Lessons from 1924: remembering the first Labour government
A new book tells the political — and human — drama of the labour movement’s first administration
This year marks the centenary of the first Labour government, Ramsay MacDonald’s 1924 minority administration.
Labour’s collective memory of Britain’s first two socialist governments — the party returned to office in 1929 — is shadowed by conspiracy and betrayal: the forged Zinoviev letter published on the eve of the October 1924 election that sought to implicate the party as Bolshevik fellow travellers, and MacDonald’s break from his colleagues to lead a Tory-dominated National Government in 1931.
The Men of 1924 by Peter Clark, a new book to mark the anniversary, cuts through the mythology to disentangle a story that might resonate with today’s party: that of an incoming Labour government faced with the challenge of governing in febrile economic and international circumstances, and building trust for a left wing administration governing a habitually conservative country.
The party’s path to power just 24 years after the establishment of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 was transformed by the social upheaval wrought by the Great War. Prior to 1914 the party had secured a foothold in the House of Commons, winning 40 seats in 1910, but the Liberal’s move to the left cast doubt upon its purpose and future. But the war changed all that: after the December 1923 election the Liberals were in disarray, Labour emerging as the second largest party, taking 191 seats with 30.7% of the vote.
During the conflict Labour evolved from its niche status as the political wing of the trade union moment into a national party. Britain had changed. The mutual sacrifice required by the war effort had persuaded a hitherto cautious elite that all classes were worthy of political representation. State direction of the wartime economy had shown that socialist ideas for public ownership and planning were at least plausible. Labour had developed credible proposals for a new postwar international order that influenced the foundation of the League of Nations. Senior party figures had proved themselves in high office, holding positions in the wartime government. And Lloyd George’s coalitions with the Conservatives had torn the Liberals apart, opening the way for Labour to pick off its seats.
The autodidacts take charge
The Labour minority administration that took office in January 1924, after the Tories were able to form a government, didn’t last long, and didn’t change much. But it transformed the profile of British governments forever. Eleven Cabinet members were from working-class backgrounds. None of the ‘Big Five’ — MacDonald, Philip Snowden, J.H. Thomas, J.R. Clynes, and Arthur Henderson — were from London or the Home Counties, and all had left school at 15. But though their class had cut their formal education short, they were ferocious autodidacts, steeped in the writings of 19th century radicals such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, William Morris and Robert Blatchford. That earnest self discipline was also manifested in a decided puritan orientation: many had been preachers and advocates for temperance.
With its radical new look and programme promising relief for the unemployed, rapid electrification, new transport networks, extended public ownership, and mass social housing, expectations for the new government were high. Perhaps too high, given its inability to command a parliamentary majority, and the exceptional domestic and international conditions it faced.
The postwar British economy was losing ground to the US and Japan, with unemployment rising just as the government was struggling with debts incurred by war spending. There was an Empire to manage amidst an international order that had been torn apart by the conflict. And, with revolutionary sentiment abroad, the party had to prove its trustworthiness to an establishment ever ready to sound the alarm about a creeping ‘Red Menace’. The Empire had already seen Labour governments in New Zealand and Australia, but European socialism was uncomfortably close to home. The 1917 Revolution had overthrown a Russian nobility with ties to the British upper classes, and the radical left was powerful in Germany and Hungary.
MacDonald prioritised ‘security and confidence, based on goodwill’ over radical reform, seeking to prove the party as being ‘just and worthy of respect’. And although the class composition of the new government was startlingly different from its predecessors, it was more of a progressive coalition than a socialist administration.
Two of the Cabinet’s most senior figures, Arthur Henderson and Philip Snowden, had Liberal backgrounds. Henderson had served in Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, and Snowden, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a zealous proponent of Gladstonian financial principles, emphasising balancing of the books and free trade over proto-Keynesian notions of demand management and borrowing for investment. ’The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I understand it,’ he told the Commons, ‘is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance.’
‘Evolutionary socialism’
The new government’s programme was woven from the various philosophies that were competing for the soul of a relatively new party that was still evolving. MacDonald’s syncretic political philosophy was representative. Though he had no formal education he was a prolific writer described by Thomas Johnston, editor of the party journal Forward as ‘one of the greatest descriptive journalists of his generation’, blessed with the gift of ‘prose poetry’.
By 1924 MacDonald’s politics was a sophisticated synthesis of early 20th century progressive thought, the most dominant strand, perhaps — like his Cabinet colleague Sidney Webb — a Fabian belief in incremental progress though the parliamentary process. For MacDonald socialism concerned the patient construction of systems capable of delivering humankind from material need. His 1911 essay The Socialist Movementset out a ‘scientific politics’ that defined socialism as ‘the method of evolution applied to society’. ‘The reason why socialism and scientific minds should be congenial to each other is not far to seek,’ wrote MacDonald. ‘The scientist loves order and is repelled by disorder. The same intellectual promptings which led him to invent a water tap which will not drip, will make him take an interest in proposals to do away with the industrial wastage of unemployment.’
Though couched in scientific imagery, his evolutionary socialism, which understood society as an organism that tended towards fraternity, had a romantic Burkean dimension that helps account for the ease with which he embraced traditional institutions and members of the ruling classes, not least King George V, who came to think of MacDonald as his favourite Prime Minister. For MacDonald, the Labour movement was ‘a product of British history and British conditions. It is neither Russian, nor German, nor American. It found the Radical movement as one ancestor, the trade union movement as another, the intellectual proletarian movement — Chartism and the early Socialist thinkers like Owen, Hall, Thompson — as another; the Continental Socialists — especially Marx — as still another.’
His ease with the establishment was facilitated by a social assurance that belied his origins, and his striking classical appearance. Future Chancellor Hugh Dalton remembered his voice as being ‘exceptionally fine and deep, resonant with a great variety of tone and sufficient of a Scottish accent to give a charm.’ For Clark, ‘In the way he had emerged from nowhere, was able to charm drawing rooms, and showed a single minded devotion to getting his way in politics, he resembled the young Disraeli.’
And, sure enough, Labour’s brief tenure did go some way to building the trust that MacDonald sought. His earnest hard-working Cabinet proved its administrative competence. The government had little opportunity to make inroads into unemployment, but was able to extend benefits and national insurance. And its most notable domestic achievement, the 1924 Housing Act, established the long-time political consensus that the public sector should build homes for rent and not for purchase, setting the blueprint for the mass social housing programmes pursued by successive governments. On the international stage — MacDonald himself served as Foreign Secretary — the government worked to ease the burden of reparations placed on Germany by 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and to end the resented French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr.
‘A Great Plot Disclosed’
And yet, for all its eagerness to prove its credibility, the government was brought down after just nine months by persistent insinuations that it was entangled in a global communist conspiracy bent on worldwide revolution. Conservative suspicions were encouraged by one of the administration’s first initiatives, diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, soon followed by negotiations towards an Anglo-Soviet trade treaty offering a loan to the Bolsheviks in return for recognition of the claims of British bondholders whose assets had been confiscated after the Revolution.
The rumbling became louder during the summer when the Cabinet reversed charges made against the Workers’ Weekly, a Communist Party periodical, over an article calling on police and troops to refrain from firing on strikers. The Tories pressed and won a vote of censure alleging that MacDonald had misled the House over the reversal, and implying that it had been forced by communist pressure. Interpreting the reprimand as a vote of no confidence, MacDonald called an election in October, just nine months after Labour had taken office, to the fury of Snowden, who later wrote that the ‘most incompetent leadership, which ever brought a Government to ruin’ … ‘had wantonly and recklessly thrown away’ its great opportunity.
During the campaign the Tories conflated the government’s failure to prosecute the Weekly with its earlier recognition of the USSR to imply Labour was in league with the Bolsheviks, a narrative supercharged just days before the election by the Daily Mail’s publication of a letter purportedly sent by Grigory Zinoviev, the president of the Communist International, to a British Communist Party official calling for revolution. Reading the paper’s incendiary headline — ‘Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters: Moscow Orders to Our Reds: Great Plot Disclosed’ — MacDonald felt as if he had been ‘sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea’. Despite extensive investigation over the decades, including a formal inquiry opened by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in the 1990s, the full details of the origins of the Zinoviev letter have never been established.
Against Labour mythology Clark is cautious about attributing the election result to the affair. The party lost some 40 seats but increased its vote by more than a million. The collapse in the Liberal vote, causing the loss of 118 seats, was more than enough to account for the Conservatives’ return to office. Though bruised by the defeat Labour had succeeded in confirming its status as Britain’s second party.
The electoral platform it had established allowed it to return to office five years later, this time as the largest party winning 288 seats to the Tories’ 260, with the Liberals blown away, reduced to 59. With a stronger hand MacDonald’s second minority government was able to do more, tackling issues that had caused the General Strike, such as wages and conditions in the coal industry and unemployment pay, and further accelerating house building.
But it was undone when Treasury orthodoxy asserted itself following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, demanding sharp cuts in spending that were unacceptable to the Cabinet. When the government fell in 1931 MacDonald took the fateful decision, influenced by the King’s counsel, to serve as Prime Minister in a National Government with the Conservatives and Liberals, a switch of loyalties which Clement Attlee, not normally given to hyperbole, considered ‘the greatest betrayal in the political history of this country’.
The offer appealed to MacDonald’s undoubted weakness for the prestige of high office. But his acceptance must be understood within the context of his abiding concern to establish Labour as a natural party of government. Believing the formation of a coalition to be an expedient measure at a time of national crisis, he had hoped to return to the Labour party. But there was to be no way back. MacDonald became an increasingly ineffectual leader as the international horizon darkened and his mental and physical health declined, dying shortly after he left office in 1935.
1924 and today
Clark’s crisp narrative does not linger on the MacDonald melodrama, broadening its focus beyond the leader to offer brief portraits of every member of the Cabinet. Above all the book makes clear the severe limitations circumstances placed on the government’s capacity for action, which shaped its own expectations of what it could hope to achieve. Perhaps ministers could have challenged Treasury orthodoxies regarding fiscal constraints when so many of those who had elected it were suffering joblessness and poverty. But Keynesian tools for economic stimulus were not yet available: Roosevelt’s New Deal was yet to come, advocacy of public investment in Britain associated with the somewhat discredited Lloyd George and mavericks such as Oswald Mosley. The party, perhaps, had won office too soon, before it had developed the policy expertise necessary to withstand the pressures of office.
The crisis that so quickly engulfed the Truss administration last year offers a visceral contemporary reminder of how quickly radical strategies can be overwhelmed by the markets risks to which MacDonald and Snowden were acutely sensitive. Today’s leadership, of course, is also aware of the particular challenges awaiting incoming Labour governments during times of economic and international uncertainty.
But, though to say so tempts fate, it may enjoy the luxury of something MacDonald never had: a substantial majority. In which case the 1945 Attlee administration may offer a happier precedent for what can be achieved by a majority administration prepared to act boldly, even during the tough times.
The Men of 1924 by Peter Clark is published by Haus Publishing. An abbreviated version of this review is also available on the LabourList website.
