labour Organiser, a journal aimed at agents and activists, was less sanguine. In the past few years, it noted, the party had expanded fast, mainly through trade-union affiliation, but there was nevertheless a 'gigantic margin' between 'the numerical strength of the Movement and the vote ... attained' (The Secretary, 'Report on the General Election', 10 December 1931, pp. 3-4, National Executive Committee minutes, Labour Party Archive, Manchester).

Nick Tiratsoo discusses the considerable success of Labour in the 1929 election and the problems that subsequently beset Ramsay MacDonald's government. (2:26 min)

During the following decade, Labour recovered, though only slowly. The election of 1935 yielded 8.3 million votes and 154 MPs, nowhere near enough to frighten the Conservatives. Later by-election victories, as Britain slid towards war, only reinforced the sense of frustration, since the swings involved did not suggest victory at a general election. Better results were achieved at local level, with the party capturing Glasgow in 1933 and London in 1934, but even here progress was hardly remarkable. By the end of the decade, Labour controlled only 60 of the 672 county and municipal local government units in mainland Britain, with its national agent complaining of the 'state of stabilisation, or stalemate' that had been reached in most other areas (Mary Agnes Hamilton, The Labour Party To-Day, Labour Book Service, 1939, pp. 88-9).

ended during the war and most assumed that, when peace came, the Conservatives would once again dominate, but at the 1945 election Labour surprised even itself by recording an extraordinary victory. The party received nearly 12 million votes, 48 percent of the total, and ended up with a 146-seat majority in the House. Important gains were made in every region except the south and south-west. Moreover, the swing to Labour was repeated at local elections shortly afterwards. By 1947, the party controlled 52 of the 83 most important cities. The LSE academic H.L. Beales predicted in Political Quarterly that Labour had come to stay: 'The government has only got to retain its unity, fulfil its very modest mandate, eschew alike factiousness and functionless authoritarianism and it will be renewed in due course' (Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo, 'England Arise!' The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain, 1995, pp. 58-68 and 170).

In fact, events unfolded rather differently. Labour decided to hold an election in February 1950, polled well, but ended up with a paltry five-seat majority. Twenty months later, it failed to repeat the trick, and the Conservatives returned. Nevertheless, few in the party's ranks were really downhearted. Labour had again received enormous popular support and its 13.9 million votes still stands as an all-time record. Indeed, the general secretary, Morgan Phillips, was decidedly upbeat in his post-election report. Given the effort, the will and the determination, he concluded, 'final victory for democratic socialism' was 'assured' (ibid., pp. 191-220).

Nick Tiratsoo explains why the Labour party lost the 1951 election despite polling a record number of votes. (3:42 min)

However, hopes of a quick return to office failed to materialise. The Conservatives won in 1955 and then again in 1959, though Labour polled more than 12 million votes on both occasions. The second defeat produced a crisis of confidence. The Conservatives were riding an economic boom, which the left as a whole found difficult to deal with positively. Many commentators suggested that in future Labour might be doomed to perpetual opposition. A Penguin Special by Mark Abrams, Richard Rose and Rita Hinden, entitled Must Labour Lose? (1960, p. 119) attracted much publicity, particularly because its expert authors seemed inclined to answer their own question in the affirmative.

Nevertheless the pundits were again proved wrong. The Conservative government lost its way, and was wracked by indecision and scandal. Meanwhile, Harold Wilson, the new Labour leader, had begun projecting the party as a fresh and invigorating force that could transform Britain. Such developments were enough to give Labour a narrow victory at the 1964 election, and then a more substantial triumph two years later, based upon 13 million votes or 48 percent of the total. But this was to be a final high-water mark. Labour lost many local authorities in the late 1960s (including 37 cities) and then suffered defeat at the 1970 election. The signs were ominous, as the party's share of the poll had fallen to 43 percent, and in fact the next 20 years were to prove something of a hard slog.

Nick Tiratsoo discusses Harold Wilson's ideas about re-invigorating Britain's economy and technological base. (4:20 min)

Labour returned to power in 1974, first as a minority government and then with a majority of three, though its vote was again down. But much worse followed. Capitalising on Britain's economic problems and the new phenomenon of 'stagflation', Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives regained power in 1979 and then won three further elections in succession. Labour was plagued by internal divisions and the breakaway Social Democratic Party, and saw its share of the poll collapse to a post-1922 low of 27.6 percent in 1983, and then only slowly recover to 30.8 percent in 1987 and 34.4 percent in 1992. Relatively good results in European elections and some progress at the local level during the early 1990s proved little compensation. Writing after Labour's fourth consecutive defeat in 1992, a group of Britain's most prominent academic political scientists were pessimistic about the party's future. It had waged a good campaign in the recent election but still lost emphatically, humbled by the Conservatives' 42.3 percent of the popular vote. The chances of victory at the next contest were slim. Labour might prevent a further Tory success but it had little chance of doing more. The prospect of a hung parliament was 'clearly a serious one'. In a letter to the Independent, Lord Skidelsky, biographer of Keynes and political critic, was more forthright. Labour, he declared, was now simply 'unelectable'.

Assessed as a whole, Labour's record in the years to 1992 hardly impressed. Much of the electorate had remained resolutely Liberal or Conservative. Even the less well-off were not necessarily sympathetic. The Conservatives consistently won about one-third of the working-class vote, and sometimes considerably more, as in 1951, when their share reached 44 percent. In this situation, large swathes of the country never returned a Labour MP, a feature that was particularly true of non-metropolitan constituencies south of a line connecting the Wash to the Bristol Channel.

Of course, the party could draw strength from the fact that it continued to dominate much of industrial Britain, and in particular the coalfields, but even here the situation was somewhat less favourable than it at first sight appeared. For if much of the urban working class remained loyal to Labour, levels of commitment were sometimes fairly perfunctory. Few could be persuaded to vote in local elections, and though a better number turned out at national polls, they did so without necessarily showing any great enthusiasm. Indeed, voting was often given little thought at all, with choices being determined by custom, habit or instructions from a senior family member. On the other hand, the number of Labour sympathisers who wished to do more than just vote for the party was always very small. Millions automatically enrolled as members through their trade unions, but far fewer actively sought to join their local constituency organisations. An internal report of 1949 suggested that individual membership was equivalent to one in nineteen of those who had supported Labour in 1945. Later estimates, based upon better data, produced even more unfavourable ratios, and underlined, too, that such figures were unusually low by European standards.

Given this background, it is unsurprising to find that some of Labour's greatest electoral successes owed much to the failures of its opponents. The party was greatly assisted in the early 1920s by the divisions that plagued the Liberals. Later, in 1945, it benefited from a lack-lustre Conservative campaign, which focused on Churchill's persona but failed to present relevant policy prescriptions for the problems of the time, notably the war-induced housing shortage. A similar pattern was observable in 1966. Harold Wilson was more popular than Edward Heath, his opposite number, but the result almost certainly turned on the public's perception that the Tories were unfit for office, 'tired, out of touch with ordinary people, [and] too much dominated by the upper classes' (D.E. Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1966, 1966, pp. 265-7). While Labour could obviously claim credit for amplifying this impression, the Conservatives had ultimately caused their own downfall.

Nick Tiratsoo discusses the suggestion that Labour's electoral successes has been largely due to the failure of its opponents. (5:23 min)

In fact, Labour's problems with the electorate were serious enough to steadily erode much of the early optimism about ultimate victory. Party loyalists continued to be puzzled about their lack of appeal. Some rededicated themselves to the struggle, but others lapsed into cynicism or criticised the voters for their ignorance or perfidy. The Labour Organiser's headline in the wake of the 1931 result was 'Forty Millions--Mostly Fools'. Five years later, the Labour peer Lord Snell explained working-class attitudes by reference to the farmyard: 'They have been driven like cattle, they have often been housed worse than cattle, and they carry with them the marks of their history.' By the end of the 1950s, judgements were becoming even less sympathetic. Seeking to explain Labour's third successive election defeat, the MP Renee Short told the party conference: 'Women in this country ... are by and large ... politically illiterate.' Her radical colleague Michael Foot was equally forthright: 'The Tories caught the mood of the public. Their votes prove it. But that mood was blind, smug, somnolent, and, in some respects, evil.' A section of the left's later fixation with 'Sun readers'--apparently xenophobes and misogynists to a man--was very much in keeping with this tradition. From such a perspective, the party's conscience was clear: it had advanced sensible programmes but had then been let down by the electorate.