What was the biggest election landslide in the uk?

Answer 1

Defining the "biggest landslide" in the UK is difficult to do - because different people have a different idea of what qualifies as the "biggest" landslide. This is in part due to the way in which the UK electoral system does not neatly translate popular support into seats - for example, in 1997 the winning party won more than 400 seats in the House of Commons for only the third time since 1900, but it did so with a lower share of the vote than the losing party had in the 1951, 1955, 1959, 1964 or 1970 general elections!

So disagreement can arise depending on whether or not you want to judge the biggest landslide in terms of seats, votes or a reasoned mix of both. The answer also changes depending on whether you count elections before 1928, when every adult man and woman could vote on equal terms (equal suffrage). These are all the possible ways of describing the biggest election landslide:

• Biggest landslide in % of votes won (ever): The biggest share of the vote ever was for the Whig Party in 1832, when it won 67.0% of the vote against 29.2% for the Tories and an overall majority of 224 (441 seats).
• Biggest landslide in % of votes won (under equal suffrage): At the 1955 general election, the Conservative group in Parliament won 49.74% of the popular vote - the highest share on record, slightly ahead of the Labour Party in 1945, which won 49.71% of the vote.
  
  There is an important difference between these two, however. In 1945, if you exclude Northern Ireland (where Labour has not nominated election candidates since 1913), Labour won more than 50% of the vote in Great Britain. In contrast, the 1955 result includes votes for the Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, which at the time was one of three parties in the Conservative group in Parliament (the others being the Conservative Party itself and the small Liberal National Party, now defunct).
  
  As such, all though the share of the vote for the Government across the whole of the UK in 1955 was higher than in 1945, in 1945 Labour's share of the vote in Great Britain was higher. Either way, the 49.71% for Labour in the 1945 election is the highest share of the vote ever for a single political party.
• Biggest landslide in terms of seats (ever): This distinction once again goes to the Whigs in 1832, when the party won 441 of 658 seats (67%), an overall majority of 224 seats in the House.
• Biggest landslide in terms of seats (under equal suffrage): The biggest post-equal suffrage landslide was Tony Blair's in the 1997 general election, when the Labour Party took 418 of 659 seats (63%), an overall majority of 179. The runner-up record also belongs to Blair, when Labour was re-elected in 2001 with 413 of 659 seats (63%). Most modern political analysts consider with this or 1945 to be the biggest landslide in British history.
• Biggest landslide in terms of actual votes cast: The most votes ever cast was for the Conservative Party under John Major at the 1992 general election, when 14,093,007 people voted for Conservative candidates. No party before or since has has that many ballots cast for it; in 1997 Labour only won 13,518,167 votes.
  
  Turnout in 1992 was extremely high, though, and the election very bitter and closely thought. So all though the Tories won a great many votes, this was only actually 42% of the popular vote and only translated into a very slim majority for the Conservative Party - not a real landslide.
• Biggest landslide in terms of difference in votes: This achievement goes to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party in 1983, when it defeated Labour with 42.4% of the popular vote against 27.6% - a lead of 14.8%; all in all the Conservative Party polled 4,555,382 more votes than Labour did.
• Biggest landslide in terms of new seats won: All though this isn't a common measure of a landslide, some people prefer to define a scale of victory by how many seats change hands. By this definition, the distinction goes to the Labour Party in 1945, which increased its representation in the House of Commons from 154 seats to 393 - an increase of 239. This was 10 years after the last election due to the Second World War however and thus a unique election; if you exclude it, then the biggest number of gains is the 216 made by the Liberal Party in 1906, or the 145 made by Labour in 1997 if only elections held under equal suffrage count.
• Biggest landslide in terms of new votes won: The biggest vote-share increase for a single winning party is 1945, when Labour's vote increased by 11.7 percentage points. Discounting 1945 for the above reasons, then the distinction goes to the 1924 general election, when the Conservative Party had an 8.81 percentage point increase in its vote share. Counting only elections held after equal suffrage in 1929, then the honour is Tony Blair's, with Labour's 1997 increase of 8.78 percentage points.
• Biggest landslide in terms of two-party swing: In 1945, there was a national swing of 11.7% from the Conservative Party to Labour, the biggest on record. However, this record can be discounted for the same reasons given in the previous category. If it is, then the biggest swing on record is the perfect 10% swing from the Conservatives to Labour in 1997.
  
  It should be noted that across all general elections from 1945 - 1997, such high swings are very rare. Across the 12 elections that happened between 1945 and 1997, only 53 out of7,631 constituency results returned a two-party swing of 10% or more. In sharp contrast, at the 1997 general election alone, there was a two-party swing of 10% or more to Labour in 364 out of 659 results.

For most people then, there are three possible choices: the 1832, 1945 or 1997 general elections, and any one of these answers is legitimate. However, there is a general consensus in modern Britain among election experts and voters alike that the 1997 election is the biggest landslide by any reasoned measure. This is largely because unlike the 1832 and 1945 elections it did not take place in any special circumstances and had no unique factors to explain the dramatic shift in voters between parties; it was held in regular times, after a regular interval, under the same electoral system with the same electorate as the election before it.

There are those who would claim that the 1931 general election holds the record for the biggest landslide by most or all measures; this is not the case, and I have purposely excluded the 1931 election in this answer for the following reasons.

In 1931, the newly formed National Government - a grand coalition between most of the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party (until 1933) and its more right-wing partner the Liberal National Party (who would join the Toriespermanently30 years later) a small section of the Labour Party and a handful of independents - won 554 of 615 (90%) seats with 67.2% of the vote.

Within this National Government, 470 seats and 55% of the votes went to the Conservative Party. This is the biggest number of seats won by any single party ever and the biggest share of the vote - however, almost all election scholars discount the 1931 election from consideration. There are two reasons for this: first, only 421 of those MPs were actually elected. In 49 constituencies won by Conservative candidates, no election was held because no other party nominated a candidate to challenge the Tory, resulting in the Conservative being automatically chosen to serve as an MP.

Second, of the 469 Conservative candidates who actually had to run for election, only 79 had to compete against at least one other National Government candidate. In 390 constituencies, the Conservatives were the only National Government partner to stand for election, usually facing just Labour and no one else. As such, in those 390 seats, the Conservatives also won the support of many Liberal Party voters (who had made up 24% of the electorate in 1929) and a small number of old Labour supporters who backed the coalition. This means the Conservative share of the vote is dramatically andartificiallyinflated in the 1931 election; when Liberals nominated more candidates against the Conservatives in 1935, the party did not fare nearly as astronomically well, despite the continuing popularity of the National Government.

As such, 1931 is discounted from the list of biggest landslides due to the unique factors behind the scale of the Tory win (and the fact the Conservatives did not form a single-party majority government after the victory).

Answer 2

The biggest election landslide in the UK was in 1935, when the Conservative Party won a majority of 387 seats, securing 55% of the vote. This landslide victory was led by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.