William Nathaniel Jones - Carmarthen By-election, 1928

Carmarthen By-election, 1928

In the event Jones did not have to wait until the next general election as Mond accepted a peerage in 1928 and caused a by-election in Carmarthen. At the previous general election in 1924 the Conservatives had not fielded a candidate and Mond had won easily in a straight fight with Labour. However this time, they put up the barrister, Sir Courtenay Mansel, another escapee from the Liberal Party in 1926 who had been MP for Penryn and Falmouth from 1922-23 but who had local connections in Carmarthenshire and was also a Justice of the Peace there. The Labour candidate was the Welsh barrister (and future MP) Dan Hopkin. There was briefly the prospect of a four-cornered contest when the National Party of Wales announced their intention to stand a candidate but in the end they decided not to fight. The by-election took place on 28 June 1928 and Jones emerged as the narrow winner. Jones had made his opposition to the land policy a feature of the campaign in an attempt to retain the support of the division’s farmers, many of whom shared Mond’s concern about the nationalisation proposals. In any event the Green Book had by this time been withdrawn as a full statement of Liberal land policy. Instead, Jones promoted as the main object of Liberal land policy the desire to give security of tenure to tenant farmers. Many of those reliant on the land for their livelihood seemed to prefer the less radical solution of the government of Stanley Baldwin for the relief of rates on agricultural land.