Thursday 6th December 1923. General Election & the first Labour Government
December General Elections are rare (and unfortunately there isn’t time now for one in 2023) but aside from 2019 the last was in 1923
Whether Tory PM Baldwin really needed to call an Election is a moot point, there were of course various crisis including a financial one and Baldwin thought he could win an increased majority.
In reality the Election saw the brief tenure of the first ever Labour Government headed by Ramsay MacDonald. He was not yet the figure who came to be hated on the left from 1931 onwards when he led a National Government, Rather he was an MP who had up to a point opposed the First World War and lost his Parliamentary seat in 1918 because of it, returning as an MP in 1922 for the Welsh constituency of Aberavon.
In the 1923 Election Labour had built on its trade union support, in some cases recently detached from the Liberals. While the Liberals got 158 seats they were a party in decline, with Labour as the coming force.
The result was:
Tory 258 seats 41.59%
Labour 191 seats 31.06%
Liberal 158 seats 25.69%
When it’s considered that in the 1918 Election Labour had got 42 seats and in 1922 142 seats the trajectory is clear. Labour formed a brief minority Government with Liberal support
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