1929 United Kingdom general election


The 1929 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 30 May and resulted in a hung parliament. It stands as the fourth of six instances under the secret ballot, and the first of three under universal suffrage, in which a party has lost on the popular vote but won the highest number of seats versus all other parties – others are 1874, January 1910, December 1910, 1951 and February 1974. In 1929, Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party won the most seats in the House of Commons for the first time. The Liberal Party re-led by ex-Prime Minister David Lloyd George regained some ground lost in the 1924 election and held the balance of power.
The election was often referred to as the "Flapper Election", because it was the first in which women aged 21–29 had the right to vote.
The election was fought against a background of rising unemployment, with the memory of the 1926 general strike still fresh in voters' minds. By 1929, the Cabinet was being described by many as "old and exhausted".
The Liberals campaigned on a comprehensive programme of public works under the title "We Can Conquer Unemployment". The incumbent Conservatives campaigned on the theme of "Safety First", with Labour campaigning on the theme of "Labour & the Nation".
This was the first general election to be contested by the newly formed Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru.
It stood as the last time when a "third party" non-Labour or Conservative polled more than one-fifth of the popular vote until 1983, the next election thus ushering in five decades in which two-party politics dominated.

Results

Votes summary

Seats summary

Constituency results

Transfers of seats

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