Title: Labour Party | History, Facts, Policies, & Leaders | Britannica
Headings: Labour Party
Labour Party
political party, United Kingdom
History

Content: By 1922 Labour had supplanted the Liberal Party as the official opposition to the ruling Conservative Party. In 1924, with Liberal support, James Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labour government, though his minority administration was brought down less than one year later over questions of its sympathy for the new Soviet state and over alleged communist influence within the party. Labour emerged from the 1929 election as the largest party in Parliament, though again it lacked an overall majority and had to form a coalition government with the Liberals. In 1931 the party suffered one of the severest crises in its history when, faced with demands to cut public expenditure as a condition for receiving loans from foreign banks, MacDonald defied the objections of most Labour officials and formed a coalition government with Conservatives and Liberals. In the ensuing election Labour’s parliamentary representation was reduced from 288 to 52. The party remained out of power until 1940, when Labour ministers joined a wartime coalition government under Winston Churchill. Ramsay MacDonald
Ramsay MacDonald. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Labour achieved a spectacular recovery in the general election of 1945, when it won 393 seats and a comfortable 146-seat overall majority in the House of Commons. Most commentators have attributed this victory to the electorate’s overwhelming desire for social reform and its determination to avoid a return to the interwar era of economic depression and unemployment. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, the Labour governments of the following six years built on the state’s recent experience of wartime intervention to construct a postwar political consensus based on a mixed economy, a much more extensive system of social welfare (including a National Health Service ), and a commitment to the pursuit of full employment.