The 1923 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 6 December 1923.[1] The Conservatives, led by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, won the most seats, but Labour, led by Ramsay MacDonald, and H. H. Asquith's reunited Liberal Party gained enough seats to produce a hung parliament. It is the most recent UK general election in which a third party won over 100 seats (158 for the Liberals) and the most narrow gap, of a "mere" 100 seats, between the first and third parties since. The Liberals' percentage of the vote, 29.7%, has not been exceeded by a third party at any general election since.
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All 615 seats in the House of Commons 308 seats needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Turnout | 71.1%,  1.9 pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Colours denote the winning party—as shown in § Results | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Composition of the House of Commons following the 1923 general election | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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MacDonald formed the first ever Labour government with tacit support from the Liberals. Rather than trying to bring the Liberals back into government, Asquith's motivation for permitting Labour to enter power was that he hoped they would prove to be incompetent and quickly lose support. Being a minority, MacDonald's government only lasted ten months and another general election was held in October 1924.
Overview
In May 1923, Prime Minister Bonar Law fell ill and resigned on 22 May,[2] after just 209 days in office. He was replaced by Chancellor of the Exchequer, Stanley Baldwin. The Labour Party had also changed leaders since the previous election, after J. R. Clynes was defeated in a leadership challenge by former leader Ramsay MacDonald.
Having won an election just the year before, Baldwin's Conservative Party had a comfortable majority in the House of Commons and could have waited another four years, but the government was concerned and the Conservatives were divided. Baldwin felt the need to receive a mandate from the people, which, if successful, would strengthen his grip on the Conservative Party leadership and allow him to introduce tariff reform and imperial preference as protectionist trade policies over the objections of the free trade elements of his party.
Oxford historian and Conservative MP John Marriott depicts the gloomy national mood:
The times were still out of joint. Mr. Baldwin had indeed succeeded in negotiating (January 1923) a settlement of the British debt to the United States, but on terms which involved an annual payment of £34 million, at the existing rate of exchange. The French remained in the Ruhr. Peace had not yet been made with Turkey; unemployment was a standing menace to national recovery; there was continued unrest among the wage-earners, and a significant strike among farm labourers in Norfolk.
Confronted by these difficulties, convinced that economic conditions in England called for a drastic change in fiscal policy, and urged thereto by the Imperial Conference of 1923, Mr. Baldwin decided to ask the country for a mandate for Preference and Protection.[3]
Parliament was dissolved on 16 November[4] and the result backfired on Baldwin, who lost a host of seats to Labour and the Liberals, resulting in a hung parliament. A reformation of the Conservative-Liberal coalition which had governed the country until the previous year was not practical, as Baldwin had alienated both of the two most prominent Liberals, Asquith and David Lloyd George.
Faced with the choice of supporting either a minority Conservative or Labour government on an issue-by-issue basis, Asquith ultimately chose the latter, partly because Lloyd George's faction was vehemently opposed to working with Baldwin (though Asquith's allies were themselves unenthusiastic about such a prospect), and partly because he believed that Labour's electoral success thus far was mostly the result of the previous split in the Liberal Party, and that a Labour government would expose the party's policies as unworkable, allowing for the Liberals to overtake them at the next election. The Liberals therefore combined with Labour to vote down the King's Speech prepared by Baldwin, causing his government to fall. For the first time in history, Labour formed a government.
Results
| Candidates | Votes | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Party | Leader | Stood | Elected | Gained | Unseated | Net | % of total | % | No. | Net % | |
| Conservative | Stanley Baldwin | 536 | 258 | 23 | 109 | −86 | 41.95 | 38.0 | 5,286,159 | −0.5 | |
| Labour | Ramsay MacDonald | 427 | 191 | 64 | 15 | +49 | 31.06 | 30.7 | 4,267,831 | +1.0 | |
| Liberal | H. H. Asquith | 457 | 158 | 86 | 43 | +43 | 25.69 | 29.7 | 4,129,922 | +0.9 | |
| Nationalist | Joseph Devlin | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.3 | 0.3 | 43,835 | N/A | |
| Independent | N/A | 6 | 2 | 0 | 1 | −1 | 0.325 | 0.3 | 36,802 | −0.5 | |
| Communist | Albert Inkpin | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | −1 | 0.2 | 34,258 | 0.0 | ||
| Belfast Labour | David Robb Campbell | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.2 | 22,255 | N/A | ||
| Independent Labour | N/A | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 | −1 | 0.2 | 17,331 | 0.0 | ||
| Independent Liberal | N/A | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 16,184 | 0.0 | |
| Constitutionalist | N/A | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | −1 | 0.1 | 15,500 | 0.0 | ||
| Ind. Conservative | N/A | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 | −3 | 0.1 | 15,171 | −0.8 | ||
| Scottish Prohibition | Edwin Scrymgeour | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.1 | 12,877 | 0.0 | ||
| Irish Nationalist | N/A | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.2 | 0.1 | 10,322 | N/A | |
| Christian Pacifist | N/A | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0.0 | 570 | N/A | ||
Votes summary
Seats summary
Constituency results
Transfers of seats
- All comparisons are with the 1922 election.
- In some cases the change is due to the MP defecting to the gaining party. Such circumstances are marked with a *.
- In other circumstances the change is due to the seat having been won by the gaining party in a by-election in the intervening years, and then retained in 1923. Such circumstances are marked with a †.
See also
- List of MPs elected in the 1923 United Kingdom general election
- 2019 United Kingdom general election, the next UK general election after 1923 to be held in December.
- 1923 United Kingdom general election in Northern Ireland
Notes
References
Sources
- Craig, F. W. S. (1989), British Electoral Facts: 1832–1987, Dartmouth: Gower, ISBN 0900178302
- Doerr, Paul W. (1998), British foreign policy 1919–1939, Manchester: Manchester University Press, ISBN 0719046718
- Marriott, J. A. R. (1948), Modern England: 1885–1945
Further reading
- Cook, Chris P. (1969), "Wales and the General Election of 1923", Welsh History Review, 4 (4): 393–4
- Craig, F. W. S., ed. (1975), British General Election Manifestos, 1900-74
- Irwin, Douglas A. (1995), Industry or Class Cleavages over Trade Policy? Evidence from the British General Election of 1923 (PDF), National Bureau of Economic Research
- Self, Robert (1992), "Conservative reunion and the general election of 1923: a reassessment", Twentieth Century British History, 3 (3): 249–273, doi:10.1093/tcbh/3.3.249
- Smart, Nick (1996), "Baldwin's Blunder? The General Election of 1923", Twentieth Century British History, 7 (1): 110–139, doi:10.1093/tcbh/7.1.110
External links
- United Kingdom election results—summary results 1885–1979 Archived 8 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine