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Showing posts with label elections. Show all posts
Showing posts with label elections. Show all posts
On May 26, 1955 the Conservatives achieved a notable victory in the General Election under a new leader, who was considerably more popular than the previous one. I know that some readers are going to spit with anger at that comment but it happens to be the truth: Churchill became popular only in the last ten years of his life when he had finally retired from politics.
The DNB entry for Anthony Eden, under whose leadership the party increased its majority from seventeen to sixty and winning the popular vote as well, is interesting in that it explains the situation in the mid-fifties when many in the party and the country thought that Churchill should finally retire and hand over the leadership to the man seen as his successor for some years. Some people thought that Churchill should have retired immediately after the war and the landslide defeat by the Labour Party under Attlee. One can argue about that as about Eden's own strengths and weaknesses - oddly enough, his political career was destroyed by foreign affairs, which were supposed to be his strength. (The Wiki entry is, as usual, less outspoken about the problems and the achievements.)
Eden was unusual in one respect. Normally, leaders who take over in the middle of a Ministry go to the end of the mandate, calling an election as late as they can, in order to impose their own personality on government and Parliament. Eden, became leader on April 7, 1955 and called an election for May 26.
It is, undoubtedly, interesting to look at the results in 1951 and 1955:
In 1951 302 Conservative MPs were elected on 12,659,712 votes, 295 Labour MPs on 13,948,883 votes and 19 Liberal National MPs (on 1,058,138 votes) who were in alliance with the Conservatives, thus increasing the government's strength. There were also 6 Liberal, 2 Independent Nationalist and 1 Irish Labour MPs.
In 1955 there were 345 Conservative MPs on 13,310,891 votes, 277 Labour MPs on 12,405,254 votes, 6 Liberal and 2 Sinn Féin MPs.
It was also the last time the Conservatives won an absolute majority of both seats and votes in Scotland.
How sad then, that the Ministry did not live up to the expectations of that day sixty-five years ago when the results were proclaimed.
1886 was an important election in British history as it ended the Liberal dominance of parliamentary politics that had given that party victory in five of the six elections since 1859 and power for seventeen of those twenty-seven years. In the subsequent nineteen years the Libearals would hold power for only three of them. The results were particularly spectacular as the previous year the Liberals had won again but Gladstone's growing obsession with Home Rule for Ireland split his party. The Conservatives under Lord Salisbury won 317 seats and their allies, the Liberal Unionists under Lord Hartington and Joseph Chamberlain, 77. The Liberals had 191 seats and their more or less reliable allies, the Irish Parliamentary Party, still under Charles Stewart Parnell, 85. The Conservatives and Liberal Unionists had a handsome majority. One of the people who won a seat with a majority of 461 in a poll of just under 7,000 was George Nathaniel Curzon who thus became an MP for Southport. In his biography of the man David Gilmour makes the following interesting comments:
A significant aspect of the election was the difference in the voting patterns between England and the Celtic fringe: Gladstone lost heavily in England, but his supporters won a majority of seats in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Nevertheless, the English predominance gave victory to Salisbury and enabled him to set about the composition of his second ministry.In fact the predominance, as can be seen from the figures above, was very handsome. Yet, it is interesting to see how early that pattern set in. These days it is the Labour Party that tends to win in the Celtic fringe with Northern Ireland presenting a picture that is as different from the rest of the country as Ireland was then. Some of us still remember when the Scottish Conservative Party was a power in the land and when a number of Scottish seats were more or less permanently reserved for the Liberal Party as it was then. All that has changed but the different pattern between England and the rest of the United Kingdom remains.
This is for the historical psephologists who, I have no doubt, look at this blog regularly. Anything you ever wanted to know about elections and voting in London from 1700 to 1850 can be found on the London Electoral Website.
The results of the 1945 General Election, in which votes took a long time to count because of the numbers that were still overseas, were declared on July 26: an astonishing though not altogether surprising (if I may use such a paradox) landslide victory for the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee who, as Deputy Prime Minister during the war, managed to spread many of the party's ideas and create the necessary structures even before he withdrew from the Coalition and demanded and election. This blog has referred to this in a posting on Robert Crowcroft's Attlee's War.
The reasons for that victory were many. Debates about it have gone on since that day and will go on for a long time. These debates and discussions are of importance because they have shaped and will continue to shape Conservative Party politics.
Was it the memory of the "heroes" coming back after the Great War to broken promises? Was it the desire never to repeat the Depression of the early thirties? Was it Churchill's undoubted lack of popularity but how popular was Attlee? Was it the dishonesty of Labour accusing the Conservatives in not seeing the dangers in Hitler's Germany while they and the unions had tried to prevent rearmament as long as they could? Was it the lack of Conservative Party structures as so many active members were still serving one way or another? Was it the lack of Conservative ideology to withstand that of the Labour Party? Or was it simply the regular exhaustion the electorate feels with one party, too long in power? As the saying goes: discuss.
1974 was the year of two elections, both lost by the Conservatives but only one resulting in victory for the Labour Party. In February of that year Harold Wilson had formed a minority government, the first in this country, as the BBC tells, since 1929 and called another election in October when he managed to convert it to a majority of 3. Inevitably, as time went on this, too, became a minority government but it managed to stagger on till the end of its term in 1979. This election also signalled the end of Edward Heath's leadership of the Conservative Party.
