Chapter 14 Repercussions of the 1922 General Election

The outcomes of the 1922 General Election were profound for all concerned. For the Conservative Party the election proved for the first time since 1900 that it could win an election in its own right. At the constituency level there was also rejoicing. For example, at Maldon in Essex, Edward Ruggles-Brise (1882–1942), the victorious Conservative candidate, was deluged with mail from across the constituency and beyond (56 telegrams and 124 letters from Conservative supporters, fellow members of the landed gentry and commercial enterprises eager for his continued custom).¹ For many Conservatives the outcome of the 1922 General Election represented an unexpected victory, and a remarkable avoidance of several potentially disastrous outcomes. Despite the rupture at the Carlton Club meeting, with its rejection of most of the leadership of the Conservative Party, the absence of party controversy, the willingness of Bonar Law to accept ‘local arrangements’, and the threat from Labour largely preserved harmony in the constituencies. As Stuart Ball has commented: ‘Above all, disunity was not carried into the constituencies. There was no purge of MPs and almost no competing candidatures, and the fragmentation of the local organisation and of the Conservative vote was avoided’.² Without the leading lights of the Conservative Party, Bonar Law’s ‘Second XI’ proved capable in the months following in an unspectacular and quiet way – exactly in line with the promises of the Conservative Party in the lead up to polling day.

The Labour Party could also claim victory in 1922. In some ways, Labour’s triumph was even more significant than that of the Conservatives. It is perhaps the post-election euphoria at Labour’s performance, and the eclipse of the Liberals, that limited the impact on later accounts of any concerns about the operation of unofficial Conservative/Coalition Liberal Pacts in many constituencies. Clynes, the Labour leader in 1922, makes no mention of them in his memoirs, but he is fulsome in his expression of joy at Labour’s performance in the election.³ Labour’s breakthrough in the urban, industrial conurbations, with 142 seats secured, meant that the party became the official opposition in the House of Commons. The significance of the performance was evident at the time with one Scottish newspaper commenting: ‘Taken all over the 1922 election is a triumph for Labour rather than for the Conservative party’.⁴ Labour’s breakthrough in 1922 transformed the parliamentary party in ways which enhanced its ability to appeal to the electorate in future elections. As David Marquand has noted:

The new parliamentary Labour Party … was a very different body from the old one. In 1918, 48 Labour MPs had been sponsored by trade unions, and only three by the ILP. Now about 100 members belonged to the ILP, while 32 had actually been sponsored by it, as against 85 who had been sponsored by trade unions. The change in class background was equally significant. In 1918, no Labour MPs had been to public schools, and only one to a university. Now there were 21 university graduates, and 9 public-school men … In the country, the Labour Party was still an overwhelmingly working-class organization. In Parliament, it could present itself for the first time as the movement of opinion rather than of class.⁵

As Alan Ball has demonstrated, the impact of the 1922 General Election on the parliamentary Labour Party, including reforms designed to enhance the authority of the newly introduced post of chairman and leader, made it more electable, capable, and gave it greater independence from the rest of the party.⁶ Just over a year later, following the 1923 General Election, the Labour Party under Ramsay MacDonald, who had gained his seat at Aberavon in 1922 from the sitting Coalition Liberal, would form a first minority administration, supplanting the Liberals as the second party in the two-party system.

The outcome of the 1922 election was not, however, uniformly positive in the long term for Labour as some of the very detailed local studies of the development of the Labour Party in this period have revealed.⁷ As Clare Griffiths has noted, Labour had done well in urban areas but throughout the interwar period the party would struggle to make progress in winning over the rural working classes.⁸ In addition, as Declan McHugh has demonstrated with regard to Manchester, support of the urban working classes would continue to be dependent on considerations of whether a vote for the Labour Party might result in improvements to their material conditions – engagement with the wider political goals of the party was limited.⁹ Formidable obstacles would remain to the consolidation of Labour’s hold on the industrial cities, as Sam Davies has demonstrated with his study of Liverpool.¹⁰ Overall, though, the 1922 General Election gave Labour a sense of momentum and a sense that power was within their grasp.

What was good for the Labour and Conservative Parties was inevitably bad for Liberals of both persuasions. As David Dutton has written:

In the event, neither Liberal faction had much cause for satisfaction. The Independent Liberals gained 43 seats, with a final total of 54 … But 14 seats were lost, 9 of them to Labour, and their showing in mining seats, where they had done well before 1914, was especially disappointing … The performance of the Lloyd Georgeites was, if anything, even worse.¹¹

The level of Conservative success at the constituency level negated Lloyd George’s strategy of trying to hold power with around seventy seats. In the event, the Coalition Liberals had fallen short of that level by seventeen seats, but even if they had reached that target, the Bonar Law administration would still have had a useful working majority. The Asquith Liberals had taken third place in the party stakes, but third place in a two-party system meant that both Liberal parties faced an existential threat underpinned by ongoing realignment of British party politics, a changing socio-economic electoral base, and further declines at the constituency level in terms of finances and activists. As Gavin Freeman has noted in respect of the decline of the Liberal Party in Leicestershire, with a divided party coming third and fourth in the general election the Liberals could not sit back and allow the natural swing of the pendulum to put them back into office at some point in the future.¹²

Amalgamation of the two wings of British Liberalism represented the only possible response to the threat. Reunion would follow within the year, impelled by the determination of Stanley Baldwin, who would replace the dying Bonar Law in May 1923, to call an election to introduce protectionist measures to safeguard British industries. The old Liberal rallying call of ‘Free Trade’ formed a convenient rationale for the party reunion that most within it regarded as a necessity. In that reunion the brand of National or Coalition Liberalism would be abandoned in favour of the older brand of Liberal Party controlled by Asquith, and in places like south-west Britain the party would experience something of a revival, as Gary Tregidga has charted.¹³ Likewise, in the 1923 General Election the final fires of discord between Baldwin and the former coalitionist Conservatives would be extinguished by the cry of tariff reform and the reunion of the Liberals.¹⁴