The1880 United Kingdom general election was held from 31 March to 27 April 1880. It saw theLiberal opposition triumph with 352 seats.
Its intense rhetoric was led by theMidlothian campaign of the Liberals, particularly the fierce oratory ofLiberal leaderWilliam Gladstone.[2] He vehemently attacked the foreign policy of the government ofBenjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, as utterly immoral. The endeavours of the Disraeli government inAfrica,India,Afghanistan andEurope, which were only partially successful and often accompanied by early, humiliating defeats, gave a good deal of fodder to Gladstone for his attacks. Further, Disraeli's favoured dealing with the Turks, who were responsible for horrendousatrocities against Balkan Christians also laid him open to religious attacks, especially in Gladstone's pamphlet “The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East” (1876). Gladstone's campaign was a synthesis of the two approaches in a populist manner adapted towardsliberalism.
Liberals secured one of their largest-ever majorities, leaving theConservatives a distant second. As a result of the campaign, the Liberal Commons leader,Lord Hartington and that in the Lords,Lord Granville, stood back in favour of Gladstone, who thus becamePrime Minister a second time. It was the last general election in which any partyother than the Conservatives won a majority of the total votes (rather than a mereplurality), as well the only time (except for1906) until1945 in which any party other than the Conservatives won a majority.
A painting by Alfred George Palmer of election night outsideExeter Guildhall in the collection of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (333/1997).
The Conservative government was doomed by the poor condition of the British economy and the vulnerability of its foreign policy to moralistic attacks by the Liberals. William Gladstone, appealing to moralistic evangelicals, led the attack on the foreign policy ofBenjamin Disraeli (now known as Lord Beaconsfield) as immoral.[3] HistorianPaul Smith paraphrases the rhetorical tone which focused on attacking "Beaconsfieldism" (in Smith's words) as a:
Sinister system of policy, which not merely involved the country in immoral, vainglorious and expensive external adventures, inimical to peace and to the rights of small peoples, but aimed at nothing less than the subversion of parliamentary government in favour of somesimulacrum of the oriental despotism its creator was alleged to admire.[4]
Smith notes that there was indeed some substance to the allegations, but: "Most of this was partisan extravaganza, worthy of its target's own excursions against theWhigs."[5]
Disraeli himself was now theEarl of Beaconsfield in theHouse of Lords, and custom did not allow peers to campaign; this denuded the Conservatives of other important figures such as theMarquess of Salisbury andLord Cranbrook, and the party was unable to deal effectively with the rhetorical onslaught.[6] Although he had improved the organisation of the Conservative Party, Disraeli was firmly based in the rural gentry, and had little contact with or understanding of the urban middle class that was increasingly dominating his party.
Besides their trouble with foreign policy issues, it was even more important that the Conservatives were unable to effectively defend their economic record on the home front. The 1870s coincided with along-term global depression caused by the collapse of the worldwide railway boom of the 1870s which previously had been so profitable to Britain. The stress was growing by the late 1870s; prices fell, profits fell, employment fell, and there was downward pressure on wage rates that caused much hardship among the industrial working class. Thefree trade system supported by both parties made Britain defenceless against the flood of cheap wheat fromNorth America, which was exacerbated by the worst harvest of the century in Britain in 1879. The party in power got the blame, and Liberals repeatedly emphasised the growing budget deficit as a measure of bad stewardship. In the election itself, Disraeli's party lost heavily up and down the line, especially in Scotland and Ireland, and in the urban boroughs. His Conservative strength fell from 351 to 238, while the Liberals jumped from 250 to 353. Disraeli resigned on 21 April 1880.[7]
Roberts, Matthew. "Election Cartoons and Political Communication In Victorian England.'Cultural & Social History (2013) 10#3 pp 369–395, covers 1860 to 1890.
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