The Growth of Support for the Labour Party in Britain

Abstract

It would appear to be a widely made assumption amongst students of politics that two-party political systems tend to be self-perpetuating. Indeed, in certain of the rather more partisan works of scholarship on the subject, the political systems of Britain and the United States are seen as the two most propitious sets of institutional arrangements for 'stable democracy'. In particular, it is suggested that in two-party systems with 'first past the post' electoral arrangements there are virtually insurmountable barriers that must be overcome by new or small parties to attain parity of size with the established parties. The Victorian political system in Britain, which was dominated by the Liberal and Conservative parties, was for a long period an example of a stable two-party system. In the general election of I900, the last general election of the Victorian era, the two main parties polled between them over 95 per cent of the total vote cast, and in the last general election before the First World War, in December I9IO, they polled over go per cent of the total vote cast.l The concern of this paper is to examine some of the reasons why such an apparently stable two-party system was radically transformed in a very short period. In the decade that followed the First World War there svas a very rapid growth of support for the Labour Party. Before the outbreak of war Labour had never polled more than 7v6 per cent of the vote at a general election or received more than so6,ooo votes. Yet in the general election of I9I8 Labour candidates obtained 22 per cent of the poll and over two and a quarter million votes. In the two subsequent general elections of I922 and I923 they received over four million votes and in the I924 general election, which followed the resignation of the lSrst minority Labour government, the party polled five and a half million votes out of the sixteen and a half million cast. The traditional explanation for this sudden and prodigious growth of support for the Labour Party has been that the Liberal Party was