House of Commons

The House of Commons is the lower, elected house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, sitting in the Palace of Westminster. Only it could introduce tax and money bills, and a government stayed in office as long as it had the House’s confidence. During the war it was where British ministers explained one wartime decision after another, where MPs argued over conscription and where governments fell.

The House in wartime

The House grew out of the medieval English Parliament. Since the Parliament Act of 1911 it had clearly prevailed over the House of Lords, which could now only delay bills passed by MPs. The war was spent by the House elected in December 1910 for five years, which extended its own term by successive acts.

On 3 August 1914 Edward Grey argued before the MPs that Britain could not remain indifferent to a war on the Continent. A few days later the House hurriedly passed the Defence of the Realm Act, the basis of wartime regulations. Conscription, however, caused the most disputes. On 24 January 1916 MPs passed it for single men by 383 votes to 36, in May they extended it to married men, and in April 1918, after the German spring offensive, they raised the age limit and agreed to extend conscription to Ireland.

Governments and secret sessions

The war also remade governments. In May 1915 Herbert Henry Asquith announced in the House a coalition of Liberals, Conservatives and Labour. In December 1916 the attacks of Edward Carson, followed by part of the Conservative backbenches, helped bring about the Prime Minister’s fall. His successor David Lloyd George relied mainly on the Conservatives, and Andrew Bonar Law became Leader of the House.

Some matters could not be discussed in front of journalists. On 25 April 1916, the day after the outbreak of the Easter Rising, both Houses met in secret session to hear confidential figures on the men available for the Army and the Navy. For the Commons it was the first such sitting in decades.

Visitors, journalists and the parliamentary reporters then left the chamber, and a wartime regulation made it an offence to publish any account of such proceedings beyond what the official Press Bureau released. Later MPs repeatedly called for further secret sessions so that the government could frankly set out the state of the war.

A new House

The war also changed the House itself. The Representation of the People Act of February 1918 gave the vote to almost all adult men and to some women aged 30 and over. The electorate grew from about 7.7 million to more than 21 million. In the election of 14 December 1918 the coalition’s candidates received letters of endorsement, nicknamed “coupons”, and they won about 470 of the 707 seats.

Asquith lost his seat, and Labour for the first time became the largest opposition party. In Ireland Sinn Féin won 73 constituencies, but its MPs, among them Constance Markievicz, the first woman elected to the House of Commons, did not take their seats at Westminster and set up their own assembly in Dublin.