The pact that conspired to put a PM back in No.10...
LAST week’s launch of the Remain Alliance, negotiated between the three main anti-Brexit parties wanting us somehow to stay in the EU – if necessary, through a second referendum – was instructive for both its content and media reception.
Modelled on the Liberal Democrats’ win in August’s Brecon and Radnorshire by-election, after the Greens and Plaid Cymru stood aside, the announced Alliance deal was that just one of the three parties would stand in 60 designated constituencies: Lib Dems in 43, Greens in ten, Plaid Cymru in seven.
Labour, while supporting a “final say” referendum, insisted it is not a Remain party and declined to join.
So apparently nonplussed were our media by this notion – parties working selflessly together for a common electoral purpose – that they resorted to the thesaurus.
Within the first 24 hours the alliance was also labelled an agreement, arrangement, campaign, deal, project and electoral pact – representing, according to one wildly over-excited report, “the first time parties have encouraged voters to switch their support to another candidate since the Coupon Election of 1918”.
Rubbish, of course.
Yes, the Remain Alliance is obviously much bigger than the numerous single-constituency electoral deals over the years. It is also different in kind from online tactical voting campaigns – like People’s Vote, Best for Britain and Gina Miller’s Remain United, all currently advising us how to help stop a Conservative majority.
But the Liberal Democrat party itself was a merger between the Liberals and Social Democratic
Party, that had campaigned together as an alliance at both the 1983 and 1987 elections. Not to mention, yet, Labour.
The Coupon Election reference, though, was interesting, and, having covered 1923 last week, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to complete a Post-exclusive set of “all previous December general elections’” So, here goes...
Labour may have opted out this time, but the first working-class MPs back in the 1870s were “Lib Labs” and since the 1900 founding of the Labour Party there have been at least four Lib-Lab pacts.
Most were post-electoral, like the 1924 agreement I noted last week, enabling Ramsay MacDonald to oust Conservative PM Stanley Baldwin and form the UK’s first Labour government.
The first pact, though, was wholly electoral; also the most secretive, one-sided, and arguably most historically significant. It was the 1903-06 deal negotiated between Herbert Gladstone, Chief Whip of the Liberal Party’s 180-plus MPs, and the same Ramsay MacDonald, then secretary of the Labour Representation Committee
(LRC), an undoubtedly growing force, but in 1903 comprising just five MPs.
The Liberals had their policy reasons, but in electoral practice the agreement was entirely one-way.
The party would withdraw candidates in some constituencies where the LRC was standing to ensure the anti-Conservative vote wasn’t split.
No quid pro quo – for Labour this really was something for nothing.
In the 1906 General Election, the Liberals achieved their main goal, sweeping the now divided Conservatives from office in a landslide. But, from just 50 LRC candidates, 24 of the 29 elected were in seats with no Liberal challenger. Labour’s parliamentary bridgehead was established, its future effectively secured.
The 24 included one Thomas Richards in Wolverhampton West. A full-time trade union official, the absence of Liberal opposition enabled him narrowly, and surely satisfyingly, to unseat the Conservative incumbent, Sir Alfred Hickman – a 1st Baronet, Freeman of Wolverhampton Borough, colliery proprietor and chairman of the new Tarmac company.
So to the General
Election on Saturday, December 14, 1918 – called immediately after the ending of the Great War on November 11.
David Lloyd George, notwithstanding all the kudos as successful war leader, still faced the consequences of having comprehensively split his own Liberal Party in displacing Herbert Asquith as Coalition PM in 1916.
To continue as peacetime PM, he had to retain the support of the coalition Conservatives, the price being letters of endorsement from himself and Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law, to those Conservatives and others supporting his retention in office – a form of wartime-style rationing that a cynical Asquith labelled “coupons”.
Deepening the divisions in an already split Liberal Party would have its longer-term costs, facilitating further the rise of Labour, but for now it was massively effective. Couponed coalition MPs secured a 473-seat landslide victory, comprising primarily 332 Conservatives and 127 Liberals, while Asquithian Liberals were reduced to just 36 seats.
The couponed majority, however, also included 10 MPs representing the National Democratic and Labour Party (NDLP), the breakaway right-wing, warsupporting faction of the Marxist British Socialist Party – one of whom would become, in among a solid phalanx of Coalition Conservatives, Birmingham’s first Labour MP, Eldred Hallas.
From a working-class Halifax background, the largely selfeducated Hallas came to
Birmingham in 1906 as resident lecturer at the very Edwardiansounding Birmingham Ethical and Psychical Society.
He soon, however, started attending and speaking at socialist meetings, and, following the 1911 Greater Birmingham Act doubling the size of the city, got himself elected as councillor – alongside the Chamberlains, Nettlefolds and Cadburys.
Hallas, however, became spokesman for the municipal workers, campaigning for better pay and an end to casual labour, then during the war becoming what his biographer, Prof Roger Ward, described as a “super-patriot”.
Working closely with Lord Mayor Neville Chamberlain, he became joint-founder of Birmingham’s unique Municipal Bank, designing savings books and encouraging workers to join.
Come the 1918 election, Chamberlain, by now Ladywood MP, persuaded the Duddleston and Nechells Unionist Party to support the NDLP Hallas as their candidate, and he was comfortably elected.
Parliament itself he quickly came to loathe, but that’s another story. Chris Game is a lecturer at the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of
Birmingham