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All 670 seats in the House of Commons 336 seats needed for a majority | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Turnout | 81.6% | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Colours denote the winning party | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The December 1910 United Kingdom general election was held from 3 to 19 December. It was the last general election to be held over several days [1] and the last to be held before the First World War.
The election took place following the efforts of the Liberal government to pass its People's Budget in 1909, which raised taxes on the wealthy to fund social welfare programmes. The 1909 budget was only agreed to by the House of Lords in April 1910 after the January general election in which the Liberals and the Irish Parliamentary Party gained a majority. The Government called a further election in December 1910 to get a mandate for the Parliament Act 1911, which would prevent the House of Lords from permanently blocking legislation linked to money bills ever again, and to obtain King George V's agreement to threaten to create sufficient Liberal peers to pass that act (in the event this did not prove necessary, as the Lords voted to curtail their own powers). [2]
The Conservative Party, led by Arthur Balfour with their Liberal Unionist allies, and the Liberal Party, led by Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, almost exactly repeated the numerical result produced in the January election, with the Conservatives again winning the largest number of votes. The Liberal Party under Asquith remained in government with the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party. This was the last election in which the Liberals won the highest number of seats in the House of Commons. It was also the last United Kingdom general election in which a party other than Labour or the Conservatives won the most seats.
Candidates | Votes | ||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Party | Leader | Stood | Elected | Gained | Unseated | Net | % of total | % | No. | Net % | |
Conservative and Liberal Unionist | Arthur Balfour | 548 | 271 | −1 | 40.4 | 46.6 | 2,270,753 | −0.3 | |||
Liberal | H. H. Asquith | 467 | 272 | −2 | 40.6 | 44.2 | 2,157,256 | +0.7 | |||
Labour | George Barnes | 56 | 42 | 5 | 3 | +2 | 6.3 | 6.4 | 309,963 | −0.6 | |
Irish Parliamentary | John Redmond | 81 | 74 | 5 | 2 | +3 | 11.0 | 1.9 | 90,416 | +0.7 | |
All-for-Ireland | William O'Brien | 21 | 8 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1.2 | 0.6 | 30,322 | +0.2 | |
Social Democratic Federation | H. M. Hyndman | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.1 | 5,733 | −0.1 | ||
Ind. Conservative | N/A | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 4,647 | ||
Independent Labour | N/A | 4 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.1 | 3,492 | |||
Independent Liberal | N/A | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | −1 | 0.0 | 1,946 | |||
Scottish Prohibition | Edwin Scrymgeour | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.0 | 913 | |||
Independent Nationalist | N/A | 4 | 2 | 0 | 1 | −1 | 0.3 | 0.0 | 911 | ||
Independent | N/A | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.0 | 57 |
The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning as an alliance of Whigs, free trade-supporting Peelites, and reformist Radicals in the 1850s, by the end of the 19th century, it had formed four governments under William Gladstone. Despite being divided over the issue of Irish Home Rule, the party returned to government in 1905 and won a landslide victory in the 1906 general election.
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The 1987 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 11 June 1987, to elect 650 members to the House of Commons. The election was the third consecutive general election victory for the Conservative Party, who won a majority of 102 seats and second landslide under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, who became the first Prime Minister since the Earl of Liverpool in 1820 to lead a party into three successive electoral victories.
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The 1918 United Kingdom general election was called immediately after the Armistice with Germany which ended the First World War, and was held on Saturday, 14 December 1918. The governing coalition, under Prime Minister David Lloyd George, sent letters of endorsement to candidates who supported the coalition government. These were nicknamed "Coalition Coupons", and led to the election being known as the "coupon election". The result was a massive landslide in favour of the coalition, comprising primarily the Conservatives and Coalition Liberals, with massive losses for Liberals who were not endorsed. Nearly all the Liberal MPs without coupons were defeated, including party leader H. H. Asquith.
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The 1906 United Kingdom general election was held from 12 January to 8 February 1906.
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In the United Kingdom, the word liberalism can have any of several meanings. Scholars primarily use the term to refer to classical liberalism. The term can also mean economic liberalism, social liberalism or political liberalism. It can simply refer to the politics of the Liberal Democrats, a UK party formed from the merger of two centrist parties in 1988. Liberalism can occasionally have the imported American meaning; however, the derogatory connotation is much weaker in the UK than in the US, and social liberals from both the left and right wing continue to use liberal and illiberal to describe themselves and their opponents, respectively.
The 1909/1910 People's Budget was a proposal of the Liberal government that introduced unprecedented taxes on the lands and incomes of Britain's wealthy to fund new social welfare programmes. It passed the House of Commons in 1909 but was blocked by the House of Lords for a year and became law in April 1910.
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The 1910 Edinburgh South by-election was a parliamentary by-election held for the House of Commons constituency of Edinburgh South in Scotland on 29 April 1910.
The 1912 Ilkeston by-election was a Parliamentary by-election held on 1 July 1912. The constituency returned one Member of Parliament (MP) to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, elected by the first past the post voting system.
The issue of Ireland has been a major one in British politics, intermittently so for centuries. Britain's attempts to control and administer the island, or parts thereof, have had significant consequences for British politics, especially in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although nominally autonomous until the end of the 18th century, Ireland became part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.