| Political
Parties |
Total
Votes |
% |
MPs |
| Conservative
Party |
9,101,099 |
36.2 |
197 |
| Liberal
Party |
2,252,430 |
9.0 |
12 |
| National
Liberals |
737,732 |
2.9 |
11 |
| Labour
Party |
11,967,746 |
48.0 |
393 |
| Communist
Party |
102,780 |
0.4 |
2 |
| Independent
Labour Party |
46,769 |
0.2 |
3 |
| National
Party |
133,179 |
0.2 |
3 |
| Irish
Nationalists |
148,078 |
0.4 |
2 |
(1)
Denis
Healey, was one of those soldiers
who fought in the Second World War who returned
in 1945 to stand in the General Election. He wrote about his thoughts
on the election in a letter to his friend Ivor Thomas (February, 1945)
A
man pushed blindfold into a courtroom with cotton wool in his ears,
obliged to plead for his
life without knowing where the jury was sitting or even whether it
was in the room at all, would nicely represent my position at this
moment... I am only one of the hundreds of young men, now in the forces,
who long for the opportunity to realise their political ideals by
actively fighting an election for the Labour Party. These men in their
turn represent millions of soldiers, sailors and airmen who want socialism
and who have been fighting magnificently to save a world in which
socialism is possible. Many of them have come to realise that socialism
is a matter of life and death for them. But too many others feel that
politics is just another civilian racket in which they are always
the suckers . .. We have now almost won the war, at the highest price
ever paid for victory. If you could see the shattered misery
that once was Italy, the
bleeding countryside and the wrecked villages, if you could see Cassino,
with a bomb-created river washing green slime through a shapeless
rubble that a year ago was homes, you would realise more than ever
that the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini is not enough, by itself to
justify the destruction, not just of twenty years of fascism, but
too often of twenty centuries of Europe. Only a more glorious future
can make up for this annihilation of the past.
(2)
Winston
Churchill, election broadcast (May, 1945)
I must tell you that a socialist policy is abhorrent to British
ideas on freedom. There is to be one State, to which all are to be
obedient in every act of their lives. This State, once in power, will
prescribe for everyone: where they are to work, what they are to work
at, where they may go and what they may say, what views they are to
hold, where their wives are to queue up for the State ration, and
what education their children are to receive. A socialist state could
not afford to suffer opposition - no socialist system can be established
without a political police. They (the Labour government) would have
to fall back on some form of Gestapo.
(3)
Henry
(Chips) Channon,
diary entry (5th
June, 1945)
The PM delivered a Broadside against the Socialists over
the wireless last
night: it was heavy pounding, certainly; and today the Labour boys
seem very depressed and dejected by Winston's trouncing. I met Attlee
in the lavatory, and he seemed shrunken and terrified, and scarcely
smiled, though Bevin seemed gay and robust enough. I personally feel
that the prevalent Conservative optimism in the Commons is overdone:
everyone today was chattering of another 1931 or at least another
1924. Everyone is cock-a-hoop.
(4)
Clement
Attlee, election broadcast (May,
1945)
The Prime Minister made much play last night with the rights of the
individual and the dangers of people being ordered about by officials.
I entirely agree that people should have the greatest freedom compatible
with the freedom of others. There was a time when employers were free
to work little children for sixteen hours a day. I remember when employers
were free to employ sweated women workers on finishing trousers at
a penny halfpenny a pair. There was a time when people were free to
neglect sanitation so that thousands died of preventable diseases.
For years every attempt to remedy these crying evils was blocked by
the same plea of freedom for the individual. It was in fact freedom
for the rich and slavery for the poor. Make no mistake, it has only
been through the power of the State, given to it by Parliament, that
the general public has been protected against the greed of ruthless
profit-makers and property owners.
Forty years
ago the Labour Party might, with some justice, have been called a
class Party, representing almost exclusively the wage earners. It
is still based on organised labour, but has steadily become more and
more inclusive. In the ranks of the Parliamentary Party and among
our candidates you will find numbers of men and women drawn from every
class and occupation in the community. Wage and salary earners form
the majority, but there are many from other walks of life, from the
professions and from the business world, giving a wide range of experience.
More than 120 of our candidates come from the Fighting Services, so
that youth is well represented.
The Conservative
Party remains as always a class Party. In twenty-three years in the
House of Commons, I cannot recall more than half a dozen from the
ranks of the wage earners. It represents today, as in the past, the
forces of property and privilege. The Labour Party is, in fact, the
one Party which most nearly reflects in its representation and composition
all the main streams which flow into the great river of our national
life.
Our appeal
to you, therefore, is not narrow or sectional. We are proud of the
fact that our country in the hours of its greatest danger stood firm
and united, setting an example to the world of how a great democratic
people rose to the height of the occasion and saved democracy and
liberty. We are proud of the self-sacrifice and devotion displayed
by men and women in every walk of life in this great adventure. We
call you to another great adventure which will demand the same high
qualities as those shown in the war: the adventure of civilisation.
We have
seen a great and powerful nation return to barbarism. We have seen
European civilisation almost destroyed
and an attempt made to set aside the moral principles upon which it
has been built. It is for us to help to re-knit the fabric of civilised
life woven through the centuries, and with the other nations to seek
to create a world in which free peoples living their own distinctive
lives in a society of nations co-operate together, free from the fear
of war.
We have
to plan the broad lines of our national life so that all may have
the duty and the opportunity of rendering service to the nation, everyone
in his or her sphere, and that all may help to create and share in
an increasing material prosperity free from the fear of want. We have
to preserve and enhance the beauty of our country to make it a place
where men and women may live finely and happily, free to worship God
in their own way, free to speak their minds, free citizens of a great
country.
(5)
Konni
Zilliacus, Election Address (June,
1945)
Only a British Government friendly to Socialism can join effectively
in making peace in Europe.
Throughout
Europe the overthrow of Fascism has meant the downfall of capitalism,
because the political parties of the Right and the leaders of trade
and industry, with a few exceptions, have been associated with the
Fascist and Quisling dictatorships and Hitler's economic system.
Throughout
Europe, the resistance movements derive their main strength from the
workers and their allies, and are largely under Socialist and Communist
leadership. Their reconstruction programmes are based on sweeping
advances towards Socialism.
Europe
can be reconstructed, pacified and united, and democracy can be revived,
only on the basis of a new social order.
To that
policy the Soviet Union are already committed, and the French people
have given their allegiance in the recent elections.
On that
basis a Labour Government can work together with the Soviet Union
and with the popular and democratic forces in Europe that would be
irresistibly encouraged by Labour's coming into power.
That combination
of states, bound together by such purposes and policies, would be
so strong and so successful as to attract the friendship and cooperation
of the American and Chinese peoples.
On these
lines Labour would put granite foundations under the flimsy scaffolding
erected at the San Francisco Conference, and take the lead in building
a world organisation capable of guaranteeing peace and promoting the
common interests of nations.
(6)
Herbert
Morrison,
An Autobiography (1960)
The very honesty and simplicity of the campaign helped
enormously. We had
not been afraid to be frank about our plans. There would be public
ownership of fuel and power, transport, the Bank of England, civil
aviation, and iron and steel. We proposed a housing programme dealt
with in relation to good town planning.
We promised to put the
1944 Education Act into practical operation. We said that wealth would
no longer be the passport to the best health treatment. We promised
that a Labour Government would extend social insurance over the widest
field.
There was no temporizing
over our political policy. "The Labour Party is a socialist party
and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment
of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain - free, democratic,
efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organized
in the service of the British people."
At the meetings I subsequently
addressed I saw the large numbers of servicemen and women in the audiences,
representatives, who happened to be on leave, of thousands of their
comrades. They were old in the art of war but had been children at
the time of the previous election. I told myself and I told my colleagues
that these people were making up their minds whatever we said, and
that therefore what we said must match their intelligence.
(7)
Margaret
Thatcher, The Path of Power
(1995)
The command economy required
in wartime conditions had habituated many people to an essentially
socialist mentality. Within the Armed Forces it was common knowledge
that left-wing intellectuals had exerted a powerful influence through
the Army Education Corps, which as Nigel Birch observed was 'the only
regiment with a general election among its battle honours'. At home,
broadcasters like J.B. Priestley gave a comfortable yet idealistic
gloss to social progress in a left-wing direction. It is also true
that Conservatives, with Churchill in the lead, were so preoccupied
with the urgent imperatives of war that much domestic policy, and
in particular the drawing-up of the agenda for peace, fell largely
to the socialists in the Coalition Government. Churchill himself would
have liked to continue the National Government at least until Japan
had been beaten and, in the light of the fast-growing threat from
the Soviet Union, perhaps beyond then. But the Labour Party had other
thoughts and understandably wished to come into its own collectivist
inheritance.
In I945 therefore, we
Conservatives found ourselves confronting two serious and, as it turned
out, insuperable problems. First, the Labour Party had us fighting
on their ground and were always able to outbid us. Churchill had been
talking about post-war 'reconstruction' for some two years, and as
part of that programme Rab Butler's Education Act was on the Statute
Book. Further, our manifesto committed us to the so-called 'full employment'
policy of the 1944 Employment White Paper, a massive house-building
programme, most of the proposals for National Insurance benefits made
by the great Liberal social reformer Lord Beveridge and a comprehensive
National Health Service. Moreover, we were not able effectively to
take the credit (so far as this was in any case appropriate to the
Conservative Party) for victory, let alone to castigate Labour for
its irresponsibility and extremism, because Attlee and his colleagues
had worked cheek by jowl with the Conservatives in government since
1940. In any event, the war effort had involved the whole population.
I vividly remember sitting
in the student common room in Somerville listening to Churchill's
famous (or notorious) election
broadcast to the effect that socialism would require 'some sort of
Gestapo' to enforce it, and thinking, 'He's gone too far.' However
logically unassailable the connection between socialism and coercion
was, in our present circumstances the line would not be credible.
I knew from political argument on similar lines at an election meeting
in Oxford what the riposte would be: 'Who's run the country when Mr
Churchill's been away? Mr Attlee.' And such, I found, was the reaction
now.
(8)
Henry
(Chips) Channon,
diary entry (1st
August, 1945)
I went to Westminster to see the new Parliament assemble,
and never have I seen such a dreary lot of people. I took my place
on the Opposition side, the Chamber was packed and uncomfortable,
and there was an atmosphere of tenseness and even bitterness. Winston
staged his entry well, and was given the most rousing cheer of his
career, and the Conservatives sang 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow'.
Perhaps this was an error in taste, though the Socialists went one
further, and burst into the 'Red Flag' singing it lustily; I thought
that Herbert Morrison and one or two others looked uncomfortable.
We then proceeded to elect Mr Speaker, and Clifton-Brown made an excellent
impression. It is a good sign that the Labour Party have decided to
elect a Conservative Speaker unanimously.
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