The British general election of 1935

On 14 November 1935 the British elected a new House of Commons. The National Government – a coalition of the Conservative Party with the small groups of National Liberals and National Labour – won some 430 of the 615 seats and just over half the votes cast. It was led by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. The Labour Party recovered some of its 1931 losses and returned to the Commons with 154 MPs. It was the last general election in Britain before 1945: the parliament elected that day lasted through the whole road to war, Munich, September 1939 and five years of fighting, and the next election was held only after Germany’s surrender.

It is sometimes said that in this election Stanley Baldwin replaced Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister. That is not accurate. The change of prime minister had taken place five months earlier, on 7 June 1935, without any election: the ailing MacDonald handed the office to Baldwin and himself took the honorific post of Lord President of the Council, which Baldwin had held until then. The November election thus did not bring Baldwin to power, but confirmed his government and gave it a fresh five-year mandate.

The National Government after four years

The National Government had been formed in August 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, when MacDonald abandoned his own party and took charge of a Cabinet composed mainly of Conservatives. In the election of October 1931 the coalition won more than 550 seats and Labour a mere 52. Over the following years the real master of the government was Baldwin, as leader of the largest party, while economic policy was directed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain. The government abandoned the gold standard, introduced tariffs and imperial preference, and cut interest rates. By 1935 the economy had clearly revived, especially in the south of England, although unemployment remained high in the old industrial areas of the North, Scotland and Wales. In the spring of 1935 the country celebrated the Silver Jubilee of George V with great festivity, which fostered a mood of contentment and stability.

The world looked more menacing. In 1931, after the Mukden incident, Japan occupied Manchuria, and the League of Nations failed to stop it. In 1933 Adolf Hitler took power in Germany, and that autumn he took Germany out of the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference. In March 1935 he revealed the existence of the Luftwaffe and reintroduced universal conscription. The British government, which until recently had hoped for general disarmament, began cautiously to rearm, above all in the air. On 22 May 1935 Baldwin admitted in the House of Commons that he had been wrong in his estimate of German air strength. A month later Britain concluded the naval agreement with Germany, which accepted the breach of the Treaty of Versailles and allowed Germany to build a fleet of up to 35 per cent of the British one.

The Peace Ballot

The public mood was revealed by a remarkable survey known as the Peace Ballot. It was organised by the League of Nations Union, an association led by Lord Robert Cecil. From the autumn of 1934 half a million volunteers went from door to door with a questionnaire of five questions. The results were announced on 27 June 1935 at a rally in the Royal Albert Hall: some 11.6 million people had responded, more than half the number who took part in the general election a few months later. More than 11 million wanted Britain to remain in the League of Nations, and more than 10 million supported general disarmament and a ban on the private manufacture and sale of arms. The most important was the fifth question, on whether nations should combine to stop an aggressor. Around 10 million favoured economic sanctions, and some 6.8 million military measures “if necessary”, with 2.4 million against.

The ballot was not a call for unconditional pacifism, as it was sometimes later portrayed, but an endorsement of collective security through the League of Nations. Politicians, however, took one message above all from it: voters did not want an arms race. Baldwin remembered the by-election in the London constituency of East Fulham in October 1933, when the Conservative lost a safe seat after a campaign in which his opponents accused the government of militarism. He believed that an open campaign for large-scale rearmament would end in defeat.

The Abyssinian crisis and the decision to go to the country

In the summer of 1935 Italy’s dispute with Ethiopia became the foremost international issue. Benito Mussolini was openly preparing to conquer the country of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Baldwin’s government, aware of the mood revealed by the ballot, decided to come forward as the defender of the League of Nations. On 11 September 1935 the new Foreign Secretary, Samuel Hoare, declared in Geneva that Britain stood for collective resistance to all acts of unprovoked aggression. On 3 October Italy attacked Ethiopia, and the League of Nations, with British support, declared it the aggressor and within a few weeks adopted economic sanctions. The government could thus go to the polls with the image of a resolute defender of international order.

The opposition at the time was in disarray. The Labour leader, the Christian pacifist George Lansbury, opposed sanctions that might lead to war. At the party conference in Brighton in early October the trade unionist Ernest Bevin attacked him fiercely, and the delegates backed sanctions. On 8 October Lansbury stood down, and his deputy, Clement Attlee, became interim leader of the party. Baldwin seized the moment. In the second half of October he called an election, and on 25 October Parliament was dissolved.

The campaign: the League of Nations and “no great armaments”

The National Government’s joint manifesto put the League of Nations at the centre of British foreign policy and promised that the government would not shrink from sanctions against Italy. At the same time it pledged to make good the deficiencies in the country’s defences, limited to what was necessary for the security of the country and the Empire. Chamberlain advised Baldwin to make rearmament the main theme of the campaign, since otherwise the government would later be accused of deceiving the voters. Baldwin chose caution. On 31 October, addressing the pacifist Peace Society, he gave an assurance: “I give you my word that there will be no great armaments.” In the constituencies, moreover, the main campaign issues were housing, unemployment and help for the depressed industrial areas.

Labour accused the government of preparing a costly rearmament programme under cover of the League of Nations. Its deputy leader, Arthur Greenwood, called Chamberlain’s statements on rearmament scaremongering. The Liberals under Herbert Samuel were divided and short of money. David Lloyd George ran a separate campaign for a British “New Deal” modelled on Roosevelt’s programme, but failed to unite the Liberals before the election.

The results

Turnout was 71.1 per cent. The Conservatives won 387 seats, counting the Speaker of the House of Commons, and 47.8 per cent of the vote. Together with the National Liberals (33 seats) and National Labour (8 seats), the National Government had some 430 MPs and a majority of more than 240. Labour won 38 per cent of the vote, the highest in its history to that point, and 154 seats, three times as many as in 1931. The Liberals fell to 21 seats, and Samuel lost his own. The Independent Labour Party won four seats, and the Communist William Gallacher won the Scottish mining constituency of West Fife, becoming the only Communist in the House of Commons.

The most symbolic defeat was MacDonald’s. In the mining constituency of Seaham he lost to his former party comrade Emanuel Shinwell, and his son Malcolm also lost his seat. Both returned to Parliament in by-elections early in 1936. Winston Churchill, for several years the loudest critic of German rearmament and British dilatoriness, remained outside the government. Baldwin did not invite him into the Cabinet. In late November and early December Labour MPs, in two rounds of voting, elected Attlee as their permanent leader.

To this day it remains the last British general election in which a single party or bloc won more than half of all the votes cast.

A mandate quickly spent

Only a few weeks after the election, confidence in the government was badly shaken. In early December Hoare and the French Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, agreed a plan to end the war in Ethiopia that would hand Italy a large part of its territory. When the French press revealed its contents, there was an outcry in Britain: a government that had just won an election as the defender of the League of Nations was ready to reward the aggressor. The Hoare–Laval Pact collapsed, and on 18 December Hoare resigned. He was replaced by Anthony Eden. The sanctions against Italy, however, did not extend to oil, Britain did not close the Suez Canal, and in the spring of 1936 Mussolini conquered Ethiopia.

Significance

The election of November 1935 shaped British policy for the whole period leading up to the war. The same parliament, elected on a programme of loyalty to the League of Nations and limited rearmament, accepted the remilitarisation of the Rhineland without response in March 1936, saw Chamberlain succeed Baldwin as prime minister in 1937, and in 1938 applauded the Munich Agreement. After the election the government launched a more serious rearmament programme: in 1936 a Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence was appointed and work began on the so-called shadow factories for the aircraft industry. Their fruits – modern fighters and the radar network – arrived, however, only just before the war.

A year later, on 12 November 1936, Baldwin confessed in the House of Commons with “appalling frankness” that he could not have gone to the country in 1933–1934 with a rearmament programme, because he would have lost. His critics, led by Churchill, took this as an admission that he had put party interest before national security, and applied his words to the 1935 campaign as well. Historians still debate whether Baldwin’s caution was a cynical evasion or a realistic assessment of a pacifist public that could not have been persuaded to rearm any faster. What is certain is that the House of Commons elected on 14 November 1935 was the one that in May 1940, in the midst of war, withdrew its confidence from Chamberlain and opened the way to power for Churchill.