Minor Parties and Minority M.P.'s, 1945-1955

• DOI: 10.1177/106591295901200410
• Author: William S. Livingston
• Date: 01 December 1959
• Published date: 01 December 1959
• Subject Matter: Articles

MINOR PARTIES AND MINORITY M.P.’s, 1945-1955
WILLIAM S. LIVINGSTON
University of Texas
HE
BRITISH SYSTEM of political parties is a two..party system more
t
in the results it achieves than in the competition it displays. The
JL. general elections since the war have regularly produced a House of
Commons dominated by the two major parties but in each of the four elec-
tions the minor-party and independent candidates have constituted an im-
portant part of the electoral scene. While they have not often won seats,
they have nonetheless affected the competition between the major parties
and have distorted the results of the elections themselves. The purpose of
the present article is to attempt as precise as possible an assessment of the
effect of these &dquo;minor&dquo; candidates upon the major-party competition and
upon the election results.
THE MINOR CANDIDATES
In the four general elections, 2,520 seats have been at stake and a total of
6,336 candidates have offered themselves for these places. Approximately
23 per cent of these candidates (1,460) have come from outside the ranks
of the Labour and Conservative parties; about three-fourths, therefore, have
been major-party candidates. Seventy-seven of these minor candidates have
led the poll and 147 more have come in second - figures that are by no
means niggardly in a scheme traditionally described as a &dquo;two-party system.&dquo;
The minor parties have competed for almost exactly half of the 2,520 seats,
more precisely for 1,243 or 49.33 per cent. But lumping all these candidates
together and calling them &dquo;minor&dquo; gives a false impression, for, while some
are important and serious candidates, many are facetious or hopeless, and
several received only a few hundred votes. If we disregard the consistent
success of the Irish nationalist groups in the southern counties of Ulster, the
principal minor-party candidacies have come from the Liberal and Commu-
nist parties. While these two groups have virtually nothing else in common,
they do share the unfortunate habit of putting up a number of candidates
without achieving much in the way of electoral success. All together, their
candidates have totaled 1,148 in the four elections, or more than three-
fourths of the minor candidacies, and they have won 35 of the 77 seats
mentioned above. It is principally to the Liberals and Communists that we
must look, therefore, if we are to assess the significance of the minor-party
competition in the four general elections under examination.
It will be useful to examine briefly the whole array of candidacies in the
four elections, for which purpose Table I conveniently assembles most of
the relevant data. It will be seen at once that 1945 and 1950 were the two
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1020
biggest years for the minor candidates. Not only is the number of minor
parties greater in those elections, but the number of candidates classified
as &dquo;independent&dquo; is also considerably greater. The election of 1945 was ill-
prepared : the electoral register was in bad shape; the European war had
just been ended; constituency organizations were poorly prepared to fight
an election; and the parties were just emerging from the wartime electoral
truce. As a result, the major parties did not put up full slates of candidates
for the 640 seats at stake, and a great number of other candidates sprang
into battle. A
total of 1,683 candidates offered themselves, 31 per cent from
outside the two major groups. Most of the seats did, of course, go to the
Conservative and Labour parties, but no less than 35 went to victorious
minor candidates.
In 1950, and in the two subsequent elections as well, the major parties
have contended for all but a scant handful of seats. In 1950, moreover, the
two most important minor parties, the Liberals and Communists, put up a
far greater number of candidates than they had offered in 1945. Finally, al-
though some of 1945’s minor groups had now disappeared -
some by atro-
phy, some by absorption -
several new ones had taken their places. In
consequence the number of candidates was greater in 1950 than in any other
election, before or since. The success of the minor groups, however, did not
match their enthusiasm. Instead of 35 successful candidates, there were only
11. Of the Communists’ 100 candidates, 97 lost their deposits and the party
as a whole actually received fewer votes than it had won with only 21 candi-
dates in 1945. Of the 475 Liberals, 319 lost their deposits, and the decline
of this once great party continued as its parliamentary representation was re-
duced from 12 to 9 seats. Not a single &dquo;independent&dquo; was elected, nor has
one been elected since that time.* Even so, as the subsequent analysis will
demonstrate, the minor candidates exercised a tremendous influence on the
outcome of the 1950 election.
In 1951 and 1955 the number of candidates sharply declined, owing
mainly to the drastic reduction in the slates of the Communists and Liberals.
The major parties continued to contest virtually every seat and in 1955, for
the first time in history, there were no unopposed candidates at all. Al-
though the pattern of competition is by no means the same throughout, the
minor-party and independent candidates have continued to elect a sprin-
kling of M.P.’s. But the real significance of their competition is to be found
in other considerations.
MINORITY SEATS
A more important measure of the significance of these minor candi-
dacies is found in the number of instances in which their entry prevented the
* The article deals only with the first four postwar elections. One independent was
elected in 1959.

---

1021
election of an M.P. by a majority vote of the constituency. One of the prin-
cipal virtues regularly claimed for a two-party system is that it produces
automatic majorities in both the constituency and the Parliament. In Bri-
tain, however, owing to the great number of instances in which seats have
been contested by three or more candidates,’ there has been a surprising
number of members elected by less than a majority vote in the constituency.
In 1945 there were 174 such M.P.’s; in 1950, when the number of candi-
dates rose to 1,868, there were 188; in 1951 and 1955 the figure dropped to
39 and 37 respectively. Thus in the four elections a total of 438 M.P.’s have
been returned by the votes of less than a majority. This constitutes 17.72
per cent of the total number of M.P.’s elected, but, more significantly, it con-
stitutes 39.25 per cent of the 1,116 seats for which three or more candidates
offered themselves.2 These figures themselves are important in a presumedly
two-party system, and they regularly call out the scorn of the refarmers.3
3
But our concern here is with how such minority representatives are produced
and in particular with the effect they have had on the election results.
TABLE II
MINORITY SEATS
One of the most interesting questions posed by these minority seats is
what would have happened to the major parties if the intrusion of minor
candidates had not produced a minority result, that is, how would the elec-
tion have come out if the minor candidates had not been running? The an-
swer to such a question can only be highly speculative, but there is a way
by which an answer can be sought -
systematically though not necessarily
with perfect accuracy. For example, if the Communists had not entered
a candidate in a given race, it is by no means certain that all those who voted
Communist would have voted at all, or, if they had voted, we cannot know
with certainty which of the remaining candidates they would have sup-
ported. The best guess we can make, however, is that such votes would most
1
The average in the four elections under review has been 2.51 candidates per seat.
2
Neither of these calculations takes account of the 39 seats still embraced in 1945 in multi-
member constituencies.
3
See, for example, J. F. S. Ross, Elections and Electors (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode,
1955), chap. 15; Enid Lakeman and J. D. Lambert, Voting in Democracies (London:
Faber, 1955), chap. 3.

---

1022
likely have gone to the Labour candidate. Therefore, while conceding that
the accuracy of the result may be impugned, we propose here to assume
that if no Communist candidates had appeared, all Communist votes would
have gone to the Labour candidates where such were available. The same
kind of assumption can be established for most of the minor-party candi-
dates, always with some presumption, but never with any assurance, of ac-
curacy. We
can then reconstruct the results in each of the constituencies
involved and find a tentative answer to two...