The 1945 General Election Reconsidered

Abstract

It may be thought surprising that one should attempt to reassess the 1945 general election, in view of the attention which has already been paid to it. The election was, as is well known, the subject of the first of the Nuffield election surveys, which have continued thereafter to the present day; and although that book, unlike more recent Nuffield studies, contained no account of the politics of the period preceding the election, such accounts have appeared in more recent years, most notably, perhaps that by Dr Paul Addison entitled The road to 1945 . Addison’s work, however, full though it is on the politics of wartime, stops short at the election itself; and the Nuffield study, being the first of its series, was also, it is fair to say, the crudest and least adequate – although when it was published it marked an enormous technical advance on any previous rapid study of a British general election.