Chapter 6 Impact of the local elections and nomination day

The closing day for nominations was 4 November, and as it approached there was considerable nervousness at what might happen. Results day for the local elections was 2 November, with 1,362 candidates for just over 70 borough councils being elected; there was significant interest in their outcome, and what this might augur for the progress of the Labour Party or the effectiveness of local pacts in shutting out the socialists.¹ The Western Morning News for one was ready to conclude on 2 November that whatever the local election results showed, it was still ‘improbable’ that the Conservatives would be able to ‘secure a working majority of the House’.² The Daily Express was rather more bullish, proclaiming: ‘Labour routed everywhere’.³

Those results, which appeared in the national press on 3 November, were startling and appeared to confirm the apparent wisdom for both Conservative and Coalition Liberals in maintaining local pact arrangements. They also suggested that Liberal and Conservative voters were less apathetic than they had been in 1919 and had learned the lesson that Labour voters would turn out at the poll even if they did not. As The Scotsman informed its readers on 3 November the results had delivered ‘an emphatic repudiation’ to the holders of ‘socialist doctrines’.⁴ Of the almost 600 candidates which Labour had put forward for the local elections, almost two-thirds had been defeated.⁵ Only in some of the larger industrial cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Derby, together with South Wales, did Labour appear able to resist the anti-socialist tide.

In London, Labour suffered serious reverses in almost all boroughs. In Islington, for example, thirty-eight Labour councillors lost their seats to return a Labour group of just six on a council of sixty members. The Scotsman claimed ‘a striking illustration of the advantages of co-operation between parties which differ to some extent on other matters, but are agreed in their opposition to Socialism’.⁶

Jubilation at the outcome of the result was widespread in both Conservative and Liberal ranks. The Pall Mall Gazette declared: ‘Smashing defeat of Labour: Seats Lost Wholesale in London’.⁷ The ‘debacle’ for Labour, with six London boroughs returning no Labour councillors, was put down to: ‘the alliance which was established in many boroughs between the Municipal Reform and Progressive parties’.⁸ Likewise in Scotland, a jubilant Liberal sympathiser, Lady Frances Balfour, wrote to her brother-in-law, former Conservative leader Arthur Balfour and Coalitionist, to express her satisfaction that in the local elections Labour had gained hardly anything.⁹ For both The Pall Mall Gazette and Lady Balfour the local election results demonstrated the utility of maintaining party pacts.

The reverses to the Labour movement were particularly heartening to the forces of Coalition Liberalism. Many of the seats where Labour had fared badly, and where ‘co-operation’ had checked socialist hopes, covered constituencies where Coalition Liberal MPs were standing in the general election including seats in Lancashire covered by the Derby truce. The results in Bristol and Norwich were also a potential omen of good fortune for Coalition Liberal candidates in those areas.

The local election results provided a confirmation of the wisdom of maintaining party pacts into the election. Indeed, in the aftermath of the results, Herbert Morrison, the secretary and organiser of the London Labour Party, paid tribute to ‘the political machinery of the Coalition’ and ‘the anti-Labour Party’ which had helped to deliver the results.¹⁰ Nevertheless, as nomination day drew closer there was nervousness in National Liberal circles that Unionist Central Office might fall into line with Beaverbrook’s personal campaign and spring a surprise and field a slate of Conservative candidates against former coalitionists. There might also have been some nervousness at the behaviour of some Coalition Liberal constituency parties. In Gloucester and in Hornsey, Coalition Liberal constituency parties declined to put forward a candidate and instead backed the Asquithian candidate.¹¹ The Gloucester Journal was happy to proclaim local Liberal reunification following a visit by Asquith to the constituency and the putting forward of a programme by the candidate that all Liberals could get behind.¹²