Author Archives: York Membery

What lessons does the past offer for the future?

If there is one thing history teaches us it’s that the Liberals invariably face a challenging time at the polls following a period of Labour government.

Indeed, taken together, the evidence from a string of post-Labour government 20th century elections makes for depressing reading. That said, recent electoral history does offer a glimmer of hope.

This downward trend in Liberal support began with the election of the first – minority – Labour government of 1923, when Ramsay MacDonald became prime minister with Liberal support.

The Liberals came within a whisker of Labour in the popular vote, taking 29.6 per cent to Labour’s 30.5 per cent, but, with 159 seats to Labour’s 191, were obliged to let Labour try to form a government. But less than a year later, when MacDonald’s government collapsed and Britain again went to the polls, the Liberals crashed and burned, so to speak, polling 17.6 per cent of the vote and emerging with just 40 seats.

In 1931, following the election of another minority Labour government two years earlier, in 1929, things were complicated by the emergence of a National Government, which saw the Liberal vote split three ways with disastrous consequences, as well as a collapse in the Labour vote.

But the usual pattern re-emerged in 1951, when the Conservatives took office after the 1945-51 Labour government, and the Liberal vote slumped to a historic low of 2.5 per cent, with just six Liberal MPs surviving.

Following a Liberal revival at the 1964 election, and the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour government (when the party gained 11.2 per cent of the vote), the party again lost ground in the subsequent 1966 (8.5 per cent) and 1970 (7.5 per cent) elections — even if, thanks to the vagaries of the electoral system, it emerged with three more seats (12 in all) in 1966 but just six in 1970.

Fast forward to 1979, and the Liberal Party again saw its vote fall back – to 13.8 per of the vote compared to 18.3 per cent in October 1974 – with a consequent drop in seats. Then leader David Steel is convinced the party’s victory in the Edge Hill by-election just weeks before the 1979 poll gave the party “a valuable eve of election bounce”.

However, the evidence from the last two elections — following the 1997-2001 Labour government — is less clear-cut.