General election in Britain

On Saturday 14 December 1918, a little over a month after the Armistice of Compiègne, elections to the House of Commons were held throughout the United Kingdom. It was the first general election since December 1910. The Parliament elected then for five years had extended its term during the war by special acts. Prime Minister David Lloyd George had persuaded the King to call an election even before the armistice, and on 25 November Parliament was dissolved. Everyone voted on the same day, but the votes were not counted until 28 December, so that the ballots of soldiers serving abroad could arrive. The result changed the British political scene for decades to come.

A new franchise

The election was held under the Representation of the People Act, which had received royal assent on 6 February 1918. It abolished almost all property qualifications for men: anyone aged 21 or over could vote, and a soldier who had served in this war could do so from the age of 19. Above all, however, it gave the vote to women for the first time, though only to those aged 30 or over who met modest property conditions, for example as owners or tenants of premises or as the wives of such persons. The age limit was set so high chiefly so that women would not form a majority of the electorate. The number of those entitled to vote rose from roughly 7.7 million before the war to 21.4 million, including about 8.4 million women. A separate act, passed in November just before the dissolution of Parliament, also allowed women to stand as candidates. Seventeen did so, including the famous suffragette Christabel Pankhurst, who lost at Smethwick by a small number of votes.

The “coupon” election

Lloyd George, a Liberal, had governed since December 1916 at the head of a coalition dominated by Andrew Bonar Law’s Conservatives. He decided to go to the country as the man who had won the war, together with them. Candidates backed by the government received a letter of endorsement signed by both leaders. The former Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, whom Lloyd George had ousted from power two years earlier and who still led part of the Liberals, contemptuously called this letter a “coupon”, like the wartime ration cards. The name stuck to the whole election. About 360 Conservatives and about 160 Liberals received coupons, and as a rule, where a candidate of one coalition partner stood, the other put up no one. The Labour Party decided in mid-November to leave the government and fought on its own.

Lloyd George promised to build a country “fit for heroes to live in”. As the campaign warmed up, however, other slogans sounded ever louder: to put Emperor Wilhelm II on trial and to make Germany pay for the whole war. The minister Eric Geddes said that Germany should be squeezed like a lemon “until the pips squeak”. These promises later tied the hands of the British delegation at the peace conference. Voters also hotly debated demobilisation, with whose slow pace soldiers and their families were increasingly dissatisfied. Turnout, however, was only about 57 per cent, and many soldiers did not vote at all.

A landslide for the coalition

The coalition won an overwhelming majority in the 707-seat House of Commons. Coupon candidates won about 470 constituencies. The biggest winners were the Conservatives, who together with candidates standing without a coupon had 382 seats and a majority of their own. Lloyd George’s Liberals won about 130 seats. The Prime Minister stayed in office but from then on depended on a Conservative majority. Asquith’s Liberals suffered a disaster: only about 30 of them returned to the House of Commons, and Asquith himself lost East Fife, which he had represented since 1886. Labour won more than 20 per cent of the vote, more than either Liberal faction, but only 57 seats, and its leading politicians, Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson, lost their seats. Even so, for the first time it was the largest opposition party in the House of Commons, though the title of Leader of the Opposition was still disputed between its leader William Adamson and the chairman of the Asquithian MPs, Donald Maclean. The collapse of the Liberals, the party that had governed Britain when the war broke out, proved permanent.

Ireland votes for independence

The most dramatic result came from Ireland. The Irish Parliamentary Party, which for decades had fought at Westminster for home rule, was almost wiped off the map. Its leader John Dillon lost in East Mayo to Éamon de Valera. Sinn Féin won 73 of the 105 Irish seats. In this way Ireland made the government pay for the suppression of the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders, for the attempt to extend conscription to Ireland in the spring of 1918 and for the arrests of Sinn Féin’s leaders in May. Many of the new MPs, including de Valera, were in prison. Edward Carson’s Unionists, on the other hand, strengthened their hold on Ulster.

In the St Patrick’s division of Dublin the winner was Constance Markievicz, a participant in the 1916 Rising, held in Holloway prison in London. She was the first woman elected to the House of Commons, but in line with Sinn Féin’s programme she did not take her seat. The party had announced that its MPs would not go to Westminster but would form their own assembly in Dublin and appeal to the peace conference in the name of the right of nations to self-determination. On 21 January 1919 they met in Dublin as Dáil Éireann and proclaimed Ireland’s independence. On the same day the first shots of the War of Independence were fired.