Labour wins the election

On 26 July 1945 Britain declared the results of its first election to the House of Commons in ten years. Clement Attlee’s Labour Party won a landslide: according to the most commonly cited figures it took 393 of the 640 seats, against 197 for Winston Churchill’s Conservative Party (just over 210 with its allies). For the first time in its history Labour had an overall majority in Parliament – and one of 146 seats. That same evening Churchill, the leader who had brought the country through the hardest years of the war, tendered his resignation to King George VI, and Attlee became the new Prime Minister.

War chronologies usually sum up the day by saying that Attlee “replaced Churchill and immediately flew to the negotiating table at Potsdam”. This is a simplification. The polling itself had taken place on 5 July, and the count had been postponed for three weeks so that the ballots of servicemen scattered across the world could be gathered in. Nor was Attlee a newcomer at Potsdam: from the start of the conference, which opened on 17 July, he had taken part in it as a member of the British delegation at Churchill’s invitation. On 25 July both men returned to London to learn the results, and on 28 July Attlee flew back to Potsdam – now as Prime Minister, accompanied by the new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin.

The end of the wartime coalition

Britain’s last general election had been held in November 1935. The life of Parliament, normally five years, had been extended year by year during the war, and since May 1940 the country had been governed by a coalition of Conservatives, Labour and Liberals, formed when Churchill became Prime Minister. Attlee was its Deputy Prime Minister and Churchill’s closest colleague, and Labour ministers – Bevin at the Ministry of Labour, Herbert Morrison at the Home Office – ran a large part of wartime domestic policy. An electoral truce was in force between the parties: they did not put up candidates against each other at by-elections.

After Germany’s surrender Churchill proposed extending the coalition until victory over Japan. Attlee was inclined to agree, but the Labour Party conference at Blackpool rejected the proposal and demanded an election in the autumn. Churchill did not want to wait: on 23 May 1945 the coalition broke up and the Prime Minister formed an interim, predominantly Conservative administration known as the “caretaker government”. On 15 June the King dissolved Parliament, and polling was set for 5 July. In a few constituencies in Lancashire and Scotland, because of local holiday weeks, voting took place a week or two later.

The campaign was fought in a country still at war. Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were fighting in the Pacific and in Burma, while in June the demobilisation of the first age groups began. Servicemen also had the vote – they could vote by post or by proxy. It was their ballots, flown in from Europe, Africa, India and Burma, that led to the ballot boxes being sealed and the count being postponed until 26 July.

Two campaigns

The Conservatives built their campaign above all around the Prime Minister. Churchill’s popularity was immense – according to Gallup polls in May 1945, more than 80 per cent of Britons approved of his performance – and his programme, “Mr Churchill’s Declaration of Policy to the Electors”, did promise social reform, but without specifics on the economy. Labour issued its manifesto “Let Us Face the Future”, which promised the nationalisation of key industries, economic planning, full employment, house-building, a universal health service and a system of social insurance. According to figures cited in the literature, the manifesto sold one and a half million copies.

The foundation of Labour’s programme was the Beveridge Report of 1942, in which William Beveridge proposed a system of social security “from the cradle to the grave”. The report became a bestseller; the Conservatives accepted many of its principles but stressed that the country could not afford to introduce them quickly. In the eyes of the voters it was Labour that became the party that really meant to put the report into practice.

The most memorable episode of the campaign was Churchill’s first radio broadcast, delivered on 4 June. The Prime Minister warned that a socialist government, in order to impose its programme, “would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance”. These words – spoken a few weeks after the liberation of the concentration camps and aimed at men with whom he had sat in the War Cabinet for five years – did most damage, in the view of most historians, to Churchill himself. Attlee replied the following evening with a calm broadcast in which he ironically thanked the Prime Minister for showing the voters the difference between Winston Churchill, the great war leader, and Mr Churchill, the leader of the Conservative Party.

The Conservatives also tried to exploit a dispute over the role of Harold Laski, chairman of Labour’s National Executive Committee. When Churchill invited Attlee to Potsdam, Laski declared publicly that the Labour leader could attend only as an observer and could not share responsibility for British policy. Churchill and the press sympathetic to him, especially Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers, presented this as proof that a Labour government would be controlled by an unelected party machine. Attlee replied that he would go to Potsdam as a full member of the delegation.

Results day

Churchill and Attlee flew from Potsdam to London on 25 July. The conference was adjourned for a few days; both men expected to return to it together. Most observers, including the Prime Minister himself, expected a Conservative victory, although the polls had consistently put Labour ahead since 1943 – at the time, however, little weight was attached to them. The count began on the morning of 26 July, and by midday it was clear that the Conservatives were heading for defeat. Among those who lost their seats were ministers from Churchill’s government – Harold Macmillan, Leo Amery and Brendan Bracken – and, on the Liberal side, the leader of the Liberal Party, Archibald Sinclair, who came third in his Scottish constituency in an extremely close three-way contest, only 61 votes behind the winner, and Beveridge himself, Liberal MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed since 1944. The Liberals won only 12 seats. Churchill held his Woodford constituency, where neither Labour nor the Liberals stood against him, but an independent rival polled more than 10,000 votes there.

According to the most commonly cited figures, Labour received nearly 12 million votes, or about 48 per cent (depending on the method of counting, figures from just under 48 to nearly 50 per cent are given), and the Conservatives and their allies about 40 per cent. The swing from the Conservatives to the opposition was the largest in any British election of the twentieth century. More than three hundred new members entered the House of Commons; among the Labour intake were the future Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. The Communists won two seats.

On the evening of 26 July Churchill drove to Buckingham Palace and resigned. The King, who received the result with evident regret, offered him the Order of the Garter; Churchill declined (he accepted it only in 1953). According to an anecdote passed on by his biographers, when his wife Clementine tried to console him that defeat might prove a blessing in disguise, he replied that at the moment it seemed quite effectively disguised. In his farewell statement he thanked the nation for its support during the war years and observed that the new government would still have heavy work ahead of it – the war with Japan was still going on. A little later the King received Attlee and invited him to form a government.

Why Churchill lost

The Conservative defeat surprised the world, especially the Americans and the Russians, for whom Churchill was the personification of Britain’s war. Historians agree, however, that it was a verdict not on Churchill as war leader but on his party. Voters remembered that between the wars, apart from brief spells of minority Labour government in 1924 and 1929–1931, the Conservatives had been in power – and so they remembered the unemployment of the Depression, the poverty of the industrial areas and the policy of appeasing Hitler. Many people felt that after 1918 the war had been won but the peace lost, and that the promised “land fit for heroes” had never been built.

The war had also changed social expectations. A state that for six years had rationed food, directed people into work, evacuated children and planned production seemed capable of providing jobs, homes and health care in peacetime too. In one 1945 poll 41 per cent of respondents named housing as the most important issue facing the country, and only 5 per cent international security. Labour had shown in five years of coalition government that it could run the country’s affairs, and its campaign promised to “win the peace”.

A significant role is attributed to the service vote. According to many accounts, the mood among the rank and file and the NCOs, who remembered the fate of the veterans of the First World War, was distinctly pro-Labour, although its exact effect on the result cannot be measured. The Conservatives later blamed the forces’ current-affairs education courses, allegedly run by left-wing lecturers; most historians regard this argument as exaggerated.

Attlee’s government and the return to Potsdam

Attlee assembled his government within a few days. According to the original plans, Hugh Dalton was to become Foreign Secretary and Bevin Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the end the roles were reversed: Bevin took the Foreign Office and Dalton the Treasury. The reasons for the change are disputed – some historians attribute it to a suggestion from the King, who noted in his diary that he had advised Attlee to send the tough Bevin to negotiate with the Russians, while others believe that Attlee’s main aim was to keep apart Bevin and Morrison, who were at odds. Morrison became Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, Stafford Cripps President of the Board of Trade, and Aneurin Bevan Minister of Health.

On 28 July Attlee and Bevin flew to Potsdam, and that evening the conference resumed. The change at the table in Cecilienhof Palace took Stalin above all by surprise; according to participants’ accounts, he had been convinced that Churchill would win the election easily. Yet British foreign policy showed more continuity than expected. The delegation was supported by the same officials, led by Alexander Cadogan, and Attlee knew all the contested issues from the deliberations of the War Cabinet and from the first week of the conference. In the view of historians, Bevin defended British positions on reparations and frontiers just as firmly as his predecessor Anthony Eden. The new Prime Minister also took on joint responsibility for decisions that had already been made – including Britain’s consent to the use of the atomic bomb against Japan, given by Churchill’s government at the beginning of July, the weapon whose existence Truman had mentioned to Stalin on 24 July. On the same day, 26 July, the call for Japan’s unconditional surrender was issued at Potsdam; its text had been approved by Churchill before he left for London, and the new government adopted it as its own.

The Poles and the change of government

The election result was received with anxiety among the Poles in the West. Three weeks earlier, on 5 July, Britain and the United States had recognised the Provisional Government of National Unity set up in Warsaw and withdrawn recognition from the Polish government-in-exile of Prime Minister Tomasz Arciszewski. Ambassador Edward Raczyński had ceased to be Poland’s official representative in London. Although it was Churchill who in February at Yalta had accepted the eastern frontier on the Curzon Line and the formula for “reorganising” the Lublin government, many émigrés saw him as the last British politician who felt a personal obligation towards Poland and its soldiers. The Labour Party, whose left wing included no shortage of sympathisers with the Soviet Union, was seen as far less well disposed.

These fears concerned above all the future of the Polish Armed Forces, including General Władysław Anders’s II Corps in Italy. Anders and most of the émigré politicians refused to return to a country ruled by communists; in accounts from those weeks the change in Downing Street appears as yet another blow after the Yalta Conference and the withdrawal of recognition. In practice Attlee’s government continued its predecessor’s line: at Potsdam Bevin accepted the provisional placing of the lands east of the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse under Polish administration, and in the following months he encouraged Polish soldiers to return home – yet in 1946 the government also created the Polish Resettlement Corps, which enabled most of them to settle in Britain. With an Act of 1947 Labour opened the way for them to stay in Britain permanently.

The welfare state

The most lasting result of the 1945 election proved to be the transformation of the British state. Over the next six years Attlee’s government nationalised the Bank of England (1946), the coal industry (1947), the railways, transport and electricity (1948), gas (1949) and iron and steel (1951). The National Insurance Act of 1946 introduced a universal system of benefits for sickness, unemployment and old age, broadly in line with Beveridge’s proposals. On 5 July 1948 – exactly three years after polling day – the National Health Service began operating: a free, tax-funded health service created by Bevan. The government also built hundreds of thousands of council houses and expanded education.

All this took place in a country financially ruined by the war. When in August 1945 the United States abruptly ended Lend-Lease deliveries, Britain had to take out a huge American loan, and food rationing lasted until 1954. Yet the welfare state model built by Labour was accepted in its main outlines by the Conservatives as well, who returned to power in 1951 – with Churchill again as Prime Minister. This cross-party consensus endured in British politics until the 1970s.

Its place in the war

The election of July 1945 was an exceptional event: while the war was still going on, one of the three victorious powers removed from office, by a peaceful democratic procedure, the leader whose name was synonymous with British resistance to Hitler. The change came in the very middle of a conference that was to settle the post-war order in Europe, yet it disrupted neither the course of the conference nor the conduct of the war against Japan – Attlee took over smoothly, and in the following weeks it was his government that accepted Japan’s surrender and began dismantling the war economy.

For Britain it was also the end of an era. Instead of restoring the pre-war order, Attlee’s government set about rebuilding the state and, within a few years, withdrawing from empire – in 1947 India and Pakistan gained independence. Churchill, though defeated at the polls, remained Leader of the Opposition and one of the most listened-to politicians in the world; his “iron curtain” speech at Fulton in March 1946 became one of the symbolic beginnings of the Cold War, in which the Labour government of Attlee and Bevin, co-founders of NATO, stood firmly on the side of the West.