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1951–1955 Parliament of the United Kingdom | |||||
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Overview | |||||
Legislative body | Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||||
Term | 26 October 1951 – 5 April 1955 | ||||
Election | 1951 United Kingdom general election | ||||
Government | Third Churchill ministry | ||||
House of Commons | |||||
Members | 625 | ||||
Speaker | Douglas Clifton Brown William Morrison | ||||
Leader | Harry Crookshank | ||||
Prime Minister | Sir Winston Churchill | ||||
Leader of the Opposition | Clement Attlee | ||||
Third-party leader | Clement Davies | ||||
House of Lords | |||||
Lord Chancellor | Viscount Simonds Earl of Kilmuir |
This is a list of members of Parliament elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom at the 1951 general election, held on 25 October 1951. A total of 625 MPs were elected.
Notable newcomers to the House of Commons included Anthony Barber, Lord Lambton and Ted Short.
These representative diagrams show the composition of the parties in the 1951 general election.
Note: This is not the official seating plan of the House of Commons, which has five rows of benches on each side, with the government party to the right of the speaker and opposition parties to the left, but with room for only around two-thirds of MPs to sit at any one time.
Affiliation | Members | |
Conservative Party* | 302 | |
Labour Party | 295 | |
National Liberal* | 19 | |
Liberal Party | 6 | |
Independent Nationalist | 2 | |
Irish Labour | 1 | |
Total | 625 | |
Effective government majority | 16 (total strength) |
This is a complete list of Members of Parliament elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom at the 1951 general election on 25 October 1951.
° Frank Collindridge, the sitting MP for Barnsley, died during the campaign. A special election took place on 8 November .
See the list of United Kingdom by-elections.
The politics of the United Kingdom functions within a constitutional monarchy where executive power is delegated by legislation and social conventions to a unitary parliamentary democracy. From this a hereditary monarch, currently Charles III, serves as head of state while the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, currently Rishi Sunak, serves as the elected head of government.
The politics of Scotland operate within the constitution of the United Kingdom, of which Scotland is a constituent country. Scotland is a democracy, being represented in both the Scottish Parliament and the Parliament of the United Kingdom since the Scotland Act 1998. Most executive power is exercised by the Scottish Government, led by the First Minister of Scotland, the head of government in a multi-party system. The judiciary of Scotland, dealing with Scots law, is independent of the legislature and the executive. Scots law is primarily determined by the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Government shares some executive powers with the Government of the United Kingdom's Scotland Office, a British government department led by the Secretary of State for Scotland.
The 1951 United Kingdom general election was held twenty months after the 1950 general election, which the Labour Party had won with a slim majority of just five seats. The Labour government called a snap election for Thursday 25 October 1951 in the hope of increasing its parliamentary majority. However, despite winning the popular vote and achieving both the highest-ever total vote until it was surpassed by the Conservative Party in 1992 and again in 2019 and the highest percentage vote share, Labour won fewer seats than the Conservative Party. That was caused mainly by the collapse of the Liberal vote, which enabled the Conservatives to win seats by default. The election marked the return of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister and the beginning of Labour's 13-year spell in opposition. It was the third and final general election to be held during the reign of King George VI, as he died the following year on 6 February and was succeeded by his daughter, Elizabeth II. It was the last election in which the Conservatives did better in Scotland than in England.
Following is a list of past United Kingdom MPs in alphabetical order.
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The representation of women in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom has been an issue in the politics of the United Kingdom at numerous points in the 20th and 21st centuries. Originally debate centred on whether women should be allowed to vote and stand for election as Members of Parliament. The Parliament Act 1918 gave women over 21 the right to stand for election as a Member of Parliament. The United Kingdom has had three female Prime Ministers: Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990), Theresa May (2016–2019), and Liz Truss (2022). The publication of the book Women in the House by Elizabeth Vallance in 1979 highlighted the under-representation of women in Parliament. In more modern times concerns about the under-representation of women led the Labour Party to introduce and, decades later, abandon all-women short lists, something which was later held to breach discrimination laws.
The fifty-fifth Parliament of the United Kingdom was the legislature of the United Kingdom following the 2010 general election of members of parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons. Parliament, which consists of the House of Lords and the elected House of Commons, was convened on 25 May 2010 at the Palace of Westminster by Queen Elizabeth II. It was dissolved on 30 March 2015, being 25 working days ahead of the 2015 general election on 7 May 2015.