The 1922 General Election Reconsidered : High Politics and the Birth of the Modern British Election

Abstract

Revisiting the high-stakes politics of 1922, G.H. Bennett unveils how one election transformed Britain’s electoral system and redefined party alliances for decades to come. The General Election of 15 November 1922 was a pivotal election in British political history. As parties adjusted to peacetime conditions and an electoral system changed forever by the enfranchisement of women and working-class men, the 1922 election stood as the first real test of party performance and engagement with voter priorities in a Britain fundamentally altered by the First World War. The result was a general election that would set national polling culture for the next century, and mark a significant step towards the decline of the Liberal Party and the emergence of a Conservative-Labour duopoly. This book examines the way the 1922 election was fought, the performance of the parties and the operation of a semi-official, but undeclared, party pact between the Conservative and Coalition Liberal Parties to manage the outcome, as they emerged from the Lloyd George Coalition and attempted to shut the Labour Party out of power. Capturing the high and the low politics of the election, and making use of newly available archival collections and digitised resources, this concise and accessible volume shows how the 1922 election marked the birth of the modern British general election as we know it today.