1906 United Kingdom general election

1906 United Kingdom general election

← 1900 12 January – 8 February 1906 (1906-01-12 – 1906-02-08) Jan 1910 →
← outgoing members elected members →
All 670 seats in the House of Commons 336 seats needed for a majority
Turnout	83.2%
First party Second party   Leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman Arthur Balfour Party Liberal Conservative and Liberal Unionist Leader since December 1898 11 June 1902 Leader's seat Stirling Burghs Manchester East (defeated) Last election 183 seats, 45.1% 402 seats, 50.2% Seats won 397 156 Seat change 214 246 Popular vote 2,565,644 2,278,076 Percentage 48.9% 43.4% Swing 3.8% 6.8%   Third party Fourth party   Leader John Redmond Keir Hardie Party Irish Parliamentary Labour Repr. Cmte. Leader since 6 February 1900 28 February 1900 Leader's seat Waterford City Merthyr Tydfil Last election 77 seats, 1.8% 2 seats, 1.3% Seats won 82 29 Seat change 5 27 Popular vote 33,231 254,202 Percentage 0.6% 4.8% Swing 1.2% 3.5%
Colours denote the winning party
Composition of the House of Commons after the election
Prime Minister before election Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman Liberal Prime Minister after election Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman Liberal

The 1906 United Kingdom general election was held from 12 January to 8 February 1906.

The Liberals, led by Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman, won a landslide majority at the election. The Conservatives led by Arthur Balfour, who had been in government until the month before the election, lost more than half their seats, including party leader Balfour's own seat in Manchester East, leaving the party with its fewest recorded seats ever in history. The election saw a 5.4% swing from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Party, the largest-ever seen at the time (and if only looking at seats contested in both 1900 and 1906, the Conservative vote fell by 11.6%).^[1] This has resulted in the 1906 general election being dubbed the "Liberal landslide", and is now ranked alongside the 1931, 1945, 1983, 1997 and 2001 general elections as one of the largest landslide election victories.^[2]

The Labour Representation Committee was far more successful than at the 1900 general election and after the election would be renamed the Labour Party with 29 MPs and Keir Hardie as leader. The Irish Parliamentary Party, led by John Redmond, achieved its seats with a relatively low number of votes, as 73 candidates stood unopposed.

This election was a landslide defeat for the Conservative Party and their Liberal Unionist allies, with the primary reason given by historians being the party's weakness after its split over the issue of free trade (Joseph Chamberlain had resigned from government in September 1903 in order to campaign for Tariff Reform, which would allow "preferential tariffs"). Many working-class people at the time saw this as a threat to the price of food, hence the debate was nicknamed "Big Loaf, Little Loaf". The Liberals' landslide victory of 125 seats over all other parties led to the passing of social legislation known as the Liberal reforms.

This was the last general election in which the Liberals won an absolute majority in the House of Commons, and the last general election in which neither Labour nor the Conservatives won the popular vote. It was also the last peacetime election held more than five years after the previous one prior to passage of the Parliament Act 1911, which limited the duration of Parliaments in peacetime to five years. The Conservative Party's seat total of 156 MPs remains its worst result ever in a general election.