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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
The definitive, insider history of the often turbulent political relationship between the Liberals and Labour. Natural allies or fierce competitors? For the past century, Britain's two major centre-left parties have co-existed in sometimes harmonious but more often fraught duopoly, from the 1903 agreement that a prominent Liberal complained was 'nursing into life a serpent which would sting their party to death' to the 1976–77 pact that gave us the phrase 'turkeys voting for Christmas' and beyond, to the failed negotiations that led to the controversial 2010–15 Lib Dem–Conservative coalition. Charting 100 years of British political history, Serpents, Goats and Turkeys explores the formal and informal arrangements that have existed between the parties, covering electoral deals, support for minority governments, formal pacts and full coalitions. What have been the overlaps of policy and ideology, and where have the parties been most divided? What explains the periods of co-operation but also the unwillingness or inability to work together for any significant time? In the wake of the 2024 'Loveless Landslide', former coalition Cabinet minister David Laws also draws on unpublished records and private diaries from the past thirty years of Lib–Lab wrangling to consider the likely options in the event of a future hung parliament. Should the parties work together? Would they be able to? And what are the prospects for voting reform? The answers to such questions will have major implications for British democracy and the future of our politics.
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SERPENTS, GOATS AND TURKEYS
A CENTURY OF LIBERAL–LABOUR RELATIONS
DAVID LAWS
For Jane and Paddy Ashdown
CONTENTS
Introduction
This is the story of the relationship between the Liberal Party/Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party, from 1903 to 2019. It is a story of both parties but is written from a Liberal perspective. It is not a history of the Liberal or Labour Party, and the narrative focuses on party development only to the extent that it sheds light on the mutual relationship.
The book seeks to answer several questions. Are these two parties natural allies, separate components of some ‘progressive alliance’ that has been wrenched apart by historical accident and awaits reassembling? Or are they natural competitors, as they have been for much of the past hundred years? What have been the overlaps of policy and ideology, and where have the parties been most divided? What explains the periods of co-operation but also the unwillingness or inability to work together for any significant time? And why is it that if there is common ground between the two parties, the Liberals have spent more time since 1915 working in government with the Conservatives than with Labour?
Since 1903, the Liberals have been ‘in government’ with other parties for twenty years – five in coalition with the Conservatives x(2010–15), one in a pact with Labour (1977–78), eight in National (wartime) Governments with both other parties (1915–18, 1940–45) and for six years in National Governments with the Conservatives, albeit with some Liberals remaining on the opposition benches (1918–22, 1931–33). Measured on this crude basis, the Liberals have been in government with the Conservatives for more years (nineteen years) than with Labour (nine years). No wonder some in Labour feel that the idea of a ‘progressive alliance’ is an illusion or merely an aspiration.
However, in addition to these years in government, there have been other periods in which Liberals enabled Labour minority governments to take and stay in power, while remaining largely independent of them (1923–24, 1929–31). If we include these years, we end up with the count being nineteen years of Lib–Con cooperation and twelve years of Lib–Lab.
Finally, if we utilise an even looser measure of ‘friendliness/ co-operation’, then we might also consider the years from 1906 to 1915, during which Labour was seated at times on the government benches and was generally supporting a Liberal government. We might even include (at a stretch) the period from 1997 to 1999, when Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair were in close co-operation and established a Joint Labour–Liberal Democrat Cabinet Committee on Constitutional Reform. Adding these years (of very materially different relations) would give us a nineteen- vs 23-year split in favour of Lib–Labbery, over the 1903–2019 period.
This is a work of political history and not current affairs. The historical narrative ends in 2019. I have not considered the period since Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Edward Davey were elected, respectively, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders. However, I have sought to reflect on the lessons of the past 120 years and how these might help xiinform and shape the future. I have also included a brief postscript to allow some early reflections on the possible implications of the landslide election of July 2024.
All the political parties mentioned in this volume have changed their names at different times over the period since 1903. The Liberals became the Liberal Democrats in 1988. From 1918 onwards, party splits also resulted in separate groups of Coalition Liberals, National Liberals and, finally, Liberal Nationals. The Labour Representation Committee became the Labour Party in 1906. Conservative candidates have stood under a wider range of party names, and I have tended to use ‘Unionist’ and ‘Conservative’ interchangeably, but I have generally favoured ‘Unionist’ before 1922 and ‘Conservative’ after this.
Electoral reform is, unsurprisingly, referred to throughout the book, and I have generally used initials to describe each voting system, rather than repeating their full names, which would become tedious for the reader. FPTP refers to ‘First Past the Post’, the current (2024) system used for Westminster elections, where the candidate with the largest number of votes is elected. AV refers to the Alternative Vote, where voters are asked to rank candidates in order of preference, with the preferences of the lowest-placed candidates reallocated until one candidate has a majority and wins. SV is the Supplementary Vote, another form of preferential voting, where if no candidate secures a majority, the top two candidates continue to a run-off in which the second preferences of the eliminated candidates are brought into play. STV is the Single Transferable Vote, which is a multi-winner system designed to deliver a ‘proportionate’ outcome by asking voters to rank candidates and transferring votes where candidates are eliminated or elected with ‘surplus’ votes. Finally, AMS is the Additional Member System, in xiiwhich voters typically cast two votes, one to elect a local MP under First Past the Post and the other to elect a party representative from a local or regional list, to give a measure of proportionality. AV Plus is a system that mixes AV for electing constituency MPs with an AMS ‘top-up’.
An interesting and important issue is how the relationship between both parties has been shaped and influenced by the significant economic, social and employment developments over this period of history. But attempting to do justice to this issue would have significantly added to the scope and complexity of this project, and I must leave that important question for other authors to consider.
In writing this volume, I have been able to draw on some unpublished material from my own time in politics, including in the period from 1994 to 2015. I am also hugely grateful to Jane Ashdown for allowing me access to the full and unpublished diaries of her husband, the late Paddy Ashdown. This has enabled me to shed more light on the period of Lib–Lab co-operation from 1994 to 1999 – unquestionably the most important period for Lib–Lab relations since Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Gladstone agreed their electoral pact of 1903. I must also express my gratitude to Ian Patrick MBE, who for many years was Paddy’s much trusted private secretary and who has enabled easy access for me to the key diary entries. The Ashdown diaries were published in abridged form in 2000–01, but there were some entries that Paddy did not wish to be made public during the lifetime of Roy Jenkins and while Tony Blair was still Prime Minister. These can now be properly considered.
I am grateful to others who have found time to read drafts of the book or talk through issues covered in this volume, including xiiiSir Nick Clegg, Lord Lipsey, Lord Oates, Lord Rennard, Lord (Jim) Wallace and Lord (William) Wallace.
My special thanks are due to Duncan Brack, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of Liberal and Liberal Democrat history was immensely helpful and saved me from quite a few foolish errors of both fact and interpretation.
Responsibility, of course, for errors, omissions and the conclusions lies entirely with me.
I am grateful to James Stephens of Biteback for commissioning the book and to my excellent editors at Biteback, Ryan Norman and Olivia Beattie, for their hard work and infinite patience. Thanks are also due to my fantastic publicist, Suzanne Sangster.
This book is dedicated to Jane and Paddy Ashdown, for the support, encouragement and wise advice that they gave me for twenty-five years, and in memory of the Liberal who may never have occupied government office but who was his party’s most loyal, energetic and effective leader since Gladstone. Paddy would have loved to have survived to see the outcome of the 2024 general election, which saw seventy-two Liberal Democrat MPs elected to Parliament, and restored his own (former) Yeovil constituency to the Liberal Democrat family of seats.
David LawsLondonJuly2024xiv
Chapter 1
‘Nursing into Life a Serpent’ 1903–14
The nurses at the Leicester Isolation Hospital on 6 September 1903 were almost certainly unaware that one of their patients was a 36-year-old man who had twice failed to be elected to Parliament and held the obscure-sounding title of Secretary of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC). His admission papers recorded him as Mr Ramsay MacDonald.
MacDonald had travelled to Leicester for the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress, but he was taken ill and admitted to the hospital. Today, he had a visitor (also unrecognised): a balding man with an impressive handlebar moustache who had travelled up from London. He was Jesse Herbert, political secretary to the Liberal Chief Whip in Parliament, Herbert Gladstone. Gladstone was the youngest son of the late Prime Minister, the most famous ever Liberal.
The two men were meeting in this unlikely setting to finalise a secret electoral pact that would soon assist in sweeping the Unionist Party from office. In time, it would contribute to destroying the Liberal Party itself. The ‘Hospital Pact’ changed the face of British politics for ever. 2
At the preceding, October 1900, general election, the Labour Representation Committee had secured the election of just two MPs. By 1906, the pact would enable them to win twenty-nine seats. Within twenty years, Labour had 191 MPs and over 30 per cent of the vote, pushing the Liberals into third position.
The ‘Hospital Pact’ now looks like one of the most ill-judged and disastrous political deals in British history. In 1970, the then Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, wrote:
The Herbert Gladstone/Ramsay MacDonald arrangement … was an act of uncalled-for electoral generosity unforgivable in a Chief Whip … At the very moment the Liberals needed no support from outside to win a smashing victory, they gratuitously admitted to Westminster … a group of MPs whose only opportunity of expansion lay in replacing the Liberal Party.1
Was Thorpe right? And, if so, how did the mighty Liberal Party make such a blunder?
In 1903, the Liberal Party was one of the two great UK political parties. As recently as 1880, it had achieved 56 per cent of the vote. But the Liberals were now neither dominant nor confident of their future. The Unionists had beaten the Liberals in MPs elected in the last four general elections. The Liberal split over Home Rule in 1886 had boosted their Conservative and Unionist opponents, who secured 201 more seats than them in that year’s election, forty-two more in 1892, a whopping 234 extra in 1895 and 219 more in 1900. Two short-lived Liberal administrations under Gladstone (1892–94) and Rosebery (1894–95) had ended in failure. After being in power so long, the Unionist grip should have been weak by 1903, but it seemed as strong as ever. 3
The Liberal Party organisation was in a fragile state. Its finances were poor, with many of the biggest donors having left over Home Rule. The ‘grand old man’ of British politics, William Gladstone, had stayed too long as leader, only stepping down in 1894 after a sixty-year career. He had failed to develop a policy agenda that responded to the new economic and social challenges and the expectations of the newly enfranchised elements of the working class. When Keir Hardie, first chairman of the Independent Labour Party but one-time aspirant Liberal MP, had led a deputation to see Gladstone to argue for the eight-hour working day, Gladstone refused to back the change on the basis that it was an infringement of liberty. It was a sign of how out of touch he was with the world of the working class.2
Now Gladstone was gone, but the Liberals had failed to find an imaginative, inspiring leader to replace him. And the party’s broad-based coalition – so often a strength in a political party – looked increasingly challenging to weld together into a coherent whole. According to George Dangerfield: ‘It was an irrational mixture of Whig aristocrats, industrialists, dissenters, reformers, trade unionists, quacks and Mr. Lloyd George.’3 This is a little unfair. What is unquestionable is that the Liberal Party faced a huge challenge to transition successfully from what it had been in the nineteenth century to what it needed to be in the twentieth.
The Conservative and Unionist Party faced challenges too. But its image was increasingly sharply defined. It was the party of the social elite and the establishment. It was the party of finance and much of big business. It was the party of the Union, of nationalism, of the Empire and of jingoism. It was the party generally of timidity on social reform and of safeguarding the economic interests of the rich. Soon, for a while at least, it was to become the party of tariffs and protection.
The Liberal Party also had an identity, but too much of it was 4framed by the politics of the nineteenth century, and some was not terribly popular – including Home Rule for Ireland and control of the drink trade. And while the ‘advanced’ and ‘radical’ elements of the party were promoting policies such as social insurance and improved working conditions, many traditional Liberals saw these as ‘socialistic’ measures involving excessive state interference in ‘private’ matters. The future of the Liberal Party lay in providing a progressive alternative to the Unionist Party. But not all its members shared this vision.
A measure of the Liberal Party’s parlous state was that in the 1900 general election, it allowed an astonishing 163 of the 402 Unionist MPs to be elected unopposed. Liberal candidates contested just 402 of 670 seats. In England, only 302 candidates stood for the 456 seats. By contrast, the Unionists deployed 569 candidates – fighting almost all the seats outside Ireland. And this was no aberration. From 1852 to 1874, the Liberals had consistently fielded more candidates than the Unionists. But in the four elections from 1886 to 1900, the Liberals fell well behind – standing just 1,830 candidates, compared with 2,326 Unionists.
The Liberal Party was also struggling to deal effectively with the issue of working-class representation. In the 1870s, a small number of working-class and trade union candidates were chosen to stand as ‘Lib–Lab’ MPs – the first two of these were elected in the 1874 general election. Local Liberal associations would support candidates who were receiving financial backing from the trade unions and who were willing to take the Liberal ‘whip’ in Parliament. This had the benefit of securing funding at a time when election costs often fell on the candidates themselves, who were not always able to pay. The advent of the Lib–Lab MPs was an ideal way for the Liberal Party to broaden its appeal while cementing its position. 5
But in many constituencies, the traditional Liberal membership was unenthusiastic about backing trade unionists – fearing that their political priorities and ideology wouldn’t fit with traditional Liberal doctrines. Only in the coal-mining areas, where the miners were so large in number that they could impose their own candidates, did working-class men win selection. In other seats, working-class Liberals found themselves being snubbed, including by the senior industrialists who exercised influence in many constituencies.
Some important Labour leaders of the future suffered these rebuffs – including Keir Hardie in 1888 and Ramsay MacDonald in 1894. At a time when the Liberals needed to widen their appeal, they were cutting themselves off from the newly enfranchised classes and the trade unions. It was a disastrous error.
An increasingly assertive trade union and socialist movement now began to question whether they were best served by relying upon the Liberal Party. Many also doubted whether the Lib–Lab MPs were sufficiently energetic in advocating policies that would benefit the working class.4 In 1888, Keir Hardie stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in a by-election at Mid Lanarkshire, as an Independent Labour candidate. He had been rejected by local Liberals as too left-wing. He was eventually elected to Parliament in West Ham South, also as an Independent Labour candidate, in the 1892 general election, without Liberal competition. Two other Independent Labour MPs were also elected this year – one in Battersea and another in Middlesborough. Friedrich Engels, the close friend and ally of Karl Marx, noted that ‘the spell which … the “great Liberal Party” cast over English workers for almost forty years is broken’.5
The separate path for Labour had now been established, and the Independent Labour Party was formed in 1893, with Hardie as its first chairman. Its policy agenda was notably more radical than that 6of the Lib–Labs, including to ‘secure the collective and communal ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’.
But breaking through against the existing duopoly would not be easy. Hardie lost his seat in 1895, fighting not just a Conservative candidate but an antagonistic Liberal press, in a general election which saw twenty-eight Independent Labour Party candidates stand without any successes. Moderate ILP members were angry with Hardie, feeling he had antagonised the Liberal supporters, whose backing they needed. Ramsay MacDonald, who also stood for the ILP in this election, wrote privately to Herbert Samuel, blaming Hardie for his own defeat.
Just as MacDonald could see the risks in competing with the Liberals, many Liberals now started to wake up to the threat presented by the new ILP. In a speech in Manchester in May 1894, Lord Rosebery noted: ‘An independent Labour organisation will not catch a single Tory vote. Such votes as it does carry away will be Liberal votes … it may hamstring and even cut the throat of the Liberal Party.’ As in much else, Rosebery was wrong. ILP candidates would not take only Liberal votes. But it was true that in the long term Liberals had more to lose.
The foundation of the Independent Labour Party was a clear signal that liberalism was failing to either smother or effectively embrace new working-class political aspirations. The 1884 Reform Act had extended the entitlement to vote to around three quarters of the adult male population. Political parties needed to appeal to the new electors. And by 1895, there were already hundreds of Labour councillors, and several councils were Labour-run.
In 1900, the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was formed to help sponsor parliamentary candidates. Union leaders and socialists joined together with the aim of establishing a ‘distinct 7Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy’. But in a nod to the need to work with Liberals, the new group agreed to ‘embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour’.
These were some of the political challenges which confronted Herbert Gladstone, when his party leader, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, asked him to take over as Liberal Chief Whip in April 1899. Today, a Chief Whip’s role is tightly focused on parliamentary party discipline. But in 1899, the responsibilities were far more onerous – including electoral strategy, raising political donations and finding sufficient parliamentary candidates. In short, it was a dreadful job.
Gladstone represented a northern constituency – Leeds West – so he was already acutely aware of the risks and opportunities around working-class representation. He held the seat against the Unionists but, in the last three contested elections, by wafer-thin majorities. As early as 1892, he had advocated more working-class MPs – up-setting the then Chief Whip, Arnold Morley. Gladstone’s personal manifesto of 1892 was also relatively radical, advocating payment of MPs, better housing and a cut in working hours on the railways.
Now, as Chief Whip, Gladstone realised that he had inherited a very poisoned chalice. It was difficult to find parliamentary candidates. And party coffers were empty. In 1900, he was so desperate for campaign funds that he felt obliged to write to thirty personal friends, asking them for £2,500 each. Only seven bothered to reply, and some of these – rather ahead of their time – wrote back to say that donating money to the Liberal Party was a hopeless cause.6
In 1899, Gladstone had been sufficiently desperate for cash that he had met with both the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party. But they had nothing to offer financially 8and were risky politically, as socialist-inclined organisations. The meeting ended without agreement. What was more tempting was candidates who possessed the support of the trade unions. The unions had money, and their members and leaders were pragmatic and willing to work with the Liberals, as the Lib–Lab MPs were already doing. By 1898, there were eleven of these, all taking the Liberal whip.
It was a Liberal trade unionist with a mining background, Sam Woods, who took the first step that led to the pact of 1903. Woods had been twice elected as a Lib–Lab MP but was sympathetic to the LRC. On 14 March 1900, he told Ramsay MacDonald that he ought to approach Gladstone, who he felt would be open to a deal to allow LRC candidates a free run in certain seats. Woods was right. Gladstone was content for fifteen LRC candidates to stand in the October 1900 election, most without Liberal competition.
For Gladstone, the LRC arrangement seemed a rare glimmer of good news. He was struggling not just with candidates and money but with an undynamic party leader. During the run-up to the 1900 general election, Campbell-Bannerman insisted on taking his regular summer rest break in the mud baths of Marienbad. Just three weeks before voting commenced on 26 September, Gladstone was grumpily writing to the Liberal leader in the Lords stating that he hoped Campbell-Bannerman might return home soon and do something to show his party that ‘he is still alive’.
In any case, only two of the fifteen LRC candidates were elected in October 1900 – Keir Hardie in Merthyr Tydfil and Richard Bell in Derby. Both stood in two-member constituencies. Bell, secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, faced only one Liberal opponent, rather than the usual two. Hardie won his seat because of a split between two Liberal candidates. One was a strong 9opponent of the Boer War, the other a jingoistic supporter. The jingoist lost. Bell was supportive of the Liberal positions on most issues, but Hardie was a committed socialist and still a member of the Independent Labour Party. So, the first LRC MPs embedded the tension that would exist in the Labour Party for its next 120 years – was it a vehicle for radical socialism, or a moderate ally of the ‘new liberalism’? For now, the LRC was an uneasy alliance of the unions, preoccupied by their own interests and seeing Liberals as allies in supporting these, and the Independent Labour Party, which was much more interested in building a socialist movement.
Ramsay MacDonald was again one of the thirteen unsuccessful LRC candidates in 1900. He stood in a two-member constituency in Leicester and was unable to prevail, given the presence of two Liberal candidates. One Liberal finished first, but the second lost out to a Unionist by just over 500 votes. Given that MacDonald had polled 4,164 votes, his intervention had cost the Liberals a seat. Both parties took note. The LRC would find it difficult to win if they stood against Liberals. But a Labour intervention could cost Liberals dearly.
The Liberals had again lost badly in 1900. Some supported the war in South Africa, while others were bitterly opposed. They were so weak that in September 1900, Herbert Gladstone had publicly admitted that ‘the opposition are not in a position to furnish a strong government’. They finished with 183 MPs to the Unionists’ 402. And where no Liberal candidates stood, the local party organisations were decaying – many now in a moribund state.
While the Liberals were weakening, the LRC was becoming increasingly influential. The ‘Taff Vale judgment’ of 1901 removed trade unions’ legal protection from strike-related damages and strengthened the case for getting more LRC MPs into Parliament. 10The affiliated membership of the LRC rose by 238,000 in the first six months of 1902 and by September 1902 exceeded 700,000. In December 1901, the miners had introduced a levy to set up a parliamentary fund to support more LRC candidates. And in 1902, the LRC followed up the initiative with work on a common fund into which union political levies could be paid. Suddenly, the LRC was going to have money – and a lot of it.
But after the electoral disappointment of 1900, MacDonald determined that he needed Liberal co-operation to break through. In March 1901, he secured a meeting with Jesse Herbert – Gladstone’s political secretary. Herbert was sympathetic to Lib–Lab cooperation. His salary was being part-funded by a £300 annual donation from George Cadbury, the well-known Liberal businessman and philanthropist. Cadbury had also contributed £500 to ILP funds and in 1901 took over the Daily News (later the News Chronicle), which from then on became an advocate of stronger LRC–Liberal relations.7
In September 1901, the Liberals ran a candidate in the North-East Lanarkshire by-election against a local miner, Bob Smillie, who was surprisingly being backed by the Scottish Liberal Whip. Smillie stood as ‘Scottish Workers’ party. A Unionist won the election, seizing the seat from the Liberals, by around 1,000 votes. With 2,900 votes going to the third-placed Smillie, it seemed clear that division on the progressive wing of politics was costing seats.
In October, Gladstone told his constituents that he could ‘come to terms with the leaders of the Labour party in the course of half a morning’. This was music to MacDonald’s ears, and in the same month, MacDonald wrote a letter to TheEcho newspaper, rejecting a proposal to establish a ‘New Party’ of trade unionists, the ILP and pro-Boer radicals, stating instead that radicals and Labour 11candidates should co-operate by ‘securing for each other the opportunities of contesting seats unhampered by third candidates.’8
In August 1902, the LRC secured its third MP when it won an unopposed by-election in Clitheroe, after the Liberals were convinced by the strength of Labour, and by their own national leadership, not to field a candidate. Local Liberals were invited to London to meet Campbell-Bannerman and Gladstone and leant on to back the LRC candidate.
It was in late 1902 and early 1903 that Lib–Lab plotting came to a head. MacDonald told Jesse Herbert that he wanted a deal in which the LRC would be allowed an uncontested run at a limited list of seats, with the assumption being that they would allow the Liberals primacy in all other constituencies. On 25 February 1903, MacDonald and Herbert met. MacDonald negotiated hard. He was offering little to the Liberals but asking for a free run in seats that the Liberals would otherwise almost certainly lose. He pointed out the financial resources now at his disposal, through the parliamentary fund, and highlighted the overlap in Liberal/LRC policy positions. He claimed the LRC now had 1 million members and a £100,000 campaign fund. He argued that LRC candidates could win over working-class Tories. He allowed the risk of LRC candidates standing against Liberals to hang over the meeting. It was a subtle mix of tempting promises and barely veiled threats.
Herbert, clearly keen, asked MacDonald to send him a list of the constituencies he had in mind. He does not appear to have thought of putting to MacDonald a list of Liberal demands, including that LRC members would follow the Liberal whip or be engaged in some other Lib–Lab embrace.
Instead, on 6 March, he sent Gladstone a note of his meeting, backing MacDonald’s pitch while also briefly highlighting the risks: 12
The official recognition of a separate group unpledged to support of the Liberal party, a group which will harass every government and whose representatives in Parliament will probably decline the Liberal whip, is not lightly to be given. It would be the recognition of a vital change in the organisation of parties.9
It would indeed.
But Herbert then rapidly and excitedly warmed to his main theme, suggesting that the LRC was only asking for a ‘friendly concession by the party of the liberty to run their candidates unhampered by the presence of official candidates’. This should have been a red flag to any self-respecting Chief Whip. However, in the miserable circumstances of 1903, Herbert was making a strong pitch to Liberal self-interest: ‘Ought the Liberal party to prefer defeat rather than assist in any way to foster the growing power of the Labour Party?’ He argued that the ‘severe individualists’ within the Liberal Party who might be upset were ‘very few’ and unlikely to cost the party much in votes and financial support. Instead: ‘The gain to the party through a working arrangement would be great and can be measured best by a comparison of the results of “no arrangement” with those of “an arrangement”.’
Herbert then rehearsed MacDonald’s argument: 1 million votes under supposed LRC influence; the alleged £100,000 fighting fund – which he noted as ‘the most significant new fact in the situation’; their candidates were generally former Liberals. These were all temptations. But there were threats too. Crucially, should LRC supporters
be advised to vote against Liberal candidates … the Liberal Party would suffer defeat not only in those constituencies where LRC 13candidates fought, but also in almost every borough, and in many of the Divisions of Lancashire and Yorkshire. This would be the inevitable result of unfriendly action towards LRC candidates. They would be defeated, but so also should we be defeated.
Finally, letting the LRC fund the campaigns in thirty-five seats might well save the Liberal Party £15,000, and Gladstone a lot of letters to reticent supporters.
Gladstone clearly found this analysis convincing. In a modest number of constituencies, he and his party would be spared the task of finding candidates and raising funds. And if he could limit the number of LRC candidates, he might avoid Liberals losing their seats to Unionists. It might even save his own seat. Finally, if the LRC and Liberals were allies, Liberal candidates might benefit from some of those working-class LRC votes in constituencies where it was a straight Liberal–Unionist fight. For a Chief Whip of a battered party that had finished behind the Unionists in four general elections in a row, the deal was tempting. Whether it made any long-term sense is another matter.
A crucial meeting between MacDonald and Gladstone soon followed, and on 13 March 1903 Gladstone sent a secret minute to Campbell-Bannerman.10 This started by noting there was ‘no compact, alliance, agreement or bargain’. There were also ‘no material points of difference’ in the policies of the two parties. Instead, ‘we are ready to ascertain from qualified and responsible Labour leaders how far Labour candidates can be given an open field against a common enemy’. In an extraordinary statement of generosity, naivety or sophisticated political tactics, the memorandum stated in its third point that ‘we are ready to do this as an act of friendship and without any stipulation of any kind’. This was ‘because we 14realise that an accession of strength to Labour representation in the House of Commons is not only required by the country in the interests of Labour but that it would increase the progressive forces generally and the Liberal party as the best available instrument of progress’. This was very dangerous ground. It seemed to suggest that only Labour could represent a portion of the working class. It was, perhaps, to be the first and last occasion of unreciprocated generosity in the long history of Liberal–Labour relations.
The memorandum went on to explain what the ‘non-agreement’ might mean in practice. Essentially, Gladstone was offering to use the influence of the national Liberal Party to persuade certain local Liberal associations to ‘abstain from nominating a Liberal candidate’ and to unite in supporting the Labour candidate provided he was ‘recognised and competent’ and supported ‘the general objects of the Liberal party’.
The memorandum noted that the LRC ‘propose to run about thirty candidates’. This excluded Scotland, MPs connected to the Miners’ Federation (who were proposing to run fifteen to eighteen candidates of their own) and candidates backed by ‘socialist bodies’.
And then it was down to the brass tacks. There followed a list of twenty-three parliamentary seats ‘where there is no difficulty’. Only one (‘Merthyr’) was in Wales, and most of the others were in the north and Midlands. Five seats were described as ‘adjustable’, and another five were ‘claimed by LRC and difficult’, alongside a helpful list of six that might be ‘available alternatives’. Four seats were named that were ‘Labour seats not recognised by LRC’. The memorandum considered it ‘quite possible’ that Labour be given an unchallenged run in thirty seats, with the miners having the same in another twelve.
In total, the list included fifty-five parliamentary seats where 15Gladstone was considering some sort of arrangement to hand the seats to non-Liberal Party candidates. That amounted to 8.2 per cent of the MPs in the House of Commons. The document finished by noting that where Liberal candidates did stand, despite a pact, they would have to be supported by the party, ‘but the Liberal Council will use every legitimate effort’ to give Labour its unopposed run.
It all looked like a fantastic deal for the LRC and ‘Labour’, but it was not yet formally agreed. Over the next three months, there were at least seven further meetings between Herbert and MacDonald.11 A revised list of seats was drawn up on 7 August.
While the talks were ongoing, there were two key parliamentary by-elections. In March 1903, Labour won Woolwich, with a solid majority of 3,000. There was no Liberal candidate, and the Conservatives had held the seat continuously since its creation. It looked like Labour had snatched away a Unionist seat by tapping into a vote that had not previously been Liberal – another argument for the pact.
On 24 July 1903, there was a by-election in Barnard Castle, County Durham. This time there was both a Liberal candidate and a Unionist, but the LRC’s Arthur Henderson (a former Liberal election agent) beat the Liberal into third place. Henderson won by only forty-seven votes, with the electorate split three ways – LRC 35.4 per cent, Conservative 35 per cent and Liberal 29.6 per cent. The seat had previously been Liberal for several decades, and this was the first LRC seat ever won against both other parties.
Gladstone was content to see the LRC gain the seat. He ensured some low-key Liberal support for Henderson and would have preferred no Liberal candidate. This caused the angry chairman of the Northern Liberal Association, Samuel Storey, to complain to the DailyNews on 7 July that Liberal leaders had ‘cheerfully cast 16Barnard Castle to the wolves in the hope, perhaps of keeping them from their own doors’. He went on to warn that they were ‘nursing into life a serpent which would sting their party to death … The effect of surrendering to this new party will be the destruction of organised liberalism here in the North.’12 Other Liberals, including Morley, were also doubtful of the tactics, and nineteen of the twenty-three presidents of Liberal associations in north-east England opposed any further deals.13
The LRC was now up to five seats. It was also becoming more independent minded. In February 1903, its conference had voted to insist that LRC candidates and MPs should not identify themselves with other parties and had even decided not to invite the Lib–Labs to join their Commons grouping. But despite this, the long period of secret Lib–Lab talks bore fruit, and the Leicester Isolation Hospital meeting of 6 September sealed the deal that had been sketched out six months earlier.
MacDonald had told Keir Hardie what he was up to but had neither briefed nor consulted his LRC committee. It suited both the Liberals and LRC to keep the deal secret and relatively informal. MacDonald later wrote his own, undated, rather coy summary of the negotiations for his private record.14 He claimed that ‘there was no bargain struck’, explaining:
I told them what seats we were determined to fight … The impression they gave me was that they [agreed] that we should have a fair chance of representation. Their attitude no doubt did influence me in opposing wild-cat candidatures and in one or two constituencies I told them there would be no Labour candidates because there was no Labour organisation. I repeat, however, that information was not given in any way as a quid pro quo. 17
Once the deal was done, MacDonald acted quickly to get candidates in place. By the end of January 1904, the LRC had selected thirty-eight. Twenty-seven were in single-member seats, and seventeen of these would be unopposed by Liberals. Eleven would be in two-member seats, and only two of these would have Liberal opponents.
MacDonald was determined that he would finally make it into Parliament, and after months of scheming, the Leicester Liberals decided to run only one candidate in their two-member constituency, giving MacDonald a clear run. Leicester had appeared in the Gladstone memorandum of 13 March 1903 in the list of five ‘adjustable’ seats. It had now been ‘adjusted’.
For MacDonald, all was going well. To deliver an LRC breakthrough, he had needed to deal with the Liberals and see off the tribalists in his party. But he did not want the LRC to get too close to the larger ‘progressive’ party. He set out his vision in the New Liberal Review, in September 1903: ‘If the new Labour movement were simply an attempt of Trade Unionists to use their political power for purely sectional ends … it would be a menace … Trade Unionism … must set [its] demands into a system of national wellbeing.’ He argued that a Labour movement was not simply about representing ‘Labour’ in Parliament. It was all about ‘opinions, not … social status’. The old agenda of seeking to ‘thrust working-men candidates upon Liberal Associations’ was now dead.15
MacDonald saw the Liberals as a decaying and outdated political force – an ageing biological organism in which the ‘structures of the body are hardened and thickened, the saps of life flow more and more slowly … until at length motion ceases altogether’.16 His view was that the Liberal Party was stuck in the politics of the nineteenth century. It had fulfilled its mission but now needed to give way to 18a bolder and more socially progressive party: ‘Lower forms merge into higher forms … socialism, the stage which follows liberalism, retains everything of value in liberalism by virtue of its being the hereditary heir of liberalism.’
David Lloyd George, by now a senior Liberal politician, began to see the risk to his party, noting in a speech in November 1904:
We have a great Labour Party sprung up. Unless we can prove … that there is no necessity for a separate party to press forward the legitimate claims of Labour, you will find that … the Liberal Party will be practically wiped out and that, in its place, you will get a more extreme and revolutionary party.
In the Commons, the LRC MPs were now getting closer to the Lib–Labs, and in the last few months of the 1900–06 parliament, these members sat together in the Commons for the first time.17 But the ILP socialists remained nervous that ‘Labour’ should not become too close to the Liberals. They saw the Liberals as just another ‘capitalist’ party. At some stage, the Labour grouping would need to decide. Was their future as a separate, socialist party? Or as the ‘radical’, working-class wing of the Liberals?
Gladstone, meanwhile, was doing what he could to create other Liberal allies – this time amongst the Unionists. He dined with Winston Churchill in January 1904, and Churchill reported to a friend that Gladstone was willing to help save the seats of fifteen Unionist free traders. Churchill would soon join the Liberals and decades later seek to reciprocate the tactical support offered, by standing down candidates against Liberal MPs.
By 1905, the Conservatives had been in office for most of the past twenty years. They were deeply split after Joseph Chamberlain 19launched his tariff reform campaign in 1903, which was soon adopted by the Unionist Party. This allowed the Liberals, and the LRC, to unite behind a populist campaign to resist ‘food taxes’. In November, the Unionist leader, Arthur Balfour, resigned. Shortly afterwards, Parliament was dissolved. Voting would take place from 12 January to 8 February 1906.
These were not yet the days of the detailed fifty-page election manifestos. Instead, Campbell-Bannerman published his own short, discursive and underwhelming address. After a rant about the Unionist economic record, and high taxes, it eventually alighted on the issue of protection. And – other than a mention of ‘the time-honoured principles of liberalism… peace, economy, self-government, and civil and religious liberty’, that was about it. There was certainly no programme of social reform to compete with an upcoming Labour Party.
The LRC published a standard election address for all candidates, which was also brief, amounting to less than a side. Its case was simple – ‘Labour’ needed representation in Parliament. There was a strong but vague social policy pitch and clear opposition to protection. This might be a Labour Party in the making, but it was not yet the party of nationalisation and fully fledged socialism – ‘The LRC’s political positions were virtually indistinguishable from those of advanced liberals.’18 And that is how Ramsay MacDonald wanted it – nothing to scare off Liberal voters, Liberal associations or the wider electorate.
MacDonald largely delivered his part of the 1903 pact. But it was still tough to get Labour to withdraw their candidates in all the non-target seats, and even Herbert Gladstone came close to facing an LRC challenge in his Leeds West constituency.19
Soon it was clear that the long era of Conservative/Unionist 20government was over. 1906 delivered a Liberal landslide, on a mighty swing of almost 12 per cent (measured in seats contested in both 1900 and 1906). The Unionists secured just 156 seats – their worst ever outcome and way down on the 1900 total of 402. Only three Unionist Cabinet members out of seventeen survived. With 43.4 per cent of the votes, they had just 23.4 per cent of the seats.
The Liberals boosted their vote share from 45 per cent to 49 per cent, and their seat numbers soared from 183 to 397. They had fielded 528 candidates, instead of the 402 in 1900. Only thirteen Unionists were elected unopposed, not the 163 of 1900. Gladstone’s hard work in finding candidates, raising money and improving the party’s electoral machine had all helped. And he targeted resources effectively – over half of the money raised was spent in just a fifth of the seats.
There was no doubt of the pact’s value to the LRC. It wholly vindicated MacDonald’s strategy. He had stood just fifty candidates, thirty-one with no Liberal opponents. Twenty-nine in total had been elected – all but five with Liberal co-operation. Twenty-three of the twenty-nine were trade union sponsored and six were Independent Labour Party candidates. Of the LRC members, around half could be considered socialists, and the others were trade unionists of less radical outlook. There were also now seventeen Lib–Lab trade union MPs, of whom thirteen were miners. It was a massive breakthrough.
The LRC vote share was just 4.8 per cent, but that had yielded 4.3 per cent of the parliamentary seats. MacDonald had ensured that votes for the LRC had really counted. By contrast, in most of the seats where three candidates stood, Labour finished last. The swing in the fifty-six seats Labour fought was 15 per cent on 21average – greater than the national swing away from the Unionists. But this was partly because many of these seats were in industrial areas where the swing was larger anyway. Only in Lancashire was there some evidence that Labour candidates were doing better than Liberals.
This time, MacDonald had benefited from his own work. He was elected in Leicester, with the Liberals giving full public backing to ‘their good friend, Mr. MacDonald’. The love-in had delivered both seats – relegating the Unionist to third position, well behind the Liberal on 14,745 and MacDonald on 14,685. Of these votes, 13,999 had been cast for both the Liberal and LRC candidate. In Leicester, the Lib–Lab alliance was very real. It looked like a win–win for both parties. But the Leicester Liberals, assisted by the party’s own Chief Whip, had just placed into Parliament the man who in barely fifteen years would become Labour’s first Prime Minister and who would help reduce their party to political rubble.
If MacDonald was pleased with the election outcome, so were the Liberal leaders. Jesse Herbert wrote to Gladstone on 6 February, asking: ‘Was there ever such a justification of a policy by results?’ In Lancashire, the sixteen LRC candidates had won thirteen seats from the Unionists, in a county where the Liberals were weak and where there was a strong Unionist working-class voting tradition. Meanwhile, Herbert noted that only two seats nationally had been lost by the Liberals due to LRC candidates, and only one LRC-favoured seat had been lost due to Liberal intervention. It was a pact that had served both parties well. Herbert contrasted the results in England with the situation in Scotland, where there was no Lib–LRC deal. In Scotland, there were ten three-way fights, and Herbert argued that this had cost his party six seats.
Herbert also thought that the pact would solidify LRC support for 22the new Liberal government. He described the LRC MPs as ‘strongly favourable to the Government. There are not more than seven irreconcilable … they are very friendly with me.’ Gladstone agreed with Herbert and wrote to Campbell-Bannerman on 21 January, concluding that the pact was ‘the prime cause of the abnormality of the Liberal victory’. He was also content with the politics of LRC MPs, noting: ‘There is no sign of any violent forward movement – the dangerous element does not amount to a dozen.’20
But while Herbert and Gladstone celebrated, other Liberals again questioned the wisdom of the pact. The agent at Clitheroe, where the party had again stood aside for the LRC, wrote to the chairman of the Liberal Election Committee to complain that ‘if the Liberal Party can only be made strong by giving away its strongest positions, all I can say is that its day of usefulness is gone’.
And six days after Jesse Herbert’s celebratory letter to Gladstone, on 15 February, the twenty-nine LRC MPs and one Lib–Lab met at Westminster and established themselves as the ‘Labour Party’, with their own organisation and whips, and Keir Hardie as chairman. They took up seats on the opposition benches. The other Lib–Lab MPs, meanwhile, irritated by the partial theft of their branding, renamed themselves as the ‘Trade Union Labour Group’, within the Liberal Party.
Was the Gladstone–MacDonald pact the naive gift to an emerging Labour Party that it looked to be? In the short run, the pact had helped the Liberals. As Searle has noted: ‘Almost all the seats where Liberal candidates stood down in 1906 were seats where the Liberals had been unable to win in 1900.’21 Indeed, in only two of the ‘pact’ seats did the Liberals give up seats they had won in 1900, and both had already been lost to the LRC in by-elections.
Brack concludes that: 23
In retrospect, it became clear that the Liberals would have won in 1906 without the … pact, and as twenty-four of Labour’s twenty-nine members were to be elected in the absence of a Liberal, it was easy to argue that the party had made an unforced error in helping its rival to its first real foothold in Parliament. However, this was not foreseen at the time, and the fear of splitting the progressive vote was a real one…22
But it is not quite true to say that the ‘unforced error’ wasn’t seen at the time – some Liberals were profoundly worried by the deal. In the short term, the Hospital Pact was a win–win for both the LRC and the Liberals. But in the longer term, it posed a major threat to the Liberal Party.
Early in the new parliament, Labour scored several policy successes. The Liberals accepted the TUC’s proposed Trade Union Bill and overturned the Taff Vale judgment. Labour pressed for and secured a new Workmen’s Compensation Act, as well as School Meals and Medical Inspection Acts. During this period, Labour did well in by-elections, winning several seats – including some from Liberals. But 1906–07 was the high point of Labour influence. Over the rest of the parliament, it was the Liberals who dictated the scale, pace and nature of progress towards economic and social reform. Labour MPs ended up providing ballast for Liberal-led battles on the 1909 Budget, Lords reform, National Insurance and (eventually) Home Rule.
By April 1908, a terminally ill Campbell-Bannerman had been replaced as Liberal leader by Herbert Henry Asquith. Asquith was an impressive politician who had the ability to unite the Liberal team and serve as a bridge between the Liberalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He would later describe himself as ‘a financier 24of a respectable and more or less conservative type’, and he was a good frontman for a government that would prove to be far more radical on social policy than past Liberal administrations.
Asquith appointed Lloyd George as Chancellor and sent Churchill (who joined from the Unionists in May 1904) to be President of the Board of Trade. Both were advocates of the ‘New Liberalism’ that would put social policy centre stage. Asquith and Lloyd George were the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown of their era – Asquith providing the safe, soothing and respectable leadership, while Lloyd George delivered the provocative radicalism. The Liberals had stumbled on a potentially winning team that might help fend off the Labour challenge. Beatrice Webb would soon observe that ‘Lloyd George and the Radicals have out-trumped the Labour Party’, with policies such as labour exchanges, pensions and National Insurance.
Lloyd George might have been the saviour who rescued his party from an era of irrelevance. But the Liberal Party’s fate was now in the hands of a highly ambitious man with a rather casual attitude to political parties. As Hattersley has noted: ‘Party solidarity was never a virtue which David Lloyd George admired. What loyalty he possessed was to ideas.’23
For now, the Liberal government would need to be bold and effective if it was to hold on to power. But by the winter of 1908–09, the House of Lords had blocked a large part of its policy agenda, while a slump in trade caused unemployment to double from 3 per cent to 6 per cent and then go on rising to 9 per cent by the end of 1908. Troubled economic times meant troubled political times. Liberals were suddenly losing by-elections – by mighty swings of around 10 per cent. Liberal knees were wobbling. It looked like the landslide of 1906 would be followed by a rout in 1910–11.
Lloyd George and Asquith now planned a comeback that would 25lead to the famous Budget of 1909, which so angered the Unionist-dominated House of Lords that they would overturn usual practice and veto the new taxes on the rich. An election was needed to break the deadlock, and Parliament was prorogued on 3 December.
This time there would be no new formal Lib–Lab deal. The hope of the Liberal leadership in 1909–10 was that it could contain the growth of Labour – continuing informal co-operation but stopping Labour seizing new seats. In 1909, the Lib–Labs had moved over to join Labour after the miners had decided that their interests were not being well served by the Liberals. Many mine owners were Liberals, and tensions over wages and working conditions were rising. This was an important political event as the miners had major influence in around ninety constituencies, of which the Liberals still represented around sixty.24 If the Liberals were losing the loyalty of the industrial working class, this would have serious implications. In any case, the Liberals were still willing to allow these Lib–Labs, and the Labour MPs elected in 1906, to go unchallenged.
Labour would also be permitted to stand unopposed in a further handful of seats where it had been the clear or only opponent of the Unionists in 1906. But if Labour tried to compete with the Liberals in other seats, they would be fought hard, and this might invite retaliation in some of the seats earmarked for Labour. The Liberals had figured out that with the Unionists now on the rise, any further Labour gains were likely to be at Liberal expense.
Labour had its reasons, in any case, for wanting the Liberals to prevail in 1910. Late in 1909, the House of Lords had decided, in the Osborne judgment, that it was illegal for a trade union to contribute financially to a political party. This was potentially a huge blow to Labour, and they needed a Liberal victory to reverse it.
The elections of 1910 – one in January on the issue of the Budget 26and another in December on the powers of the House of Lords – would not be easy ones for securing a big Labour breakthrough. Both were triggered by major clashes between the Liberals and Unionists, in which Labour was inevitably eclipsed and obliged to row in behind Asquith and Lloyd George. In their election addresses, Labour candidates almost universally led on the ‘Liberal’ issues of the Lords, free trade, pensions and the Budget. They were more likely than Liberal candidates to highlight the right to work, nationalisation, payment of members, electoral reform and Home Rule. But social reform and pensions were prioritised by a similar proportion of Labour and Liberal candidates.25
Asquith knew that one highly probable outcome of the January 1910 campaign was that his party would lose its majority and be dependent on Labour and the Irish Nationalists. He faced a highly partisan press that were heavily aligned with the Unionists. A nod and a wink during the campaign that Home Rule might be back on his agenda helped to secure the Irish flank. And there was little doubt that Labour would ally with the Liberals.
Asquith’s pithy but impressive manifesto was complemented by a successful speech on 10 December 1909 at the Albert Hall. The former put the Budget, the Lords and free trade centre-stage, but it also mentioned pensions and social reform, funded by progressive taxation. The latter anticipated Clinton and Blair by talking of the state lending a ‘helping hand’ – a clear indication of the importance of the New Liberalism. The Liberals had begun at last to respond to the changed political context.
Labour’s January 1910 manifesto was also pro-Budget, pro-free trade and anti-Lords. It positioned the party as the advanced guard of reform – claiming it had ‘demonstrated the value of the Labour Party acting on independent lines’. In the first snappy soundbites to 27appear in a UK party manifesto, it concluded with: ‘The land for the people. The wealth for the wealth producers. Down with privilege. Up with the people.’ That was sounding more radical than in 1906 but was not yet parting company from ‘New Liberalism’.
Labour’s campaign was limited to just seventy-eight candidates for the 670 seats. These were largely in the industrial north of England. It was still acting essentially as a radical, working-class offshoot of the Liberal family. MacDonald continued to work to ensure that individual constituencies stuck with his strategy. The right of the party, including in many mining areas, wanted more Lib–Lab deals. But the radical elements sought a more independent line. In 1909, at the ILP conference, local branches had made clear they wanted freedom to run candidates against the Liberals, regardless of national understandings. MacDonald and others threatened to resign from the party if this occurred. The conference eventually followed its leaders, but the vote was 244 to 146, demonstrating how widespread concern was. A grumpy MacDonald stayed away from the conference for the next five years in retaliation.26
Of the seventy-eight seats Labour fought in January 1910, fifty-one had no Liberal opponents. This included the twenty-nine seats won by the LRC in 1906, nine seats won by Lib–Lab miners in that year, four won in by-elections, three seats not fought by the LRC in 1906 and six seats that the LRC had lost in 1906 but where Labour either fought alone or were in a strong second to the Unionist.
Of the twenty-seven seats where Labour stood but the Liberals also contested, three were previously Labour, eighteen had not been fought by the LRC in 1906, and six were in seats previously fought by the LRC but where they were not the obvious challengers to the Unionists. In these twenty-seven three-cornered fights, twenty seats were currently held by Liberal MPs, and six were Liberal–Unionist 28marginals. In all these seats, then, Lib–Lab competition risked letting the Unionists in.
When the results emerged, from 15 January onwards, it was clear that there were huge regional variations, with the Liberal vote holding up in the north, but the Unionists doing much better in the south and Midlands. There was a big ‘southern swing’ of up to 10 per cent in some counties, but the average national swing of 4.4 per cent was not enough to deliver a Unionist majority, and the two big parties ended with a photo finish – 274 Liberal seats to 272 Unionist. But there was good news for Asquith. Labour had failed to break through in every one of the twenty-seven seats contested with the Liberals, and in twenty-three of these the Labour candidate finished last. Meanwhile, both parties were benefiting from explicit mutually co-operative voting in two-member seats. In most seats, where such voting was possible, over 90 per cent of the Liberal–Labour vote transferred to the other party.
As Asquith had anticipated, Labour and the Irish now held the balance of power. With their support, Asquith still had a majority of 112. But the Liberals had lost many seats. Lloyd George had hoped that his campaign could mobilise the working classes against the wealthy landlords and Unionist House of Lords, without upsetting other voters. But Herbert Samuel noted that ‘it was the abiding problem of Liberal statesmanship to rouse the enthusiasm of the working classes without frightening the middle classes. It can be done but has not been done this time.’27
Labour was down from the forty-five seats they held going into the election to forty. The increase from the 1906 total of twenty-nine was entirely due to the Lib–Lab miners having joined the Labour group. Labour gained one seat from the Unionists but lost six to 29them. With more Labour candidates, their vote share was up to 7 per cent. In the Commons, Labour continued to support the Liberals – indeed, during 1910, the Labour MPs moved from the opposition side of the House and took up seats on the government benches. MacDonald was happy to stay close to the Liberal Party, for now. Hardie was not, and amongst the wider Labour Party there was criticism that the Liberals were being given too easy a ride.
The January 1910 election settled the issue of the Budget. But it did not resolve the issue of the Lords. That led to a further general election in December 1910, which delivered an almost identical result. Labour won around the same number of seats as in the January election (forty-two), but this time had fielded only fifty-six candidates against the seventy-eight of January. It had learned to target its resources on seats where its organisation, finances and Lib–Lab relations were conducive to success. Of those forty-two Labour candidates who were successful, not even one had triumphed in a genuine three-cornered fight. Three were unopposed. Eleven were in two-member seats in an arrangement with a Liberal candidate. Twenty-six were in single-member seats, without Liberal opposition, and just two were in straight fights with the Liberals.
