A snap general election, which destroyed a secure Conservative Government and brought the Labour party to power for the first time, took place on 6 December 1923. Although the existing Parliament elected in November 1922 had four more years to run, it was dissolved by the King on 16 November 1923 at the request of Stanley Baldwin, who had become prime minister less than six months earlier, inheriting a Commons majority of 75. A fiercely contested three-week campaign ensued, the last to be held so late in the year until 2019. Business organisations protested strongly about the disruption of their Christmas trade.
Like most snap elections, it was called to resolve a single issue, which, in the prime minister’s view, had to be settled urgently in the national interest. Baldwin hoped to secure a clear mandate for a fundamental change in economic policy in order to tackle high and rising unemployment.
There was a general expectation in the summer of 1923 that the number of people without a job would increase from 1.5 million to 2 million, 15 per cent of the working population, over the coming twelve months. In June, the Minister of Labour, Sir Anderson Montague-Barlow, wrote despairingly that “the next will be the fourth winter of grave unemployment…fewer trades unions can continue unemployment benefit, and the deterioration and hopelessness of the workers increases.” At a meeting of the cabinet on 23 October 1923, it was agreed that “unemployment is the outstanding problem in the political life of the country. Failure to deal with it might wreck the Government. “Unresolved, the unemployment problem could obviously be expected to draw ever-increasing numbers of working-class voters into the arms of the Labour party, assisting its further advance after the dramatic increase in the number of its MPs from 63 to 142 at the 1922 election.
After careful thought during his long summer holiday at Aix-les-Bains where he went every year, followed by private consultations with various cabinet ministers, Baldwin came to the conclusion that there was only one answer to unemployment: the introduction of tariffs on imports, ending Britain’s long commitment to free trade. In an aide-memoire composed at Chequers on 7 October, he wrote that “every attempt to relieve unemployment is only applying palliatives: the only way to safeguard the future is to protect our own industries and develop our own Empire.” The latter was already under discussion with the prime ministers of the dominions.
“But Bonar’s pledge stands in the way”, Baldwin added in his note of 7 October. This was the commitment, given by his predecessor Andrew Bonar Law at the November 1922 election, that “this Parliament will not make any fundamental change in the fiscal system of this country.” It was only through a further election, the cabinet agreed, that the pledge could be set aside and the way cleared for the introduction of economic protection.
Baldwin took his constituency associations and the wider public totally by surprise when he announced his dramatic shift in policy in his leader’s speech to the annual Conservative party conference in Plymouth on 25 October. But the unexpected demarche was not accompanied by any indication that an election was imminent. Baldwin made clear “that he had no desire to rush the country into an election, but wished to give the electorate time to examine the Government’s economic policy before they were called on to vote on it.”
The intense pre-election atmosphere which the Plymouth speech unleashed quickly altered the calculations. Several members of the cabinet expressed impatience at the delay; others had serious misgivings about protection itself, which seemed likely to grow if no election were to be held until 1924.
The most skilful and least scrupulous politician of the day helped hasten the election. Rumours abounded that Lloyd George intended to seize the initiative by launching his own crusade for protection in the company of two formidable disaffected leading Conservatives, Austen Chamberlain and F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, who were outside the Government and openly contemptuous of Baldwin. Stanley Jackson, the Conservative Party Chairman, warned that “LG and FE with the Rothermere press were going strongly for protection”. Could they use the issue to recreate the Tory/ Liberal coalition under Lloyd George which had been overthrown at the famous Carlton Club meeting in October 1922, and in the process destroy Baldwin?
These factors settled the matter. Overriding considerable scepticism in his divided cabinet, while simultaneously flirting with Chamberlain and Birkenhead in an attempt to curb their trouble-making, Baldwin suddenly announced on 12 November that Parliament would be dissolved. There was by this point a growing belief that the Government had lost the tactical advantage and the new protection policy could only be saved by going to the country in the hope of snatching victory before the opposition parties could mobilise fully. At this early stage of his long period as Tory leader, Baldwin never looked like a man who was firmly in control of events.
That impression was not diminished by Baldwin’s conduct during the election campaign. He failed to explain the case for protection with the force and passion needed to banish scepticism and doubt. Though Conservative Central Office had assured him that victory was certain, its literature was inevitably prepared in great haste and lacked effective slogans to galvanise enthusiasm and electoral support. Within the party itself, protection failed to conquer every heart. A number of MPs who had planned to stand again withdrew from the contest rather than repudiate free trade, while thirteen actually stood as free traders with the support of their constituency associations.
There were insistent demands for a clear indication of the implications of the Government’s plans. The Conservative manifesto was little help, providing only a general outline of the Government’s intentions. It said that action would be taken to “impose duties on imported manufactured goods” in order “to raise revenue” and “give special assistance” to industries facing “unfair foreign competition” while negotiating for “a reduction of foreign tariffs” to help British exports and giving “substantial preference to the Empire.”
In his campaign speeches, Baldwin confined himself to vague promises that great benefits would be forthcoming, or at the very least that no harm would be done. Asked in Liverpool at the end of the campaign how shipping would be affected, he replied that its prosperity had long preceded the arrival of free trade “and to imagine that it would decline on a return to protection, or indeed that any responsible statesman could support measures that would put it in peril, was absurd.”
This inevitably created much frustration. The Times noted on 22 November: “ The statement is constantly heard that what is wanted is a plain, straightforward explanation of the Government’s scheme.” The trouble was that no proper scheme had been prepared in the run-up to this snap election.
The Times, like most of the other leading dailies, was unwilling to give the Tories strong backing. Never before, it was said at the time, had a Conservative campaign suffered more from lack of press support. The mass circulation newspapers caused much tribulation among Tory party officials. The leading press barons of the right, Lords Rothermere and Beaverbrook, whose papers had a combined daily circulation of 4.5 million, did not allow a good word to be said about Baldwin throughout the campaign. They yielded to no one in their enthusiasm for protection, but were unimpressed by Baldwin’s rapid conversion, and above all wanted a definite scheme to assist goods coming from the Empire, which Baldwin failed to bring forward.
For the first time in electoral history money was a problem for the Tories. The Party Treasurer, Viscount Younger of Leckie, told Baldwin that £150/160,000 would be needed, but “money is really very scarce, and subscriptions come in very badly.” He had to dip into the party’s capital reserves. The demands on the party’s resources were considerably greater than at the previous election. More seats were contested. In 1922, when many of Lloyd George’s supporters were given a clear run by the Tories (despite the collapse of the coalition), there were 483 candidates; the number rose to 540 in 1923. As a result the total Conservative vote went up in an election that was lost.
This was the last election in which broadcasting played no part. The BBC, under John Reith’s dynamic direction, had just been set up. Conservative Central Office, buffeted by the press, saw the potential of this new powerful medium. Reith’s diary contains the following entry for 20 October 1923: “Met Sir Reginald Hall, chief agent for the Unionist party[as the Conservatives were at this point generally known]. He hoped we should be able to broadcast the prime minister from Plymouth, but I am sure this will not come off.” It didn’t and no broadcasts were made during the election campaign, but this early Tory interest in the BBC put it far ahead of the other parties, which worked greatly to its advantage at future inter-war elections.
In 1923 very little worked to its advantage. Unsettling reports from constituencies across the land reached Central Office as the campaign wore on. It took no notice. On 4 December, two days before polling, it told Baldwin to expect a majority of 87 (which it increased on polling day itself to 97), giving no indication how it had arrived at its figures. The prime minister had just returned from the last of his l election tours by rail, conforming to the tradition set in the late nineteenth century. He was “very cheerful”, his confidant, Thomas Jones, recorded in his diary, having received “very favourable reports of the progress of the campaign in the North” where the case for protection had seemed unlikely to be well received. As he departed for his Bewdley constituency, Baldwin said: “I don’t want any bands when I come back!” That was just as well since they could only have played a lament.
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Labour and the Liberals could hardly believe their luck. Their support for free trade had never wavered over the generations . When the Tories had first proposed tariffs twenty years earlier, they had profited enormously in electoral terms. Now they hoped that history would repeat itself. They were not to be disappointed.
Their gains in 1923, though substantial, would have been spectacular if they had fought the election as allies, dividing up constituencies between them, as they had when Labour had been the Liberals’ very junior partner before the First World War. But now they were deadly rivals. While united in condemning Baldwin for violating a sacrosanct element of national life, they also fought each other unyieldingly for electoral supremacy. In the astute hands of of Ramsay MacDonald who had been reinstalled in the party leadership after the 1922 election (having been forgiven for his pacificism during the First World War), Labour looked to a future in which the Liberals barely existed (an objective which, as it happened, it shared with Baldwin).
In 1923, however, the Liberals had particular cause to thank Baldwin. Nothing, it had seemed, would ever end the deep animosity between Asquith and Lloyd George, which had torn the Liberals asunder at the end of 1916 when Lloyd George formed his coalition with the Conservatives. The two men had hardly spoken to each other since then. At the 1922 election, the two Liberal parties had fought each other venomously. Baldwin achieved what had been regarded as impossible. His election campaign for protection united the warring Liberals. Abandoning his pro-protection intrigues with dissident leading Conservatives, Lloyd George travelled to Asquith’s Paisley constituency where, as he put it, “the rites of Liberal reunion were celebrated at an enthusiastic meeting in the town hall.”
This meant not just a united campaign fought on a common programme, but a well-financed one too. Asquith’s faction had hardly any money; Lloyd George had plenty, thanks to the personal political fund he had built up while he was prime minister. The Welsh wizard put some £90, 000 into the party’s election account, helping to take the total to around £150,000, so matching Tory expenditure. This large sum met the costs of effective campaign literature and assisted many candidates with their expenses. A committee was established to fuse the two Liberal organisations at constituency level, and stop rival Liberal candidates fighting each other. It did a good job; the Liberal vote was split in only two seats. The reunited party contested 453 constituencies, husbanding its strength a little after the 490 contests that the two divided parties had mounted in 1922.
The predominant theme of the Liberal campaign was that Britain had been forced into a cost of living election by Baldwin’s irresponsible new tariff policy. Cartoons were produced portraying “Baldwin and Co. high price tailors” with shop windows displaying signs such as “All prices raised by 20 per cent” and “You pay—we prosper”. A circular issued in the name of Asquith’s daughter denounced protection as “ an attack on the standard of life of the poorest homes in the country.”
This Liberal theme was given strong backing by several newspapers, including The Glasgow Herald which stated on 1 December that “this is a cost-of-living election. More and more candidates are being pressed to talk about the effect of protection on the cost of living. It is a subject of absorbing interest to all the electors.” The Liberals were mining a rich electoral seam. Few could complain about the vigour with which the two leaders of the reunited party went about it. They undertook long railway journeys across the country to address meetings on the iniquity of protection. Asquith’s travels were especially protracted as a result of a rather poorly planned programme of speaking engagements.
Throughout the campaign Lloyd George insisted that it was not enough simply to denounce protection and its effects on the cost of living. The Liberal manifesto contained the first draft of his radical interventionist initiatives for economic revival and much fuller employment that he was to develop dramatically during the rest of the decade. There were proposals for the “bold and courageous” use of “national credit” to provide cheap power for industry and homes, along with road and water transport, afforestation, and land reclamation. There was a ringing call for a welfare state: “ Liberal policy concentrates upon lifting from the homes of the poor those burdens and anxieties of the old, the sick, the widow with young children, which the community has the power and duty to relieve.” Lloyd George challenged the Labour party on its strongest ground.
Ramsay MacDonald struck back. The Labour manifesto matched the Liberals point for point under the heading “practical idealism.” The party’s “national schemes of productive work” included all the interventionist initiatives that Lloyd George had put in the Liberal manifesto with the addition of town planning and housing. On the latter, there was no lack of ambition. Labour promised to “abolish the slums [and] build an adequate supply of decent homes.” Socialism made a brief appearance in a short section of the manifesto attractively entitled “The Commonwealth of Co-operative Service”. Just three industries would be nationalised: the mines, railways and power stations.
It was a left-wing taxation reform which became the most controversial element of Labour’s programme. What was described as “a non-recurring, graduated war debt redemption levy” was announced for “all individual fortunes in excess of £5,000.” This capital levy came under strong attack from other parties in the closing stages of the campaign. MacDonald insisted that the proceeds of the levy would be used to reduce debt, not to finance left-wing hobby-horses. The measure was a “symbol of financial straightforwardness.” He did not allow it to throw Labour seriously on the defensive.
Overall MacDonald offered a reformist agenda with a dash of socialism to tackle unemployment as a constructive alternative to Baldwin’s protectionist policy, which he attacked as vigorously as the Liberals . Labour fielded 422 candidates, up slightly on 1922. With pardonable exaggeration, a senior Labour official described it as “an effort which may be regarded as almost unique in the history of British politics.” As usual, Labour’s funds were much more modest than those of the other two parties. The party had to make do with £23, 565 provided by the trade unions.
Not much was heard about MacDonald’s colleagues during the campaign. The Labour leader, eloquent and masterful on the platform, commanded almost all the attention. While his rivals in the other parties followed tradition and campaigned by rail, he took to the road. The press gave lavish coverage to his progress by car from London to his Aberavon constituency in South Wales in this novel form of electioneering. Crowds gathered in large numbers at his meetings in the cities and towns through which he passed. In Newport, the car was towed through the streets. In Port Talbot “the crowd bore down on the car like an avalanche.” No other party leader evoked so much enthusiasm in 1923. A relatively new form of transport had moved to the centre of British elections.
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This was the first election at which results were broadcast. The newly established BBC announced constituency poll declarations between 9.45 pm on 6 December at 1pm the following morning without commentary (music from two bands at the Savoy Hotel filled the gaps). Two million people were estimated to have gathered around wireless sets across the country.
Manchester Exchange, a Conservative seat, was the first to be declared . It was lost to the Liberals on an 11.8 per cent swing. It was the harbinger of Tory disaster in Lancashire, a bastion of the party since Disraeli’s day, and elsewhere in the north west with its deep attachment to free trade in the interests of the cotton industry. The Liberals won five of the ten Manchester seats, their first victories in the city since 1910.
Thomas Jones, faithful friend of Baldwin (despite being a Labour voter), listened to the results in the cabinet room at No 10. “As the Liberal and Labour gains continued in an unbroken stream,” his diary for 6 December recorded, “our faces grew longer [and] we saw less and less chance of the home counties putting things right. Bath and Nottingham were a great shock. If Nottingham would not vote for a tariff after all the trouble about foreign competition in the lace trade, who was going to support Baldwin?” (Jones added that he listened to “the growing tale of Labour victories with undisguised joy.”)
The Liberals won Bath on a 10.7 per cent swing. The Manchester Guardian noted on 8 December that “it is indeed curious how many Liberal successes there have been in places which have cathedrals, racecourses, and esplanades.” The party had victories in a number of seats which had been safe Tory strongholds since at least 1885, including Basingstoke, Blackpool, Chelmsford, Chichester and Shrewsbury. Asquith asked: “What is the explanation of these unexpected, and in some cases un-hoped for, victories?” The victors themselves were often utterly astonished. In Chichester they “only knew 12 Liberals”, and were without a candidate until the last minute.
23 Tory urban constituencies fell to the Liberals, who did better still in Tory county seats, where they made 44 gains, most notably in the south midlands and the south west. This was the only election between 1918 and 1966 in which the Conservatives did not win a majority of agricultural seats. Farm prices had fallen sharply, and farmers were furious since they had been promised in the 1920 Agriculture Act that, with Government support, prices would be maintained at a high level. Tariffs offered nothing to them since food was to be exempted from Baldwin’s scheme.
Overwhelmingly, however, in both rural and urban seats Liberal victories came with insubstantial or very small majorities, which were destined to be overturned when the tariff controversy faded in 1924. Some Liberal successes were due to the absence of a Labour candidate in seats where the Labour vote would have been large enough to hand victory to the Tories; a marked increase in Labour candidates in 1924 had just that effect. Furthermore, the Liberals did not in 1923 recover lost ground in some former strongholds, such as the industrial regions of Scotland, south Wales and parts of Yorkshire. 1923 was an election in which the Liberals did very well in non-industrial seats, a development which foreshadowed the Liberal revivals of the 1960s and 1970s.
Labour advanced less spectacularly in terms of seats than the Liberals in 1923, emerging with 191 seats—an increase of 49—as against the Liberal increase of 72, which took its total representation, no longer split between two warring parties, to 159. In some constituencies, Labour organisation displayed notable efficiency: in Leicester West the party showed its detailed canvass returns to journalists, who were impressed by the accuracy with which they indicated the majority by which Winston Churchill, fighting his last election as a Liberal, would be defeated. Labour gained 18 seats where, as in Leicester West, a Liberal supporter of the Lloyd George faction had been elected in 1922.
In 1923 Labour consolidated its position in many northern industrial constituencies, and made some useful gains in a variety of urban seats elsewhere, such as Coventry, Ipswich and Cardiff. Its most conspicuous advance occurred in the greater London area, where it more than doubled its MPs from 16 to 37, chiefly at the expense of the Conservatives.
Baldwin and the Conservatives paid a heavy price for their sudden, unexpected tariff election. They were defeated in 108 seats, with the overall loss being reduced to 88 by the gain of 20 seats, chiefly from the Liberals in eastern Scotland and elsewhere. Northern Ireland sent eleven Ulster Unionists, most of them unopposed, to give their loyal support to Baldwin after an election in which tariffs played little part. The contest there had been dominated by the threat to Northern Ireland posed by a Boundary Commission that had been set up to consider the redistribution of territory between the two parts of Ireland. “ Not an inch”, said the Unionists. Baldwin would display much skill in protecting their interests in the next two years.
With their MPs down from 345 to 257, the Conservatives had lost their substantial majority and become the largest party in a hung parliament. It was clear where the blame lay. Summing up the election on 8 December, The Times stated: “The general opinion in Unionist circles yesterday was that Mr Baldwin’s policy had been defeated on the ‘dear food’ cry”, even though Baldwin had said that tariffs would not apply to the main foodstuffs. His assurances seemed to carry little conviction, particularly among those who at that time did most of the shopping. The Times added: “in the main the women’s vote was cast against the Government.” Baldwin told Thomas Jones: “The people of this country can’t be shaken out of their fear of high prices.”
Resignation passed fleetingly through Baldwin’s mind, but he came under no serious pressure from his party to depart. It yearned for stability after the turmoil of the coalition years with Lloyd George, and Baldwin seemed best placed to provide it, despite his rash tariff election. The Liberals sought no deal either with him or Ramsay MacDonald, but Asquith made plain in mid-December that his party would support Labour in the hung parliament which met on 15 January 1924. Baldwin was defeated on the address six days later, and Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labour Government.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. Conservative, Labour and Liberal General Election Manifestos, 1900-1997, 3 Vols., ed. Iain Dale (Routledge,2000). Baldwin Papers: A Conservative Statesman, 1908-1947, ed. Philip Williamson and Edward Baldwin (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Stuart Ball, Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2013). Chris Cook and John Stevenson, A History of British Elections since 1689 (Routledge, 2014). Roy Jenkins, Asquith (Collins,1964). Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary , Vol. 1 1916-1925, ed. Keith Middlemas (Oxford University Press,1969). David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (Jonathan Cape, 1977). Michael Kinnear, The British Voter: An Atlas and Survey since 1885 (Batsford, 1981). Richard W. Lyman, The First Labour Government 1924 (Chapman & Hall, 1957). Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography (Macmillan. 1969). The Reith Diaries, ed. Charles Stuart (Collins,1975). Robert Self, “ Conservative Reunion and the General Election of 1923: A Reassessment” in Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 3 (1992). Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values ( Cambridge University Press, 1999). Trevor Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party 1914-1935 (Collins, 1966).
