February 1974 United Kingdom general election
A general election was held in the United Kingdom on Thursday 28 February 1974. The Labour Party, led by former Prime Minister Harold Wilson, gained seats, and became the largest party, but was short of an overall majority. The governing Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Edward Heath, lost seats, even though it polled a higher vote share than Labour. This resulted in the first hung parliament since 1929.
Heath sought a coalition with the Liberals, but the two parties failed to come to an agreement and so Wilson became prime minister for a second time, his first with a minority government. Wilson called another early election in September, which was held in October and resulted in a Labour majority. The February election was also the first general election to be held with the United Kingdom as a member state of the European Communities, which was widely known as the "Common Market".
Its results saw Northern Ireland diverging heavily from the rest of the United Kingdom, with all twelve candidates elected being from local parties after the decision of the Ulster Unionists to withdraw support from the Conservative Party in protest over the Sunningdale Agreement. The Scottish National Party achieved significant success at the election by increasing its share of the popular vote in Scotland from 11% to 22%, and its number of MPs from one to seven. Plaid Cymru also succeeded for the first time in getting candidates elected at a general election in Wales.
Although Heath's incumbent Conservative government polled the most votes by a small margin, the Conservatives were overtaken in terms of seats by Wilson's Labour Party because of a more efficiently distributed Labour vote. Ultimately, the decision by the seven Ulster Unionist MPs not to take the Conservative whip proved decisive in giving Labour a slim plurality of seats. The other four unionists elected were hardliners who were not affiliated with the UUP.
Both the Labour and the Conservative parties lost a considerable share of the popular vote, largely to the Liberal Party under Jeremy Thorpe's leadership, which polled two-and-a-half times its share of the vote in the previous election. However, even with over 6,000,000 votes, only 14 Liberal MPs were elected. There had been some media projections that the Liberals could take twice as many seats.
Given that it was not obvious who could command the support of the House, Heath did not resign immediately as prime minister. However, he knew that even if he could persuade all eleven of Northern Ireland's unionist MPs to support a Conservative government, at least on confidence matters, over one led by Wilson, he would still need the support of the Liberals to have a workable majority. Heath, therefore, started negotiations with Thorpe to form a coalition government. Thorpe, never enthusiastic about supporting the Conservatives, demanded major electoral reforms in exchange for such an agreement. Unwilling to accept such terms, Heath resigned, and Wilson returned for his second stint as Prime Minister.
The election night was covered live on the BBC and was presented by Alastair Burnet, David Butler, Robert McKenzie and Robin Day.
Prominent members of Parliament who retired or were defeated at the election included Gordon Campbell, Bernadette McAliskey, Enoch Powell, Richard Crossman, Tom Driberg and Patrick Gordon Walker. It was the first of two United Kingdom general elections held that year, the first to take place after the United Kingdom became a member of the European Communities on 1 January 1973, and the first since 1929 not to produce an overall majority in the House of Commons for the party with the most votes. This was also the first time since 1910 that two general elections were held in the same year.
Background
On 20 October 1973, a group of Arab nations led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia imposed a total oil embargo on the United States to punish the Americans for a perceived pro-Israel bias during the October war, which led to the so-called "oil shock" that plunged the world into the steepest recession since the Great Depression. The United Kingdom was not subject to the embargo, but the embargo led to the price of oil quadrupling worldwide in late 1973 as the shortage of oil in the United States made American consumers willing to pay higher oil prices, which in turn led to higher worldwide oil prices including in Britain as oil producers would not ship oil to nations that would not pay the same prices relative to American consumers. Oil was discovered in the North Sea in 1969, but only started to be pumped in 1975, making Britain in 1973–1974 almost entirely dependent upon imported oil. At the time, it was believed that oil from the North Sea would be extracted only by the end of the 1970s.. The end of the "long summer" of post-war prosperity caused an immense psychological shock in the Western nations, leading the Financial Times to run a famous headline in December 1973 reading: "The Future Will Be Subject to Delay".In December 1973 Heath warned in a series of speeches that because of the "oil shock" that the United Kingdom was headed into a recession and the British people should expect economic austerity. The need to avoid importing the now considerably more expensive oil to help manage the balance-of-payments led the Heath government to turn towards coal as a substitute source of energy, which gave the coal miners union immense leverage over the government to press for higher wages for the coal miners. Prior to the oil shock, the government could always threaten to convert electricity plants powered by coal to oil, a threat that could no longer be credibly made. In the years prior to the "oil shock", there had been a tendency to switch from coal to oil to power electricity plants, a policy that reduced the need for coal and hence coal miners. Heath offered the coal miners a 7% wage increase, which was rejected as insufficient by the miners who wanted a 35% wage increase. In late 1973-early 1974, Heath held a series of inconclusive meetings with Joe Gormley, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers. Several times, Heath threatened to call a snap election with the aim of seeking a mandate to oppose the demands of Gormley and the other union leaders, a tactic that was considered to be counterproductive by the union leaders. In a bid to save electricity, in December 1973 the Heath government passed a bill imposing a three-day work week that came into effect on 1 January 1974, which greatly contributed to the crisis atmosphere. Heath decided in early 1974 to call a snap election to provide him with the mandate to oppose the NUM. In the early 1970s, the Liberals under Jeremy Thorpe had won 5 by-elections and public opinion polls showed that the Liberals would win at least 20% of the popular vote in a general election. Heath calculated that under the first-the-post system that the Liberals would not be able to translate their support into winning many seats, but that the Liberals would draw away many Labour voters disenchanted with Harold Wilson.
Campaign
On Thursday 7 February, it was announced that Prime Minister Edward Heath had asked Queen Elizabeth II, who was then in New Zealand for the 1974 British Commonwealth Games, to dissolve Parliament for a general election to take place on 28 February. Because of the Queen's being abroad, the dissolution of parliament was required to be promulgated by Counsellors of State, in this case Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, on her express instructions. The severe economic circumstances in which the election was held prompted both The Sun and the Daily Mirror to characterise it as a "crisis election". Heath had been elected on a platform in 1970 that in some ways anticipated the policies later pursued by Margaret Thatcher as he called for less state involvement in the economy, but during his time in office he performed a series of "u-turns" that instead led to greater state involvement in the British economy, which had damaged his reputation. Heath by his various "u-turns" performed between 1970 and 1974 acquired the image of a leader who reacted to events instead of being a leader who shaped events, which contributed in part to his defeat in 1974. A number of ministers in Heath's government, most notably William Whitelaw, were opposed to calling an election in early 1974 and would preferred to wait until later in 1974 or even 1975 out of the hope the economy might be in better shape. With the notable exception of the question of British membership in the European Economic Community as the European Union was then called, foreign policy was not a factor in the election with the attention being paid mainly to domestic issues.On 10 February, the National Union of Mineworkers, as expected, went on strike, but it was more of a low-key affair than the high-profile clashes of 1972, with no violence and only six men on each picket line. Jim Prior later wrote that the miners had been "as quiet and well-behaved as mice". The Three-Day Week continued throughout the election, although Heath allowed the late-night television curfew to be lifted to allow more coverage of the campaign. The low profile of the miners' strike allowed worries over inflation to dominate the election. On 15 February, it was announced that the Retail Price Index showed a 20% increase in prices over the previous year.
On 21 February, the Pay Board released a report on miners' pay, which unexpectedly revealed that they were paid less than other manufacturing workers, contrary to the claims of the National Coal Board. That came as a severe blow to the Conservative position, and led to accusations that the National Coal Board did not understand its own pay system and that the strike was unnecessary. Further bad news for Heath and his party came four days later, with the latest trade figures showing that the current account deficit for the previous month had been £383,000,000, the worst in recorded history. Heath claimed the figures confirmed "the gravity of the situation" and the need for a new mandate, which prompted Roy Jenkins to quip: "He presumably thinks a still worse result would have given him a still stronger claim".
One of the most unexpected and explosive events of the campaign was when the outspoken Conservative MP Enoch Powell, who had already announced that he could not stand for re-election on the Conservative manifesto, urged people to vote against Heath for bringing about UK membership of the European Communities. In a speech in Birmingham on 23 February 1974, Powell claimed the main issue in the campaign was whether Britain was to "remain a democratic nation ... or whether it will become one province in a new Europe super-state"; he said it was people's "national duty" to oppose those who had deprived Parliament of "its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of the country". The speech prompted The Sun to run the headline "Enoch puts the boot in". A few days later, he said he hoped for victory by "the party which is committed to a fundamental renegotiation of the Treaty of Brussels and to submitting to the British People ... the outcome of that renegotiation". Those were the explicit manifesto promises of the Labour Party.
A further unforeseen blow to the Conservative campaign came on 26 February when Campbell Adamson, Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, was reported to have called for the repeal of the Heath Government's Industrial Relations Act and to have said that the Act had "sullied every relationship between employers and unions at national level". Adamson had been closely involved with the Downing Street talks over the mining dispute. Although Heath emphasised that Adamson was voicing a personal opinion and that his views did not express the official position of the CBI, he after the election acknowledged that the intervention had a negative impact on the Conservative campaign. Labour, meanwhile, cited Adamson's comments as proving the need "for everything they... been urging on the Government".