1945 United Kingdom general election

← 1935 5 July 1945 1950 →
← outgoing members elected members →
All640 seats in theHouse of Commons 321 seats needed for a majority
Opinion polls
Turnout	24,073,025 72.8% (1.7pp)
First party Second party   Leader Clement Attlee Winston Churchill Party Labour Conservative Leader since 25 October 1935 9 October 1940 Leader's seat Limehouse Woodford Last election 154 seats, 38.0% 387 seats, 47.8% Seats won 393 197[a] Seat change 239 190 Popular vote 11,967,746 8,716,211 Percentage 49.7% 36.2% Swing 11.7pp 11.6pp   Third party Fourth party   Leader Archibald Sinclair Ernest Brown Party Liberal Liberal National Leader since 26 November 1935 1940 Leader's seat Caithness and Sutherland(lost seat) Leith (lost seat) Last election 21 seats, 6.7% 33 seats, 3.7% Seats won 12 11 Seat change 9 22 Popular vote 2,177,938 686,652 Percentage 9.0% 2.9% Swing 2.3pp 0.8pp
Colours denote the winning party – as shown in§ Results
Composition of theHouse of Commons after the election
Prime Minister before election Winston Churchill Conservative Prime Minister after election Clement Attlee Labour

The1945 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 5 July 1945.^[b] Withthe Second World War still fresh in the minds of voters, the oppositionLabour Party led byClement Attlee won a landslide victory with a majority of 146 seats, defeating the incumbentConservative-led government under Prime MinisterWinston Churchill. The result reflected widespread public concern about the future direction of the United Kingdom in thepost-war period.^[1]

The election's campaigning was focused on leadership of the country and its postwar future. Churchill sought to use his wartime popularity as part of his campaign to keep the Conservatives in power after awartime coalition had been in place since 1940 with the other political parties, but he faced questions from public opinion surrounding the Conservatives' actions in the 1930s and his ability to handle domestic issues unrelated to warfare. Clement Attlee, leader of theLabour Party, had been Deputy Prime Minister in thewartime coalition in 1940–1945 and was seen as a more competent leader by voters, particularly those who feared a return to the levels of unemployment in the 1930s and who sought a strong figurehead in British politics to lead the postwar rebuilding of the country. Opinion polls when the election was called showed strong approval ratings for Churchill, but Labour had gradually gained support for months before the war's conclusion.

Labour won alandslide victory, gaining 239 seats for a total majority of 146 with 49.7% of the popular vote, allowing Attlee to become prime minister.^[2] The party also won two seats in awalkover, the last time any seat in the House of Commons went uncontested in a general election.^[c] This was Labour's first outright majority and enabled Attlee to begin implementing the party'spost-war reforms.^[3] The result was a major shock for the Conservatives,^[4] who lost 189 seats despite winning 36.2% of the vote, having campaigned on the assumption that Churchill's wartime leadership would secure victory. TheLiberal Party suffered a net loss of nine seats and its leaderArchibald Sinclair lost his seat, while theLiberal National Party lost 22 seats, including that of its leaderErnest Brown. A total of 324 new MPs entered the House of Commons, a record that stood until2024.^[5] Additionally, the beginning of theAttlee ministry paralleled the beginning of theTruman administration in the United States.

The 11.7% swing from the Conservatives to an opposition party is the largest since theActs of Union 1800; the Conservative loss of the vote exceeded that of the1906 Liberal landslide ousting of a Conservative administration. It was also the first election since1906 in which the Conservatives did not win a plurality of the popular vote. Churchill remained actively involved in politics and returned as prime minister after leading his party into the1951 general election. For the Liberal National Party the election was their last as a distinct party, as they merged with the Conservatives in 1947 (although they operated as a subsidiary party of the Conservatives until 1968) while Ernest Brown resigned from politics in the aftermath of the election.

Held less than two months followingVE Day, this was the first general election since1935, as general elections had beensuspended by Parliamentduring the Second World War.Clement Attlee, the leader of theLabour Party, refusedWinston Churchill's offer of continuing thewartime coalition until the Allieddefeat of Japan. On 15 June, KingGeorge VI dissolved Parliament, which had been sitting for nearly ten years without an election.

The Labour manifesto,Let Us Face the Future, included promises ofnationalisation,economic planning,full employment, aNational Health Service, and a system ofsocial security. The manifesto proved popular with the electorate, selling one and a half million copies.^[6] The Conservative manifesto,Mr. Churchill's Declaration to the Voters, on the other hand, included progressive ideas on key social issues but was relatively vague on the idea of postwar economic control,^[7] and the party was associated with high levels of unemployment in the 1930s.^[8] It failed to convince voters that it could effectively deal with unemployment in a postwar Britain.^[9] In May 1945, when the war in Europe ended, Churchill's approval ratings stood at 83%, but the Labour Party had held an 18% poll lead as of February 1945.^[8]

The polls for some seats were delayed until 12 July and inNelson and Colne until 19 July because of localwakes weeks.^[10] The results were counted and declared on 26 July to allow time to transport the votes of those serving overseas.Victory over Japan Day ensued on 15 August.

Thecaretaker government, led by Churchill, was heavily defeated. The Labour Party led by Attlee won a landslide victory and gained a majority of 146 seats. It was the first election in which Labour gained a majority of seats and the first in which it won a plurality of votes.

The election was a disaster for theLiberal Party, which lost all of its urban seats, and marked its transition from being a party of government to a party of the political fringe.^[11] Its leader,Archibald Sinclair, lost his rural seat ofCaithness and Sutherland. That was the last general election until2019 in which a major party leader lost their seat, but Sinclair lost only by a handful of votes in a very tight three-way contest.

TheLiberal National Party fared even worse by losing two-thirds of its seats and falling behind the Liberals in seat count for the first time since the parties split in 1931. It was the final election that the Liberal Nationals fought as an autonomous party, as they merged with the Conservative Party two years later although they continued to exist as a subsidiary party of the Conservatives until 1968.

Future prominent figures who entered Parliament includedHarold Wilson,James Callaghan,Barbara Castle,Michael Foot andHugh Gaitskell. Future Conservative Prime MinisterHarold Macmillan lost his seat, but he returned to Parliament at aby-election later that year.

Ralph Ingersoll reported in late 1940:

"Everywhere I went in London people admired [Churchill's] energy, his courage, his singleness of purpose. People said they didn't know what Britain would do without him. He was obviously respected. But no one felt he would be Prime Minister after the war. He was simply the right man in the right job at the right time. The time being the time of a desperate war with Britain's enemies".^[12]

The historianHenry Pelling, noting that polls showed a steady Labour lead after 1942, pointed to long-term forces that caused the Labour landslide: the usual swing against the party in power, the Conservative loss of initiative, wide fears of a return to the high unemployment of the 1930s, the theme that socialist planning would be more efficient in operating the economy, and the mistaken belief that Churchill would continue as prime minister regardless of the result.^[13]

The greatest factor in Labour's dramatic win appeared to be its policy ofsocial reform. In one opinion poll, 41% of respondents considered housing to be the most important issue that faced the country, 15% stated the Labour policy of full employment, 7% mentioned social security, 6% nationalisation, and just 5% international security, which was emphasised by the Conservatives.

TheBeveridge Report, published in 1942, proposed the creation of a welfare state. It called for a dramatic turn in British social policy, with provision fornationalised healthcare, expansion ofstate-funded education,National Insurance and a newhousing policy. The report was extremely popular, and copies of its findings were widely purchased, turning it into a best-seller. The Labour Party adopted the report eagerly,^[4] and the Conservatives (including Churchill, who did not regard the reforms as socialist) accepted many of the principles of the report, but claimed that they were not affordable.^[15] Labour offered a new comprehensive welfare policy, reflecting a consensus that social changes were needed.^[3] The Conservatives were not willing to make the same changes that Labour proposed, and appeared out of step with public opinion.

Labour played to the concept of "winning the peace" that would follow the war. Possibly for that reason, there was especially strong support for Labour in thearmed services, which feared theunemployment andhomelessness to which the soldiers of theFirst World War had returned. It has been claimed that the left-wing bias of teachers in the armed services was a contributing factor, but that argument has generally not carried much weight, and the failure of the Conservative governments in the 1920s to deliver a "land fit for heroes" was likely more important.^[3]

Labour had also been given during the war the opportunity to display to the electorate its domestic competence in government, under men such as Attlee asDeputy Prime Minister,Herbert Morrison at theHome Office andErnest Bevin at theMinistry of Labour.^[7] The differing wartime strategies of the two parties likewise gave Labour an advantage. Labour continued to attack prewar Conservative governments for their inactivity in tackling Hitler, reviving the economy and rearming Britain,^[16] but Churchill was less interested in furthering his party, much to the chagrin of many of its members and MPs.^[8]

Though voters respected and liked Churchill's wartime record, they were more distrustful of the Conservative Party's domestic and foreign policy record in the late 1930s.^[7] Churchill and the Conservatives are also generally considered to have run a poor campaign in comparison to Labour. Churchill's personal popularity remained high; hence, the Conservatives were confident of victory and based much of their election campaign on that, rather than proposing new programmes. However, people distinguished between Churchill and his party, a contrast that Labour repeatedly emphasised throughout the campaign. Voters also harboured doubts over Churchill's ability to lead the country on the domestic front.^[3] The writer and soldierAnthony Burgess remarked that Churchill, who then often wore a colonel's uniform, was not nearly as popular with soldiers at the front as with officers and civilians. Burgess noted that Churchill often smokedcigars in front of soldiers who had not had a decentcigarette in days.^[17]

In addition to the poor Conservative general election strategy, Churchill went so far as to accuse Attlee of seeking to behave as a dictator, despite Attlee's service as part of Churchill's war cabinet. In the most famous incident of the campaign, Churchill's first election broadcast on 4 June backfired dramatically and memorably. Denouncing his former coalition partners, he declared that Labour "would have to fall back on some form of aGestapo" to imposesocialism on Britain.^[18] Attlee responded the next night by ironically thanking the prime minister for demonstrating to the people the difference between "Churchill the great wartime leader" and "Churchill the peacetime politician" and argued the case for public control of industry.

Another blow to the Conservative campaign was the memory of the 1930s policy ofappeasement, conducted by Churchill's Conservative predecessors,Neville Chamberlain andStanley Baldwin, that had been widely discredited for allowingAdolf Hitler's Germany to become too powerful.^[3] Labour had strongly advocated appeasement until 1938, but the interwar period had been dominated by Conservatives. With the exception of two brief minority Labour governments in 1924 and 1929–1931, the Conservatives had been in power for all of the interwar period. As a result, the Conservatives were generally blamed for the era's mistakes: appeasement,inflation and theunemployment of theGreat Depression.^[3] Many voters felt that although the First World War had been won, the peace that followed had been lost.

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All comparisons are with the winning party in the 1935 election; the aim is to provide a comparison with the previous general election. This list includes seats where the incumbent was standing down and therefore there was no possibility of a particular person being defeated.

• In some cases the sitting MP had changed to the gaining party. Such circumstances are marked with a *.
• In other circumstances the gaining party had won a by-election in the intervening years, and then retained the seat in 1945. Such circumstances are marked with a †.

• Nigel Colman (Brixton)
• Harold Macmillan (Stockton-on-Tees)

• Percy Harris (Bethnal Green South West)

Polls showed a lead for Labour since 1943, except for one poll in June 1945 when both Labour and the Conservatives tied on 45%.

• List of MPs elected in the 1945 United Kingdom general election
• 1945 United Kingdom general election in Northern Ireland
• 1945 United Kingdom general election in Scotland
• 1945 United Kingdom general election in England
• 1945 Prime Minister's Resignation Honours
• Attlee ministry

Wikimedia Commons has media related to1945 United Kingdom general election.

• Catalogue of general election ephemera held at LSE Archives
• "Labour Wins".Melbourne Argus. 27 July 1945.
• http://www.election.demon.co.uk/geresults.htmlArchived 30 January 2012 at theWayback Machine

• Mr. Churchill's Declaration of Policy to the ElectorsArchived 24 July 2012 at theWayback Machine, 1945 Conservative Party manifesto
• Let Us Face the Future, 1945 Labour Party manifesto
• 20 Point Manifesto of the Liberal PartyArchived 31 May 2012 at theWayback Machine, 1945 Liberal Party manifesto

• 1945 United Kingdom general election
• General elections to the Parliament of the United Kingdom
• 1945 elections in the United Kingdom
• July 1945 in the United Kingdom
• Electoral history of Winston Churchill
• Clement Attlee
• History of the Labour Party (UK)

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