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Famous Historical Elections: The Coupon Election of 1918
29 Plays16 days ago
In this episode, Ethan Reuter speaks with Dr. Luke Blaxill about the extraordinary 1918 general election—the first after the Great War and the first under the Representation of the People Act, which tripled the electorate overnight. Held just six weeks after armistice amid demobilisation and the influenza pandemic, this was democracy's leap into the great unknown.
The conversation explores the dramatic transformation of British politics through the controversial "coupon"—a simple piece of paper signed by Lloyd George and the Conservative leader that became a victory passport for coalition candidates. Dr. Blaxill explains how this khaki election, fought on punishing Germany and building the peace, split the Liberal Party in two, elevated Labour to official opposition status, and cemented Conservative dominance for decades to come.
But the most revolutionary outcome came from Ireland, where Sinn Féin swept to power, winning 73 seats—47 of their MPs elected from prison. Their refusal to take their seats in Westminster and decision to form their own parliament in Dublin transformed an electoral mandate into a revolutionary moment that would reshape the union itself.
From the mystery of who received the coupon to the first woman MP elected, this is the story of an election that ended Victorian politics and ushered in the democratic age—though nobody quite understood what that would mean until the pieces fell.
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Transcript
Introduction to the 1918 Election
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Observations podcast brought to you by Democracy Volunteers. Today we'll be talking about the 1918 election. Called immediately after the 11th of November armistice, the election saw a massively expanded franchise.
00:00:24
Speaker
The election is known as the khaki and coupon elections. It split the Liberal Party, resulting in a large win for incumbent Prime Minister David Lloyd George, his coalition liberals and allies, and especially the Conservatives.
00:00:38
Speaker
That split between Lloyd George's coalition and Asquith's independence liberals left the old Liberal Party fractured.
The Liberal Party Split and Lloyd George's Rise
00:00:46
Speaker
On today's episode, I'm joined again by Dr. Luke Blacksell to talk us through it all. Dr. Luke Blacksell is a historian and college lecturer specialising in 19th and 20th century British history at Hertford College, Oxford.
00:00:59
Speaker
Luke, thank you for being here. Hello, Earthen. So the first question I have for you is giving us context into the 1918 election.
00:01:10
Speaker
Set the scene for us, like, what was it like? How was Lloyd George faring and coming into the election? Well, Lloyd George had become prime minister following a really seismic liberal split in 1916. Of course, this was during the war itself, and Lloyd George offered something that seemingly Asquith didn't offer, which was strong wartime leadership, the ability to go around kind of really cracking heads together in the military and industrial establishment to solve near-term crises like the shell shortage, and really give Britain decisive wartime leadership.
The Impact of the Armistice and Expanded Franchise
00:01:48
Speaker
Immediately after um armistice, general election is being considered. And Britain goes to the polls just six weeks after that, when a lot of soldiers are still you know out in the field and haven't returned home yet.
00:02:01
Speaker
And so the atmosphere is very, very strongly a sort of democratic postscript, if you like, to the fighting. What should happen as a result of the war that has just concluded? In particular, what should be done with Germany?
00:02:15
Speaker
And what should the future in Britain look like domestically? Is there a role for party politics in this new democratic age? Are we going to go back to liberalism versus conservatism? Is it going to be conservatism versus socialism?
00:02:29
Speaker
Or perhaps a new politics might emerge where parties don't really matter so much. And the country is focused much more on national rebuilding. So I think the 1918 election is happens at a historic moment, but it's a historic moment not just because of the importance of the close of war, but also because it was really rather unclear what politics would look like in this new democratic age, where after all the franchise had tripled and most voters had never voted before when they cast their ballots in that election in December.
Challenges of the 1918 Election: Influenza and Political Uncertainty
00:02:59
Speaker
You brought it up that this was quite an open moment for politics and for the country. This is a time of the influenza pandemic and just after armistice.
00:03:12
Speaker
How was the home front look during 1918?
00:03:17
Speaker
Well, I think Britain domestically is really considering what it is wanting out of politics. So obviously you've had a an international situation which has changed Britain fundamentally in a large number of ways, but it's not clear what those ways actually are.
00:03:36
Speaker
Of course, the experiences that soldiers had when they were actually fighting, that they brought back with them into domestic politics, were, of course, quite detached from people on the home front. This isn't like the Second World War, the so-called People's War, where people had been much more thoroughly consumed in the war effort at home.
00:03:53
Speaker
They had seen bombing themselves domestically. And there was much more of an awareness of the international situation and the fact that the world had been completely reshaped. In Britain in 1918, it's a bit more semi-detached from that.
00:04:07
Speaker
The soldiers have got their own experiences, but people at home, even though they may have lost loved ones and their families, are maybe not thinking about politics in such a revolutionarily changed way ah than it might seem on paper.
00:04:22
Speaker
There is, for example, also the influenza pandemic, where you have... um sick candidates, canceled meetings, um yet another enormous piece of disturbance in a world that had already been turned upside down.
00:04:37
Speaker
So I think there's an overriding feeling of confusion in 1918 more than anything else. There's not so much in the way of international purpose, apart from the desire to punish um the Kaiser's Germany.
00:04:47
Speaker
There's a confusion about what political parties even mean domestically in Britain, given the obvious remaking that's taking place with the rise of Labour and the split in the Liberals and the issuing of the coupon and the coalition.
00:04:58
Speaker
And I think ah a lack of clarity also on what the new post-war state can actually achieve. There's been a lot of nationalization in the war. The government has taken control of industry, house building in a way that has never previously been seen. And so it's not really clear what this new state can exactly do.
00:05:17
Speaker
And so the overriding feeling, I think, on the home front is of... distress, ah confusion, um a lack of understanding about what Britain can really be and what the future of the empire will really be.
00:05:31
Speaker
And thus the election is perhaps a way of Britain making sense of itself and the world ahead at this crucial turning point. Now, before we get into the role that the state plays and the metrics of the election, let's first go internationally. You brought up the role of German reparation into the campaign for the opposing sides. How did that affect actually going into 1918 and the election?
The 1918 Reform Act and Its Consequences
00:05:58
Speaker
Well, I think the desire to um essentially punish Germany until the pips squeaked was one of the relatively few sort of national kind of themes that resonated with the electorate, that Germany widely being blamed for starting the war, um also you know continuing it,
00:06:19
Speaker
that it provides, I think, a very convenient sort of external whipping boy. I also think it fitted into ah probably a broader historically-based anti-German narrative, which was also there throughout the Edwardian period too.
00:06:34
Speaker
Germany had been the subject of the naval scare in the Edwardian period, where um it was suspected that Britain would lose her sort of supremacy as kind of having the largest navy. German ah industry was also responsible, as some British protectionists saw it, for dumping lots of sort of cheap goods on the international market, thus undercutting domestic British a production and causing Britain to experience unemployment and stagnation.
00:07:00
Speaker
And so I think... Germany was very, very easy to characterize as being an enemy, an aggressor, and a rival. And if there was one thing everyone in Britain could agree on, even if they were disagreeing on everything else, it was the need to punish Germany. And there was certainly a competition on how onerous ah those reparations should be.
00:07:23
Speaker
So if this was an issue that almost united wider franchise, going into the wider franchise, this was the first election after the representation of the People Act.
00:07:37
Speaker
Who did the franchise expand to and how did this impact the election that we see? Well, this is an absolutely massive question. To answer this fully, we have to go back into the past and into the 19th century to look at who was in and who was out. without This was the fourth Reform Act that was passed in 1918. It enfranchised all working class men, regardless of property qualifications, and there had been property qualifications in place after all of the Reform Acts after 1832 and before that as well, and enfranchised women over 30 who did meet a property qualification.
00:08:13
Speaker
And so there is an enormous expansion um of the electorate that is following this, that you have the shift from Britain being a an electorate, which is quite partial, probably only about one in four adults, still a mass democracy prior to 1918, without...
00:08:27
Speaker
but without an enormous subset ah group of the working class and without any women. And so there's very much the feeling of this being an enormous democratic experiment, a democratic big bang, if you like, and politicians not really knowing how the pieces were going to fall.
00:08:44
Speaker
I mean, even after 1867, a reform act that perhaps enfranchised about a million and a half voters compared to 14 million voters this time, that was called a leap in the dark by politicians then. And if that was the leap in the dark, this was the leap into something that was far beyond the dark.
Campaign Strategies Without Modern Media
00:09:01
Speaker
And with the actual election itself and how it actually affected things, suddenly you go from having elections where... You know, you're being able to actually physically meet still a lot of um actual voters as candidates, even though that, you know, you're still having to hold mass meetings.
00:09:19
Speaker
Now, most of the electorate, and especially because of the influenza pandemic as well, is not going out to attend public meetings to hear their candidates speak. Almost entirely, their experience of the election is comprised of reading leaflets that come through their door um and reading the newspaper reports.
00:09:37
Speaker
There's no wide access to radio at this point, obviously no television, and people aren't going out to those traditional public meetings, which were the staple workhorses of campaigning. So you've got an enormous unknown electorate comprised of lots of groups of the population that have no have had hitherto no formal involvement with politics and politicians don't know how they're going to behave.
00:09:57
Speaker
And also the general way that people interact with elections in election campaigns through public meetings where politicians and people are placed into the same physical space is also absent. and so there's really the feeling that politicians have of almost this election being like bumps on a kind of sonar radar. they they They've got some idea of what's going to happen in this election, but they really don't know. And so that's perhaps the real point with 1918. It is a leap into the big, great, dark unknown.
00:10:28
Speaker
Going into the dark, a lot of the pre-election speculation was of women and working class men voting very differently, right?
00:10:40
Speaker
And a lot of that sexism shone through in the coverage of how that would play into the specific votes and the tallies. What were the repercussions and the actual impacts that we see within the actual election results of groups such as women getting the vote?
Voter Behavior and Election Outcomes
00:10:59
Speaker
Right. So you're absolutely right there. Those two groups, lots of speculation on what they would do. Now, let's first talk about working class men. Now, even though perhaps we tend to celebrate the ah the inclusion of women in the electorate in 1918, perhaps more nowadays,
00:11:14
Speaker
politicians were much more concerned with the inclusion of working class men. And so who were these working class men? So they were much more likely to be industrial laborers, much more likely to be from the sort of the lower strata of um trades unionized groups of the population, they were, the Labour Party certainly thought, by far the likeliest you know to vote for more radical redistributionist kind of policies.
00:11:41
Speaker
And so they were very, very strongly feared by the Conservatives and by the liberal and Liberal Party, mainly because they thought that they would vote for essentially a form of confiscationary socialism. And this goes back to the whole fear that many opponents of franchise extension always had, that a mass electorate would vote for knife and fork politics, taking more of other people's stuff.
00:12:06
Speaker
So that they were a concern. As for women, well, I think that there was a concern that they might potentially vote initially maybe for feminist parties. That was ah one suspicion, although that didn't really end up happening. They might be more likely to vote for other women candidates who are in the small number of constituencies where they ran.
00:12:26
Speaker
And maybe that they would be more subject, and this was perhaps the more specific fear, to more emotional kind of political appeals that wouldn't be based on you know sober, rational ah judgments about the macroeconomic situation or the imperial kind of repercussions, that women voters would be much more parochial in their conception of politics and tend to vote on things like the price of food in the shops and stuff. Not that that was an invalid issue, but would perhaps be more limited.
00:12:54
Speaker
In terms of where your real question was going in terms of how that does actually affect voting, well, in regards to the ah the sort of the the woman factor, I don't think there's any evidence that...
00:13:06
Speaker
the electorate voted differently for different parties because it had a large minority of women in the electorate compared to if women had been excluded. There were some women candidates in some places, but none of them did very well.
00:13:18
Speaker
um And if anything, if there was a gender effect, it probably was maybe boosting the Conservatives somewhat because there was a, in the interpretation of the election results, there was this feeling that women were put off by more sort of socialist policies, but I don't think it's a large effect.
00:13:34
Speaker
And then finally in working class men, Well, that's more of the large one. Historians argue about this to this day. It's the so-called franchise factor argument. Did those working class men who were off the ballot before vote Labour in large numbers?
00:13:48
Speaker
you know And was that what explained the demise of the Liberal Party? It's Very hard to say is the answer. And there's been all sorts of regression analysis and attempt to reconstruct what would have happened if we'd had the pre-war franchise.
00:14:00
Speaker
But I think the take home is probably that to some extent, yes, those working class men do vote for Labour in larger numbers and don't vote for the Liberals. And so in that regard, the the basis or the sociological basis of British politics clearly has changed moving forwards. And it's one that probably isn't favourable to the Liberal Party, as they find out throughout the nineteen twenty s the The Liberal Party certainly do, you are right.
00:14:25
Speaker
But I i want to um want to delve slightly deeper ba behind into the female issue quickly. And so if if all men under the age or over the age of 21 without any property qualification ah get the vote, women over 30 are the only group that gets the vote with a property qualification.
00:14:44
Speaker
What leads to this distinction? why why Why is there this qualification that women only expressly feel? It is a rather peculiar distinction, and it does seem quite arbitrary, also because it was removed entirely in 1928, so it only lasted for 10 years.
00:15:01
Speaker
I think to understand it, we have to look back into the debate about women's suffrage that really was, in some ways, starting from around the 1870s, where women were given the franchise in local elections, but really obviously took off when you had the suffragist and suffragette movement in the um in the Edwardian period.
00:15:18
Speaker
And i think that really the age of 30 can be understood as being a compromise. There was the feeling that if you restricted it to the franchise to older people, you would get voters who were less impressionable, ah who had more political experience, ah more um opportunity to be able to kind of read the news and to develop mature political opinions.
00:15:41
Speaker
um And also, if you connected it to a property qualification, which was, of course, a principle that had been done away with for men, once again, that's going to remove a strata of the less-propertyed classes. Women could qualify for that usually by dint of their husband's property, unless they happen to own quite a lot of property themselves.
00:15:59
Speaker
And so... The women who were voting were most were older, more likely to be married because of that property clause, and more likely to be respectable. And so I suppose it probably can be understood a little bit like the way in which the working class were enfranchised in the 19th century, which is it was first the upper section of the working class in 1867 who were enfranchised, and then increasingly more of the working class over time.
00:16:23
Speaker
In this way, I think it was felt that women who are less likely to rock the boat, shall we say, and more likely to have more political experience were included in the franchise while having the safety valve of still you know keeping out the young women, keeping out the so-called flappers from potentially destabilizing politics with whatever ah they were going to bring into it.
00:16:43
Speaker
and And did that it that extension of the franchise create any sort of administrative problems in dealing with the specific election in terms of counting the votes?
00:16:56
Speaker
Less counting the votes, more preparing the electoral register. So, of course, um in modern elections in Britain, really the electoral register is just simply a question of who lives where, which, you know, is a vexed issue. And we have seen that in in modern times being a concern.
Conservative Victory and Labour's Emergence
00:17:11
Speaker
In the 19th century and prior to 1918 in the Edwardian period, the register was hugely important because, of course, you had a property qualification in order to vote. And so, therefore, you had to value property at certain levels and decide what property qualified. And that required a great deal of arguments in registration courts. And political parties would have their own solicitors who would get into arguments about who should be on and who should be off, as you might kind of imagine.
00:17:39
Speaker
And so i think when we came to this election where you had this ah situation where there was a different franchise and operation for men as opposed to women, there was already quite a kind of a large amount of muscle memory that existed there with excluding and including certain votes from registration.
00:17:57
Speaker
um As for counting the votes, well, there were some issues with this because you had quite a lot of ballots appearing from overseas. um Again, the soldiers actually had a different franchise. For them, it was entry at 19.
00:18:09
Speaker
And there were undoubtedly large numbers of people on the register who were eligible to vote who actually turned out not being able to vote because there'd been huge displacement of people in the war, obviously lots of obviously death as well.
00:18:23
Speaker
And so the register that was in operation in 1918 was old, out of date, and some people who thought they ought to be able to vote, it turned out actually they couldn't. And so that did create something of a logistical mess and is reflected by the fact that only about 57% of the electorate actually turned out in 1918, which is, ah to my knowledge, actually the lowest turnout in any British general election on record.
00:18:48
Speaker
Heading then from the turnout into the specific results of the election, what do we see come out 1918? Who wins, who suffers?
00:19:00
Speaker
It's um difficult to say in some ways. So the obvious winner of the election is the Conservatives. I mean, the Conservatives get, if you include the couponed and uncouponed Conservatives, as we might talk about later, 379 seats.
00:19:15
Speaker
um You've got Labour with 57. Now, that doesn't look like a very good result on paper for the Labour Party in terms of seats, and it isn't really.
The 'Coupon' and Coalition Politics
00:19:23
Speaker
But compared to what they were doing in the Edwardian period, where they were getting relatively similar numbers of seats,
00:19:29
Speaker
But they do field over 350 candidates in this and this campaign, as opposed to only about 70 or 80. So there's a huge expansion of their electoral ambition. They get a lot of second-place finishes and a lot of constituencies.
00:19:43
Speaker
They put in strong third-place performances in places they've never entered before. So there's a lot of hidden-laid strength under that 57 seats. um Then you've got the David Lloyd George Liberals. There are two liberal parties in this election, the Lloyd George Liberals and the Liberals.
00:19:59
Speaker
The David Lloyd George Liberals get 126 seats. They win most of the seats they can contest. But of course, that's because conservatives tended to stand their candidates down in those places and tell voters to vote for the Lloyd George candidate. So it was very manufactured.
00:20:16
Speaker
As for the actual Liberal Party, look, on paper, they get 36 seats and Asquith loses his seat. Obviously a complete disaster. I mean, the Liberals were up in the 330s, 340s, 350s in elections in the Edwardian period.
00:20:31
Speaker
The Liberals aren't finished in 1918. They do come back a bit later in the 1920s, especially in 1923. But there was an enormous collapse of their strength there, obviously in the context of a first-past-the-post election.
00:20:44
Speaker
system where you have two different parties which are dividing your own voters, another progressive party coming up from behind in Labour, and then also all sorts of pacts that are operating on a local level, as well as the coupon.
00:20:58
Speaker
And then finally, we of course turn to Ireland, and we see Sinn Féin entering um an election for the first time sweeping to power, winning 73 out of the 100 Irish seats.
00:21:10
Speaker
That's about up to a similar level than the old Irish Nationalist Party under Parnell was winning in the late 19th century. And Sinn Féin almost completely destroy the old moderate Irish parliamentary party who are in favour of Home Rule.
00:21:24
Speaker
So Sinn Féin are an enormous winner of this election. The Conservatives, I suppose, on paper are the winner. And Labour, I think, even though they're only getting 57 seats, there's a lot in these election results that are actually very good for
00:21:40
Speaker
So certainly it's ah it's ah it's an incredible performance for Sinn Féin and Labour are quietly showing quite promising signs. But i want I want to turn our attention to the coalition and the coupon. It's referred to as the coupon coalition, and there is a split between the Liberal Party, as you said, between the Lloyd George Liberals and the actual Liberals.
00:22:05
Speaker
what is it What is it do we mean when we say the coupon election? So the coupon is essentially just a piece of paper. i mean, you could call it a victory passport because candidates with the coupon usually won their seats. In fact, almost always did.
00:22:19
Speaker
And it's essentially just a piece of paper that's signed by Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, and um by Adra Bonalore, the leader of the Conservatives, which essentially says, we endorse this candidate for this constituency as part of the wartime coalition, which has won the war and will now build the peace.
00:22:37
Speaker
And, you know, these go around with little pictures of Union Jacks on them. When candidates have the coupon, they often wave it around. They often put it on their electoral literature. They say, I'm a coupon candidate. And it's placed with pictures of Union Jacks.
00:22:50
Speaker
And the thing I think that's sometimes missed from this in a lot of analysis is that most candidates, in almost and including all those who were couponed, would not call themselves conservatives or liberals. They would just call themselves coalition or national.
00:23:03
Speaker
And that was it. They wouldn't have a party name. They might say in their election dress that they had been a conservative in the past, but they would present themselves literally as almost like a national government running for office, if you like, in the context of a highly patriotic election where people you know are feeling very strongly nationally charged. And that is an irresistible appeal.
00:23:25
Speaker
So if you don't have a coupon, if you're one of the uncouponed liberals or you are an uncouponed Labour candidate, and very few of the liberal Asquithian liberals and the Labour candidates get coupons, um in fact, none of the Asquithians and a few Labour but not many, you're essentially, you've got the insurgent kind of card that you're playing there, essentially saying, well, you know, the parties are trying to stitch this up.
00:23:48
Speaker
They're obsessed with, you know, punishing the Kaiser. um What we really need to do is domestically rebuild. um And the Labour Party would be saying, well, we need to focus now our attention on building peace in these important ways.
00:24:01
Speaker
Whereas the Asquithian Liberals might be saying, you know, this is a moment of crisis. We need sensible, moderate liberal voices in politics rather than... Khaki fever, um electors obsessed with achieving very, very nationalist kind of outcomes, continuing to fight the war in the peace.
00:24:21
Speaker
And they would be like appeals to sanity, if you like, if you read some of the Asquithian literature. But unfortunately, while sometimes playing the role of the insurgent can be electorally beneficial in certain contexts, we especially see this, of course, in modern elections with the rise of populism, playing the role of an insurgent in the context of 1918 is a disastrous political platform.
00:24:41
Speaker
And those parties that don't have coupons and those candidates that are uncouponed invariably tend to lose. you You mentioned the the distinction between the victory so-called victory passport and an insurgency candidates.
00:24:56
Speaker
How actually was decided if you would get a coupon, and especially if you were a Liberal? It's really interesting because the coupon was wrapped in a lot of mystique.
00:25:06
Speaker
So really it's Bonalore and Lloyd George and their whips and their party strategists deciding who's gonna get the coupon from a smoke-filled room. And really it's often kind of quite mysterious because there are actually kind of a handful of conservatives who are sort of expecting to get the coupon in the post and actually don't get one. They don't really understand why.
00:25:28
Speaker
So I think it's it's the coupon is best understood, I think, as a device for a central cross-party leadership to be able to bestow sort of officialdom on a certain series of candidates.
00:25:42
Speaker
And thus is a really major device, if you like, by which a small leadership, a small clique at the top, has been able to kind of take over politics and go beyond normal party structures. And i There's never been another instance of that in British politics, that literally, because of the personal popularity of Lloyd George, which was absolutely sky high, because it was thought that he'd reorganized the British economy and the British military to win the war, um and the mostly very distinguished record of a lot of the Conservatives as well, that those leaders are able to really cement their control over politics through issuing the coupon, and also quietly shunt outside, quietly in the
00:26:24
Speaker
the Conservatives case, and very noisily in the case of the Liberals, their opponents from those two parties, and remake what could have been a new centre party, really, um and governed without really a party label until 1922, where once again, we had Conservatives and Lloyd George Liberals. Only in 1923, when politics is turned upside down by a new crisis of tariff reform, do the old party labels really, truly re-emerge.
00:26:50
Speaker
You spoke about the idea of a so-called national party. Ultimately, Lloyd George is turning his back on the Liberal Party, at least somewhat. what are What are his specific motivations to participate within this coalition? Obviously, he gets significantly less candidates to be selected to have the coupon than the Conservatives. why Why does Lloyd George elect for this?
00:27:18
Speaker
Well, I think Lloyd George realises that his position is weaker ah than that of the Conservatives. Now, he is the Prime Minister, and he has personal appeal that goes beyond any other politician by many, many a mile.
00:27:31
Speaker
But he does not have his party with him. There has been this extremely damaging wartime split, and Asquith still has a lot of supporters. Really, if you want to characterise the political division between them, and it did happen on political as well as personal lines,
00:27:46
Speaker
Asquith's liberals are, if you like, the classical liberals, the liberals of Gladstone, the sort of Mandarin administrative kind of moderate liberals. Whereas Lloyd George, they're new liberals.
00:27:59
Speaker
interested in things like pensions, welfare reform, free school meals, taxing wealth, taxing land, really quite a lot of things that the Labour Party is also in favour of as well, but without really the kind of nationalisation element, without the very overt trades union and class motif.
00:28:15
Speaker
And so there's that war that's been going on within the Liberal Party, that fight for survival that carries over to the Edwardian period about whether you want you know new positive liberalism or kind of old negative liberalism to characterise it in those terms.
00:28:29
Speaker
And this is exacerbated by an enormous personal divide at the top of the party. Lloyd George, a fascinating figure, very, very ah volcanic, vastly better orator um than his contemporaries.
00:28:44
Speaker
forever indulging in all sorts of um schemes, ah some of them, to be honest, even sexual in their nature as well. He managed to sleep with most of the wives of most of the other kind of leading liberals, ah selling of honors while he was prime minister, accumulating an enormous war chest of his own, um and also trying to carve out his own personal kind of fiefdom.
00:29:05
Speaker
And he finds that a lot of the Liberal Party establishment is really against him because they just don't like his politics. that politics They see him as being populist. They see him as really kind of, I suppose, too left-wing and too collectivist for a lot of their liking.
00:29:18
Speaker
Yet he finds in the Conservatives quite a lot of, um shall we say, people who are rather friendly to him and um inclined to do lots of deals. And you know Lloyd George is a master of those smoke-filled rooms, and the Conservatives are very good at that as well.
00:29:32
Speaker
And so... Really, there isn't, I think, a particularly strong ideological basis to the Lloyd George coalition. I do think it's very personal. I do think it's um inspired by a lot of Lloyd George's own disagreements with other members of his party. And the behaviour of Lloyd George, which also...
00:29:50
Speaker
takes place also throughout the 1920s and um his attempts to some argue, maybe wrongly, but some do argue sabotage his party throughout that point is really kind of one of the main motivating factors. And so I don't think it's really a very ideological coalition. I think it's very much based around the personality of Lloyd George and his objectives and also the Conservatives playing the role that they have so often played in British politics in the 20th century, which is as the pragmatists.
Sinn Féin's Victory and Irish Politics
00:30:17
Speaker
as the power behind the throne. Put Lloyd George up, they put Ramsay MacDonald up, but they were the ones who were really pulling the strings. And if you if you like, that's one of the first in a series of many cards the Conservatives have played throughout the 20th century, which has enabled them you know to stay in power, sometimes in quite inauspicious circumstances.
00:30:37
Speaker
And you brought up the Conservatives behind the throne. Looking at the longer-term impacts of the 1918 election, how does the strength of the Conservatives and compared to the relative weakness of look the Lloyd George Liberals actually affect the government?
00:30:56
Speaker
So the strength of the Conservatives. Well, I think that they, um because they control not only the vast majority of seats, they also control the pathway into politics for the Lloyd George Liberals as well, because the Lloyd George Liberals are usually only getting in, not always, but usually because the Conservatives are standing down candidates themselves.
00:31:17
Speaker
And so the Conservatives become the real kind of kingmaker candidates in British elections. And So when you see results of elections throughout the nineteen twenty s it can be a little bit confusing to look at the numbers of votes cast and even the numbers of seats won, because a lot of that must be refracted through the prism of there being lots of different pacts that are operation at local levels.
00:31:39
Speaker
And so it's quite difficult to know exactly how strong the parties are at any given time. Often throughout the nineteen twenty s even when the liberals were seemingly decimated, they were always saying, oh, well, our real voting strength is much stronger than this on paper.
00:31:53
Speaker
We've only got one and a half million votes in this election. But really, if we had candidates everywhere and we polled properly, we'd actually get six million votes. And of course, that doesn't actually end up ever happening. But there is a disconnect, I think, between what the election results look like the seats in Parliament and what the real kind of political power circumstances actually are.
00:32:14
Speaker
It's not good enough to just read across what an election result is and indeed even who how many seats there are in Parliament to understand the sort of underlying power dynamics. In order to understand that, you really need to kind of get quite close to, I think, especially to the Conservatives and where they're deciding to run candidates and where they're not and where they're doing deals and where they're not.
00:32:34
Speaker
But I think the consistent thing that can be said about that is the Conservatives are probably even more strong than they appear, um I think, on paper. They look quite dominant in the 1920s, although they do lose in 1923.
00:32:46
Speaker
But I suspect they are actually a lot more powerful than that. And from one the strength of one party to another, switching moving to Sinn Féin, this is also a stunning win for them in Ireland over especially the Irish Parliamentary Party, who get seven seats.
00:33:07
Speaker
Why did Sinn Féin win so heavily? Again, a massively disputed and argued about theme. Why did Sinn Féin suddenly capsize the old Irish Parliamentary Party?
00:33:20
Speaker
So the Irish Parliamentary Party, we must remember, had been stunningly electorally successful itself. Since um the secret ballot was carried in 1872 and from the election of 1874, the Irish Parliamentary Party, which starts off cumulatively, kind of from the Liberals, but comes after the land war, becomes its own party, is winning almost every seat outside of Ulster.
00:33:43
Speaker
It's winning about between 80 and 85 seats. And to the extent that Liberals and Conservatives do not bother sending candidates over to Ireland because they know they're just going to be destroyed. And so that party, which is agitating the things like um the rights for Irish tenant farmers, a reduction in or an abolition of ah the the sort of the church tithe um and religious freedom of expression and some of those grievances which have plagued Irish politics since the union.
00:34:14
Speaker
is suddenly overturned by Sinn Féin. I think that the most compelling, ah the standard argument that is often given is that the British response to the Easter Rising in 1916, where, of course, ah a radical group um of ah of Irish Republicans ah takes over many key ah buildings in Dublin, such as the General Post Office, and the British um response, which involves...
00:34:39
Speaker
The swinging prison sentences, executions for many of those who were involved in the rising is seen as being so heavy handed that that turns a lot of moderate opinion in Ireland against the British. Now, it's a bit simplistic, though, I think, as a theory.
00:34:55
Speaker
Another one that's been sometimes put across is the idea of there being like a generational shift, if you like. And a lot of those who were involved in Sinn Féin are often younger people. If you look at some of the leaders of Sinn Féin, Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins, for example, very, very young men and also some young women as well who haven't had any political experience before. And many of them are voting for the first time in 1918. The electorate in Ireland is actually increased more by the representation of the People Act than in England because the property qualifications push more people out in Ireland and ah than in the case of the rest of the United Kingdom.
00:35:32
Speaker
And so you have a new group of of voters who, it's hard to say, who have been who have been disengaged from politics for eight years, ah who have seen the British response to the Easter Rising, have been um flooded with lots of propaganda from you know new forces.
00:35:50
Speaker
um Sinn Féin saying that we will overthrow ah the old... Irish parliamentary party who are in hock to the British, who just only want home rule, which is like the equivalent of the Holyrood Parliament, but for Ireland, whereas we want full independence.
00:36:05
Speaker
It's never really been properly understood, to be honest. But what we can say is that the 73 seats that the Sinn Féin win, all of them at the expense of the Irish parliamentary party, has the effect of detonating um a revolution in Ireland.
00:36:21
Speaker
And Sinn Féin are able to point at the results and say that, look, we won all these seats, including more than half our representatives won them when we were in prison, which, you know, in a age where physical campaigning is still critical, is obviously a huge disadvantage.
00:36:35
Speaker
This shows that the will of the Irish nation has changed. And That gives great impetus um ah to the ah to the to the Republican movement.
00:36:46
Speaker
um Another convenient point, of course, is that the old Ulster Volunteer Force, who were providing this sort of really military opposition to Irish Home Rule in the period before the war, many of them ah were amongst those who were wiped out on the Somme. And so there are there is a feeling that the armed portion of the Irish population who are loyalist has been weakened disproportionately. That's another underlying factor.
00:37:11
Speaker
But I think it can really only be described as, you know, something of a revolution in in people's minds. But the election wasn't just the manifestation of that. The result acted as a cause that pushed the Irish War of Independence in the
Women in Politics: A New Milestone
00:37:26
Speaker
years that followed.
00:37:26
Speaker
Okay. So from 47 of Sinn Féin's MPs being elected in jail, you've mentioned the fact that this was a key cause in Irish independence.
00:37:39
Speaker
how How does this come to pass? What are the direct links? well but Well, very simply put, that those MPs who are elected, who of course do not take their seats, Sinn Féin today still don't take their seats in Parliament. The Irish Parliamentary Party did take their seats in Parliament and did a lot with those seats as well, but Sinn Féin do not.
00:38:01
Speaker
And so they declare a new Irish Parliament, a new Dáil-Iran, where they... create their own chamber. ah They start trying to pass their own laws ah from Dublin and they create, if you like, a kind of a parallel a parallel parliament.
00:38:18
Speaker
um Obviously, when people start not obeying ah British rule, ah there are obviously tensions, escalation of violence. There's a large attack on the police force who are obviously the very the visible um visible sort of targets, if you like, of British oppression in temporary.
00:38:35
Speaker
Britain um sends in the black and tans to reinforce the um ah the the Irish constabulary. And you have a situation where you have almost a sort of an ungovernable system where you have um people not being prepared to ah to pay taxes, to comply with the law, many displays of of civil of civil disobedience. And then, of course, actual guerrilla attacks on numerous parts of the British state and the British establishment. and If the question is really, could Britain have dug in?
00:39:08
Speaker
Would Britain have dug in before the war? The answer is yes, in both cases. um But it would have required coercion on an enormous level to um ah put down this insurgent movement. And in the new, more pragmatic age after 1918, British politicians, even people like Edward Carson, the the leader of the um the ulster you know the the Ulster Volunteer Force, famous unionist,
00:39:32
Speaker
are prepared to increasingly start thinking in terms of, well, if this is ungovernable and we really have, in a sense, kind of fundamentally lost a generation, perhaps the best solution to the Protestant minority in Ireland, especially in Ulster, is partition.
00:39:50
Speaker
And the focus is then on how do we get the best partition terms and how many counties of Ireland is that going to going to entail? um But I think it was really that, um the lack of appetite for maintaining um part of its territory by force after a really brutal kind of war after which mines were changed.
00:40:14
Speaker
There are some echoes of that in what happened you know in places like Suez, for example, or in parts of the British Empire after the Second World War, a reluctance you know to really put down the jackboot at a point where there is enormous war weariness and there is a perception, even amongst those who were fought tooth and nail, that the world has just changed.
00:40:35
Speaker
And I think that's ah the feeling which was dominant, really, I think on both sides. It was a real macro turning point, it seems, in Irish politics. There was also a mike more micro turning point, obviously, with the representation of the People Act. It allows women to stand for votes. Famous suffragettes such as Christabel Pankhurst stand and fail. There is only one who from Ireland succeeds.
00:41:06
Speaker
Yes, and this Constance Markovitz is elected from prison. ah She was going to be executed after the Easter Rising, but was pardoned largely, we think, because of her because of her sex.
00:41:20
Speaker
um And that's a very important landmark, because and when we think about the entry of women into um formal politics, um women voting... That's the first thing. But then also, of course, women running as candidates and then being successful as candidates as well.
00:41:36
Speaker
I think it's, some I suppose, because Markovits doesn't take her seat and because she is, I suppose, elected in the context of... um extreme developments on the outside. I don't think it would be right to say that Markievicz was elected because she was a woman or in spite of being a woman. I think she was elected because she was a Sinn Féin representative and had obviously been a prominent member of the rising.
00:42:00
Speaker
However, it doesn't take long for a woman to be elected one year afterwards in 1919, Nancy Astor in Plymouth, and for her to actually take her seat.
00:42:11
Speaker
ah But it's an important landmark, um but nevertheless, although i think it's probably one that now with our eyes in the 21st century, we perhaps are much more interested in than they would have been at the time.
00:42:23
Speaker
ah For that, I think it would have been much more of a kind of an incidental and incidental footnote. It wasn't quite like actually a woman turning up to Westminster and taking her seat in the chamber as it was for Nancy Astor in 1919, which was something which was um you know debated, discussed um and laughed about um both in a nice way and in a less nice way when it happened.
The End of Victorian Politics and Rise of Class-Based Politics
00:42:47
Speaker
This scene is seen a huge impact um for Ireland, for the Conservatives, for Labour, and especially for the Liberal Party, alongside expanding the franchise. It's it's clearly an incredibly important election.
00:43:04
Speaker
Why specifically do you think 1918 still matters? And it's the which of these is the most long-lasting, impactful piece of the 1918 election that we feel affects from?
00:43:18
Speaker
I think it's really the logical turning point where you see the end of Victorian politics. You see the end of politics being a more exclusive club that's based upon property, that is a more exclusive discourse, that is um contributed to by those who are more politically engaged, have more of a stake in politics, and towards something much more universal, much more unpredictable.
00:43:44
Speaker
The real outcomes, I think, of it are probably mainly in the parties. Now, it has been debated literally until the cows come home what it was that destroyed the Liberal Party, whether it was because they did not adapt to class politics in the Edwardian period when they were strong, when Labour were coming up behind them, whether they were run over by the rampant omnibus, as it's sometimes called, you know of the war um and the split that followed, or whether they could have just played their cards better, even from a weak position after the 1918 election result.
00:44:17
Speaker
But it's certainly true that given what happened to the Liberals after 1924, especially when they were cut down to 40 seats and they were gone to all extents and purposes as a major part in British politics, and with them, of course, the whole tradition of British liberalism, the whole tradition of, if you like, moderate centrism, of classless politics,
00:44:35
Speaker
confined to the past. And you definitely, given that happened, can see 1918 as the moment where politics changed in a way that made that possible. It's really arguable as to what would have happened had there not been the split, had the Liberals tried to stand in a way that had united their strength.
00:44:55
Speaker
Maybe the Liberals would have survived for longer, or maybe there was something that was just deep-seated, inexorable, and was sociologically changing beneath everything, which perhaps would have meant that this election, seismic though it was, perhaps more reflected underlying developments than it did that caused change.
00:45:13
Speaker
But I think it can best be understood as you know an enormous um democratic riot where many, many things were tossed into the air, where politics was done differently, the whole campaign happened differently, parties were confused, and the future looked uncertain.
00:45:31
Speaker
But the pieces fell, I think, in unpredictable places and played out throughout the 1920s. It was more of a mess, I think, than it was for anything else. But I think, you know, the winners, obviously the Conservatives, in the long term the Labour Party, the losers,
00:45:47
Speaker
first and foremost Sinn Féin, but also I think the Conservatives, really establishing themselves as the party of property, the party that could inherit the old sort of liberal mantle, and perhaps more importantly than any of other of those things, the dominant party of government in Britain.
Recommended Literature on the Liberal Party's Decline
00:46:03
Speaker
Perfect. Luke Black, so i have to say thank you very much. do you Do you have any further reading recommendations if any of our listeners would like to further educate themselves on 1918?
00:46:16
Speaker
It is a massive historiography, but I think if you are interested, as I am, especially in the decline of the British Liberal Party, I would recommend Trevor Wilson's Downfall, ah which describes really the end of liberalism.
00:46:30
Speaker
For a nostalgic ah kind of account of that, there is, of course, The Strange Death of Liberal England by um George Dangerfield, which is very, very famous. um Another about the Liberals and the Labour Party ah by Keith Leiborne, Liberalism and the Rise of Labour.
00:46:46
Speaker
um Those are are the three, I think, that really go into the kind of electoral ah nitty gritty. ah ah But if you wanted some others, you could look at David Thacker's Conservatism in the Democratic Age, which is about um Conservatives and how they adapted to the you know in the and in the interwar period. And I might also recommend my own article in the historical journal, which is about Lloyd George and the particular role he played and how far he can actually be held responsible for the collapse of British liberalism in the years that followed.
00:47:16
Speaker
Luke Blexel, it's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us on Observations to Chat About the 1918 election. And we look forward to seeing you again. My pleasure.
00:47:36
Speaker
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00:47:49
Speaker
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