Within three days of the armistice, an emergency Labour Party conference withdrew the Labour ministers from the Coalition and proclaimed its “protest against any patching up of the old economic order.” In the ensuing general election, Labour fought with a very radical manifesto, Labour and the New Social Order, specifically demanding
The immediate nationalisation and democratic control of vital public services such as mines, railways, shipping, armaments, and electric power; fullest recognition and utmost extension of trade unionism… the abolition of the menace of unemployment… the universal right to work or maintenance, legal limitation of the hours of labour and the drastic amendment of the Acts dealing with factory conditions, safety and workmen’s compensation.
It contained the appeal for a new society:
The view of the Labour Party is that what has to be reconstructed after the war is not this or that government department, or this or that piece of social machinery; but, so far as Britain is concerned, society itself… We of the Labour Party… recognise, in the present world catastrophe, if not the death, in Europe, of civilisation itself, at any rate the culmination and collapse of a distinctive industrial civilisation, which the workers will not seek to reconstruct… The individualist system of capitalist production… with the monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces, and the degradation and brutalisation, both moral and spiritual, resulting there from, may, we hope, indeed have received a death-blow. With it must go the political system and ideas in which it naturally found expression. We of the Labour Party, whether in opposition or in due time called upon to form an Administration, will certainly lend no hand to its revival. On the contrary, we shall do our utmost to see that it is buried with the millions whom it has done to death.
The poll was deliberately called as a snap election. Although Lloyd George’s National Coalition was returned with a thumping majority in this “Khaki” election, giving the Coalition Tories 359 seats and the Coalition Liberals 127 seats, this was certainly not an accurate reflection of the mood in society or the growing support for the Labour Party. Many soldiers were still to be demobbed and the voting registers were hopelessly out of date. The revolutionary feeling of the soldiers returning from the front had not been translated into parliamentary arithmetic, which dramatically lagged behind the real situation in Britain. Despite this, Labour had become the effective opposition, with two-and-a-half million votes (up dramatically from half a million in 1910) and a record 57 seats in the Commons.
The opening days of 1919 were preparing another explosion in the class struggle. The working class had been promised a “home fit for heroes”, and now many were determined to fight for it. A new revolutionary chapter in the history of the British working class was about to open. It represented the retying of a knot of struggle that had been broken by the war, but on a much higher level than ever before.