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The 1945 election stands out as a historic high point for the Labour Party. For the first of only two times in its history it took an absolute majority of the popular vote, and 458 seats, giving it a majority of 276. As one might expect, a number of dramatic factors caused this dramatic landslide.
Obviously, the biggest was Prime Minister Ernest Bevin’s enormous popularity and political capital after Britain’s victory in the Second World War two months before the election- even with nothing else it’s difficult to imagine a war leader losing an election in a scenario like Bevin had. But making it even more easy for Labour was the prominence in the public consciousness for the past two years of the Beveridge Report. Despite coming from a Liberal MP, its advocacy of Keynesian economics to create a demand-side economy, strong welfare state and minimal unemployment was vastly popular with the public after the disaster of the Great Depression, and Bevin and his party were wholeheartedly eager to implement it.
That leads onto the other problem his opponents faced- the Tories were badly divided over the report, or at least how to make its provisions happen. In order to distance themselves from the appeasement of Chamberlain and the truce of Halifax, they’d invited Winston Churchill back into the party and made him their new leader in 1940, and while he was as skilled a wartime propagandist as any, now that Britain was entering peace his hardline conservatism was brought into sharp focus. His campaign aggressively opposed what he perceived as the authoritarian underpinnings of a welfare state, and he claimed Labour would have to fall back on ‘some sort of Gestapo’ to implement it, a remark often considered as in particularly bad taste.
Further benefitting Labour was that Bevin was helping them enjoy a newfound legitimacy even among anti-Communists. Bevin had steadfastly fought communist agitation in the unions prior to becoming party leader, and at the Yalta Conference he had quite clearly sided with Roosevelt over Stalin, reassuring the public he would take a hard line against any far-left agitation on the continent. Ironically, the 1945 election was quite a good one for those to Labour’s left as well as the party itself, as the Independent Labour Party took three Glaswegian seats, seats won by the Independent Progressives in 1940 and the Common Wealth Party-held seat of Chelmsford remained loyal, and the CPGB and Independent Progressives took two each. The centrist and right-wing parties were thoroughly battered- the Tories took their fewest seats in history and recorded their worst voteshare since 1832, the Liberals fell to just twelve seats (including losing their leader, Sir Archibald Sinclair, to Labour) and the Liberal Nationals only won ten, contributing to their absorption by the Tories during the following Parliament.
On a more dubious note, Labour also did particularly well out of the way constituency boundaries had been redrawn for the first time since 1918. Every constituency twice the permitted maximum size was split into multiple seats, but undersized seats (like the ones in London and other inner cities where the Luftwaffe had performed particularly violent slum clearance) were left the same until 1950. To take a particularly drastic example, the Labour-inclined seat of Romford formed one seat in 1940, and was split into Barking, Dagenham, Hornchurch and Romford for 1945, all of which voted strongly for Labour, while the three seats comprising the Metropolitan Borough of Southwark (the population of which was just over half what it had been in 1931 by 1951) were kept intact. Some more Conservative-inclined figures (including Churchill in his memoirs) speculated that a Labour defeat would have been impossible on the 1945 boundaries.
In any case, Bevin won the biggest landslide Labour had ever seen or, as of this writing, ever has. The most admired wartime leader Britain had ever seen would have to prove he could lead the country just as ably during peacetime.
