Ramsay MacDonald was the first ever Labour leader to become Prime Minister. When the Conservatives lost a vote of confidence in January 1924, King George V asked MacDonald to form a government with support from the Liberals. That government was short-lived. It lasted only nine months before being defeated at the 1924 general election. MacDonald became Prime Minister once again in 1929, however, forming the second Labour administration, after becoming the largest party in the House of Commons. Yet MacDonald was to be vilified by his own party when he decided to push ahead with cuts in unemployment benefits, against the will of the majority of the Labour government, and formed the National Government, with himself as Prime Minister, until 1935. David Howell argues that the party owed much to MacDonald, who patiently built coalitions between trade unionists, socialists and, when prudent, the Liberals in the early years of the party. As Prime Minister, MacDonald also faced debilitating challenges during the second government, with a worldwide economic recession and relatively few policy options at hand. MacDonald may claim to have acted in the national interest in implementing economic orthodoxy during times of national crisis, Howell argues, but the reality was that he implemented regressive social policies, and the impact on the Labour Party’s electoral fortunes was disastrous.
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When politicians dispersed for their summer holidays at the end of July 1931, Ramsay MacDonald’s position as head of the second Labour government and leader of the Labour Party seemed secure. Although his minority administration faced a deteriorating economy and by-elections offered sombre evidence of eroding support, adversity seemingly strengthened appeals for Labour solidarity. The government’s survival depended on an understanding with a sizeable section of an increasingly fissiparous Liberal Party, and, at the beginning of the summer recess, the auguries looked auspicious.
Within a month, this agenda lay in ruins. A financial and budgetary crisis was complemented rapidly by a political earthquake. By the last week in August, the Labour government had disintegrated and MacDonald headed the National Government, accompanied by a handful of Labour colleagues. His new administration was backed by the Conservatives and almost all Liberals, but opposed by the Labour Party. What was proclaimed as a temporary expedient to deal with a crisis rapidly became a durable reshaping of the party system. Conservative pressure for an election proved irresistible; supporters of the National Government could obscure their differences under the assertion that the Labour Party was economically incompetent and therefore anti-patriotic. The result was Labour’s near obliteration as a parliamentary presence. The 287 MPs elected in May 1929 went down to just fifty-two in 1931 – six of whom had not even stood as official candidates.
MacDonald was thereafter demonised in Labour folk memory as the ultimate renegade, who succumbed to the aristocratic embrace, abandoning and then waging a devastating war on the party he had led. The party responded by anticipating, by a quarter of a century, a process of de-Stalinisation: MacDonald’s portrait disappeared from party premises and trade union banners.
Attlee’s effectiveness as leader depended significantly on the certainty that he would not be mistaken for a second MacDonald. The idea of the leader as a flamboyant personification of the party gave way to that of the discreet and dutiful team player. Yet any casting of MacDonald as the traitorous destroyer of the party has to reckon with his earlier achievements as party architect. MacDonald’s Labour Party has parallels with a Chekhov play: understanding is inexorably coloured by the observer’s knowledge of what is to come.172
Labour politics in the 1920s must be understood on its own terms and not seen as the prelude to an inescapable 1931. Yet the connections between the optimism and uncertainties of that earlier world and Labour’s great disaster must also be explored – only then can the complexities of MacDonald’s leadership and of the context within which he operated be appreciated. Labour’s political leadership in the 1920s remained very much the preserve of the generation that had entered the Commons in 1906 and 1910. MacDonald, Arthur Henderson, Philip Snowden and J. R. Clynes had all been born in the 1860s, Jimmy Thomas in the subsequent decade. Through their diverse political identities they personified the alliance between the ILP and the trade unions. Personal relationships were rarely close, but, post-war, they all agreed on Labour’s political strategy. MacDonald, however, made a distinctive and arguably crucial contribution to this collegiate enterprise.173
As secretary of the LRC, and subsequently of the Labour Party from 1900 to 1912, he had patiently constructed an alliance between socialists and trade unionists that he hoped would combine enthusiasm with organisational resources. This statement of independence was complemented by the negotiation of a limited and secret electoral pact with the Liberals. This deal proved decisive in the election of thirty Labour MPs in the 1906 election, including MacDonald himself as MP for Leicester. From 1910, the imperative of parliamentary arithmetic brought Labour closer to the Liberal government – how this de facto alliance of progressives would have developed in the absence of a major European war remains a perennial subject for counter-factual history.174
MacDonald’s response to the war was cloaked in ambiguity. Neither a pacifist nor the pro-German vilified by the jingo press, he evinced the sentiments of a high-minded Liberal or ethical socialist. He opposed British entry into a European war, fearing illiberal consequences; subsequently, he argued for a negotiated settlement and campaigned against the encroaching authoritarianism of the British state. Predictably, he was heavily defeated in Leicester in the 1918 election, but as disillusion grew with the Versailles settlement, and more broadly with the economic failings of post-war society, MacDonald’s wartime position seemed to some both principled and prescient.
The Labour Party entered the 1918 election with enhanced ambitions; in terms of seats, its rewards were meagre. In the November 1922 election, the party advanced significantly and MacDonald re-entered the Commons as MP for Aberavon. At the first meeting of the PLP, he was narrowly elected chairman and, in effect, Labour’s first national leader. One highly supportive newspaper predicted that he would ‘infallibly become the symbol and personification of the party’. Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, the perceptive London correspondent of the German Socialist newspaper Vorwaerts, observed MacDonald’s years of dominance; he characterised MacDonald as ‘the personification of all that thousands of downtrodden men and women hope and dream and desire … he is the focus of the mute hopes of an entire class’. Wertheimer’s specific parallel with Lenin could jar, but the claim illuminated the personalised carnivals that were MacDonald’s election tours. Beatrice Webb, austere and acerbic, suggested that MacDonald was a ‘magnificent substitute for a leader’.175
Substitute or not, MacDonald returned to King’s Cross from his new Seaham constituency in May 1929 as leader of the largest party in the Commons. Since November 1922, Labour had doubled its representation. Labour had just won eighty-one seats for the first time. Given that electoral success is a prime criterion for assessing party leadership, MacDonald could claim a signal achievement. Yet placing performance in context is crucial; this period was distinctive in its partisan complexities and volatilities. By 1918, Britain could claim to be a formal electoral democracy for men; a decade later, with the equalisation of the franchise for women (an issue of both age and class), any qualification became redundant. Expansion of the franchise on a vast scale destroyed the apparent stabilities of Edwardian politics; this loss of signposts was compounded by the partisan legacies of war. The Progressive Alliance of Liberal and Labour, to which MacDonald had made a major contribution, was dead. The Liberal Party was incoherently, if venomously, divided into partisans of Asquith or Lloyd George, plus those who wished the destructive feuding would end. Labour’s response under MacDonald was to attempt a reconstruction of the Progressive Alliance, under the hopefully extensive and attractive umbrella of the Labour Party.
The success of Sinn Féin across most of nationalist Ireland in 1918, and the subsequent creation of the Irish Free State, decisively changed the Westminster arithmetic. A major obstacle to a Conservative majority had vanished. Yet the interplay between complex party competition and the electoral system meant that elections had the potential to produce unpredictable outcomes, in which the relationship between votes cast and seats won would be disproportionate. The consequence was the prospect of minority government and subsequent bargaining. Much of party politics during the period of MacDonald’s Labour leadership can be understood as a series of attempts to construct a viable and durable anti-Labour majority. The post-war Lloyd George coalition was seen by some adherents as the basis for a new centre party that could respond to the rise of Labour. This aspiration foundered on the reefs of Tory and Liberal tribalism. In 1924, a Conservative combination of Baldwin’s mannered moderation and anti-socialist hyperbole produced a majority inflated by the support of anxious Liberals. This majority proved vulnerable to a Liberal revival in 1929. As yet, the conundrum remained.176
Amid these complexities and uncertainties, Labour made progress. Within the 142 seats won in November 1922, Labour enjoyed absolute majorities in eighty-five and was unopposed in four more. This achievement suggested that the party had a base of seats that it was likely to retain in most circumstances. Typically, these strongholds rested on the electoral strength of specific and well-unionised occupational groups. Coal-mining seats became more solid for Labour as, for many miners, post-war optimism was destroyed by industrial defeats, wage cuts, short-term working and unemployment. Sections of heavy industry developed strong Labour loyalties – for example, Sheffield steel workers. Railway trade unionists often provided the nucleus for local party organisation, not least in small towns and rural areas. Within this advance, MacDonald was a powerful – and, on occasions, inspirational – presence. When Oswald Mosley successfully contested Smethwick in 1926, thousands gathered to hear MacDonald one December evening. But for all of MacDonald’s rhetoric denying Labour was a class party, and his encouragement of well-heeled candidates such as Mosley, the reality remained throughout the ’20s that Labour’s electoral base was not just working class, but heavily dependent upon specific occupational groups. MacDonald’s ambition to construct Labour as the post-war Progressive Alliance was unrealised.177
Such a limitation was obscured by the fact that the party was advantaged due to the combination of a first-past-the-post electoral system, and unstable and ambiguous relations between the parties.
| Year | Total vote | Percentage of all votes cast | Candidates | MPs |
| 1922 | 4,237,349 | 29.9 | 414 | 142 |
| 1923 | 4,439,780 | 31.0 | 427 | 191 |
| 1924 | 5,489,087 | 34.0 | 514 | 151 |
| 1929 | 8,370,417 | 37.8 | 569 | 287 |
Source: Author, compiled from Rallings and Thrasher, British Electoral Facts 1832–2006 (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007), pp. 23–8.
Given that one priority of Labour strategy in the 1920s was to eliminate the Liberals as a credible party, achievement of this objective, at least in the short term, would damage Labour. The party’s unexpected arrival in office in January 1924 was the consequence of the Liberal advance into Tory territory, resulting from Baldwin’s calling of an election on the Liberal’s iconic issue – free trade. The subsequent decline in Liberal candidacies in 1923–24, from 457 to 339, was one cause of the decisive Conservative victory in the latter election. Equally, the Liberal expansion back to 507 candidates in 1929 damaged the Conservatives and thereby helped Labour. By the mid-’20s, the Baldwin-led Conservative Party was proving more effective than Labour in attracting former Liberal voters. The irony for Labour’s strategy was that its long-term objective – a secure position in a two-party system – would mean a worsening of the party’s electoral terms of trade, without any guarantee of subsequent improvement.
| Year | Total vote | Percentage of all votes cast | Candidates | MPs |
| 1931 | 6,640,220 | 31.1 | 515 | 52 |
| 1935 | 8,325,491 | 38.6 | 551 | 154 |
Source: Author, compiled from Rallings and Thrasher (2007), pp 28–32.
The 1931 contest could hardly have occurred under worse circumstances for Labour, yet the contrast with 1923 – an election that was genuinely a three-way contest – is nevertheless telling. Virtually the same share of the vote saw 139 fewer Labour MPs returned. The 1935 result demonstrated the basic problem: Labour’s share of the vote returned to its 1929 level, but its number of seats was cut by almost half.
An electoral achievement that was impressive yet brittle inevitably posed problems of party management, particularly in 1924 and 1929–31. Compromises in office could generate resentment by both high-minded socialists, sensitive to betrayals of principle, and to pragmatic trade unionists, seeking specific improvements. Yet throughout his leadership, MacDonald’s position was never seriously questioned. Tensions between individuals, not least those at the top of the party, were inevitable; so were the complaints of those who did not obtain ministerial office.
None of this mattered. Notably, despite the mounting economic difficulties after 1929, MacDonald remained effectively unchallenged – a contrast with the torrent of criticism unleashed on Baldwin in opposition, and with the shambles that was the Liberal Party. MacDonald was backed by firm majorities across Labour’s key institutions: the PLP was dominated by loyalists who would support him in any critical vote.
Under the second Labour government, trade unionist concerns typically focused on unemployment benefits – both levels and conditions. They strongly opposed the ostentatious revolts that they associated with the left-moving ILP, believing these to be both self-indulgent and counter-productive. Discretion mattered in terms of propriety and effectiveness. Similarly, within Labour’s national executive committee (NEC), criticism could be marginalised. The development of a new policy document in 1927–28 was settled very much on MacDonald’s terms, despite the presence of articulate critics who demanded greater precision in policy proposals. The resulting Labour and the Nation was overwhelmingly approved at the 1928 party conference. Critics were marginalised – the whole affair given a suitably ethical tone by George Lansbury’s chairmanship. In October 1930, MacDonald spoke at what would be his last party conference. An emotional socialist appeal disarmed many of those who were increasingly critical about the Labour government’s seeming inability to address mounting unemployment. An observer noted that MacDonald concluded with ‘a purple peroration, which could have done duty at any Labour conference in the last twenty years’.178
Across all these arenas, MacDonald’s position was protected by Arthur Henderson, who, from June 1929, showed a great capacity to alternate between the roles of Foreign Secretary and party secretary. If MacDonald was the elegant artist, Henderson, in football terms, was the ball-winner, indulging in the dark arts to allow the star turn to display his talents. Mosley, having quit the government in May 1930 over the unemployment crisis, took his case to a PLP meeting; MacDonald and the minister responsible, Jimmy Thomas, responded unconvincingly to Mosley’s case. Henderson, however, provided a masterclass in party management. He transformed the issue from the merits or otherwise of Mosley’s agenda on unemployment to an issue of proper procedure and trust in colleagues, allowing Mosley to be portrayed as the unreasonable outsider. The crisis for the party, if not for the unemployed, was defused. Similarly, Henderson’s influence produced an ethos of sweet reasonableness on the NEC, even as the government was about to fragment in August 1931. At conference, he was an omnipresent influence – the dutiful administrator, effectively shepherding delegates in pursuit of a conference that allowed a managed diversity.179
The marginalisation of dissent under MacDonald and Henderson suggested that Labour had become a less tolerant party. The range of permitted identities had narrowed. Communists had been purged from conference and local parties. The lengthy process reflected the desire of MacDonald’s close allies and trade union leaders, who, after the defeat of the general strike and the long agony of the miners’ lockout (with its subsequent recriminations), turned their anger on the left. Space for independent activities by women inside the party withered. Women were increasingly defined in terms of economic and social citizenship; women supporters of MacDonald, most notably Margaret Bondfield, opposed any emphasis on gender issues as divisive. More broadly, dissent was portrayed as uncomradely, and identified increasingly with an ILP left, viewed widely as unrealistic and self-advertising. These developments harmonised with the dominant desire among the unions. A Labour government was a necessity. In pursuing this objective, trade unionists chloroformed their doubts about Labour politicians and their sometimes minimal links with, and understanding of, the union movement. Such self-abnegation deepened intolerance of those who engaged in public criticism.
This trade union loyalism underpinned MacDonald’s dominance of party institutions and of successive Labour Cabinets. Senior members of MacDonald’s administrations had entered politics as trade unionists. Many retained close ties with their own unions or with the wider trade union world. There lay a potential challenge to MacDonald’s dominance. During the 1920s, the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC), starting from an expectation of close cooperation, had developed distinct priorities and institutional cultures. Political and industrial issues were dealt with by the appropriate organisation, but problems arose when issues could not be thus contained. Labour politicians were uncomfortable about the political implications of the general strike. Trade union leaders felt slighted by many ministers during the brief 1924 government and resolved that a second Labour government must be different. In turn, Labour ministers were sensitive to claims by opponents that trade unions were afforded special privileges; many believed that ministers, not least socialist ones, needed to look beyond sectional interests. Within the TUC, a rising and increasingly self-confident figure, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) leader Ernest Bevin, prioritised industrial concerns, and had a visceral suspicion of politicians. Here was a world of labour where party and ministerial considerations were not pre-eminent, and MacDonald’s writ did not operate. Were significant figures in this world to oppose a Labour government on a major issue, the impact on the party institutions could be dramatic.180
The minority status of both of MacDonald’s Labour governments inevitably limited expectations, and provided a convenient alibi for failings. No one within the leadership group, and few within the PLP, thought that a minority government should propose a bold socialist programme in the Commons, and, after the inevitable defeat, campaign on the programme in the subsequent election. Only extreme optimists could believe that such a profession of faith would be successful. Instead, Labour needed to use its time in government to demonstrate its competence. From the very beginning, Labour MPs had seen Parliament as an institution that could be used constructively, not as a theatre for disruptive scenes. MacDonald’s dismay in June 1923, when some of the ILP left staged a dramatic defiance of the Speaker, was evident.181 In his desire to be constructive, he was joined by the bulk of Labour MPs who had served on local councils or were familiar with established systems of collective bargaining. The 1924 government demonstrated that Labour ministers would respect constitutional practices, and endorse, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the accompanying etiquette. Within their various offices, they demonstrated the varieties of ingenuity and inadequacy characteristic of any government. To demonstrate competence was an achievement that would resonate with working-class voters, who could take pride in the very existence of the government. Yet office alone would never be enough. Even minority Labour governments were expected to not just demonstrate competence in administration; they were expected to make a difference politically. Such expectations faced the difficulty that verdicts of competence concerned not just administrative effectiveness, but also the substance of policy.
Labour governments experienced relatively few problems on foreign affairs. Liberal opinion had reacted against the Versailles settlement, and, more broadly, scepticism about military solutions to international problems left its mark on popular culture, not least in R. C. Sherriff’s 1928 play set on the Western Front, Journey’s End. In 1924, MacDonald doubled up as Foreign Secretary – that a critic of British intervention, with the exception of the Soviet Treaty, attracted little criticism illuminated the consensus on pacification. Similarly, Henderson, at the Foreign Office from 1929, was considered an effective advocate of that consensus on foreign policy. Perhaps critically for his and the party’s future, Henderson’s tenure distanced him from the government’s growing domestic difficulties.
By contrast, Labour governments were faced with a much more challenging prospect on economic problems. The quest for the pacification of Europe was central to an economic orthodoxy that saw such normalisation as integral to an export-based revival of the British economy. Public works were viewed sceptically as a diversion of funds from private investment; the return to the gold standard of 1925, at a punitive exchange rate with the dollar, was accepted as an inescapable constraint. That a party of the left largely endorsed such doctrines was testament to the party’s radical Liberal roots, most obvious in Labour’s support for free trade – an attachment that was as much moral as economic. MacDonald embraced a dominant sentiment that socialism would emerge, not from a crisis of capitalism, but from its flourishing. Philip Snowden, his Chancellor, preached these doctrines with the rigid fervour of his Nonconformist, West Riding roots – a socialist evangelist turned Chancellor, at one with the urbane pronouncements of Treasury officials.182
Snowden’s austerity, and its endorsement by most Labour politicians, demonstrated a naive readiness to defer to the economic views of the highly educated and self-confident, both in Whitehall and the City. Increasingly, from mid-1929, it was thought such orthodox responses to deepening depression might assuage respectable opinion, but this conditional respectability was bought at the cost of the disillusionment of party members and Labour voters. One response was to demonstrate competence in areas that could be protected, to some extent, from the core economic difficulties. When Henderson addressed the need for an attractive agenda at the 1930 party conference, he repeated an innovation from the previous year. Fresh from electoral victory, Snowden as Chancellor and Thomas as Minister for Employment had addressed delegates. A year later, Thomas, his credibility destroyed, had moved to the Dominions Office, and another instalment of Snowden’s patronising economic lectures seemed unattractive. Instead, party managers turned to Arthur Greenwood, Herbert Morrison and Christopher Addison. Their records in housing, transport and agriculture, they hoped, would indicate ministerial competence to uneasy party delegates and perhaps to a wider public.
MacDonald’s party offered little ideological challenge to prevailing economic orthodoxies. Socialist rhetoric provided, at best, a fig leaf for conformity. Such vacuity doubtless helped to inspire John Maynard Keynes’s comment in December 1930: ‘So long as party organisation and personal loyalties cut across the fundamental differences of opinion, the public life of this country will continue to suffer from a creeping paralysis.’ This assessment has resonances in some later historiography; Labour’s emergence as a major party and its mixture of economic orthodoxy and socialist utopianism has been seen as blocking the possibility of a meaningful challenge on economic questions from the centre left. This seems a simplistic representation of a complex problem.183 Whatever Labour’s limitations, the Liberals lacked credibility as partners for a progressive economic option. They campaigned in the 1929 election on a programme of public works, yet the response of almost all Liberals to the 1931 crisis was to embrace orthodoxy, spiced by anti-Labour rhetoric. The basis for a Progressive Alliance majority in Parliament on economic issues did not exist. Similarly, a variety of alternative programmes emerged within the labour movement: the ILP’s living wage doctrine; the proposals by Oswald Mosley for public works, protection and a streamlined executive; the work of the TUC research department under
Walter Milne-Bailey.184 But such agendas easily aroused opposition on factional or personal grounds. There was, in 1929–31, no parliamentary majority for a radical alternative. An election was soon to demonstrate that, in a crisis, the electorate would decisively endorse conservatism. Whether a coherent alternative policy was available is debateable; that the constraints on the government were severe is evident. Yet the administration’s orthodoxy was subject to one significant qualification. The TUC leadership might have felt disappointed by the government’s lack of achievement, and slighted by ministerial distance; nevertheless, TUC pressure restrained the impact of austerity on unemployment benefit. Such incremental gains mattered to trade union leaders who could justify, not least to themselves, continuing support for a Labour government. They also mattered to the guardians of orthodoxy, who saw in such concession and procrastination compelling evidence that a Labour government, despite Philip Snowden, could never be accepted as ‘sound’ on the economy.
Such an exercise in procrastination provided one tributary of the terminal crisis. In February 1931, the government had secured Liberal support in a crucial parliamentary vote through a proposal to set up a committee to review national expenditure under the chairmanship of Sir George May of the Prudential assurance company. The May Report was published at the end of July; the minority recommendations by the Labour committee members were subsequently ignored. The majority report opposed increased taxation as inimical to economic recovery. Instead, the projected deficit necessitated extensive expenditure cuts – the majority coming from a proposed cut of 20 per cent in unemployment benefit. Hope of a response in the autumn would have involved negotiations with sympathetic Liberals and discussions with, among others, the TUC. This strategic agenda disintegrated in the face of a financial crisis. With most politicians on holiday, a Cabinet sub-committee explored possible responses; their deliberations were followed by discussions in full Cabinet. Yet a meeting with Conservative and Liberal leaders on 20 August suggested that any hope of a Progressive Alliance option was giving way to Conservative–Liberal agreement on further economies, hopefully with a compliant Labour government forced to harvest the subsequent unpopularity. Later the same day, two meetings with the TUC general council dramatically transformed the government’s predicament. Bevin and the TUC general secretary Walter Citrine attacked the ministerial case – one forcefully, the other with an administrator’s distaste for lack of both substance and respect. MacDonald’s dismissive response demonstrated a distaste that went beyond the immediate crisis: ‘It was practically a declaration of war … The TUC undoubtedly voice the feeling of the mass of workers. They do not know and their minds are rigid and think only of superficial appearances and so grasping at the shadow lose the bone.’185
This confrontation proved crucial; the consequential waves were evident around the Cabinet table. A small number of ministers – Lansbury, Greenwood and Addison – were already unhappy about proposed cuts. After 20 August, they were joined by Henderson – always sensitive to trade union opinion – and where he went, others followed. The final Cabinet vote on a proposed 10 per cent cut in unemployment benefit three days later was symbolic and decisive. In an almost evenly divided Cabinet, Henderson was the most senior figure in the dissenting minority. The division fitted no pattern; trade unionists, ex-Liberals, and first- and second-generation Labour figures were on both sides. The subsequent resignation of the government was expected to be the final chapter. The party would go into opposition. Economies would be implemented by others, followed by an election. Whether MacDonald was expected to remain as party leader was obscure; one possibility for him was to resign and support the economies from the back benches.
Instead, he announced to his Labour colleagues the formation of the National Government, with himself as Prime Minister. He was joined in the Cabinet by three of his former colleagues and by senior Conservatives and Liberals. The initiative was presented as a short-term arrangement to implement economy measures; there would then be an election and a return to partisan alignments. Labour ex-ministers and backbenchers were astounded. Such a possibility had never been discussed within the Labour Party – a contrast with the prelude to the party’s participation in the wartime coalitions. With the strong backing of the TUC, many Labour MPs reacted vigorously to the transformation. When the PLP met on 28 August, MacDonald’s son Malcolm spoke, as did John Sankey, who had continued as Lord Chancellor. Otherwise, the field was left to those firmly committed to opposing the National Government, and thereby inexorably drawn to criticise MacDonald and his few Labour allies.
Such solidarity brought out Sankey’s prejudices. Having experienced the wrath of the PLP, he expostulated in the privacy of his diary: ‘Very hostile as all the trade unionists were there … Feelings bitter … They have gone mad and talk about the class war.’186 Yet many present had mixed emotions – anger and confusion jostled with pain. Some reacted dismissively to those longstanding critics of MacDonald who claimed wisdom before the event. Public passions were complemented by private ambivalence. Some wrote to MacDonald. Jack Lawson epitomised the moderate and respectable Durham miners’ leadership. He told of ‘deep respect … rooted in an undying affection’, and suggested the breach could well be temporary. Will Lunn, a Yorkshire miner, drew the line at the proposed cut in unemployment benefit: ‘I think we have been let down by the two men whom I have loved and revered more than any men I have ever known in public life.’ Gordon Macdonald, from the Lancashire coalfield, seemed less torn in his reaction. He wrote of his lifelong friends among the unemployed, and contrasted their poverty with the ‘full display of immense wealth’.187 The kaleidoscope of responses was underlain by a shared memory. Several could recall the decisions taken by individual unions and by the party conference in November 1918 that Labour should quit the Lloyd George coalition. Sankey might conjure up madness, bitterness and class war, but, in fact, the positions taken in 1918 and 1931 were consistent with the sentiments that had informed the foundation of the LRC in 1900 – a commitment to independence and a focus on what were understood as labour interests.
MacDonald’s talents and choices had been central to Labour’s development over three decades. Yet in 1931, he went against the cultural and organisational identity that had secured Labour solidarity. One explanation, offered not least by him, suggested that he deliberately placed the claims of the nation before those of his party. This characterisation begged the question as to how national needs were understood. For MacDonald in 1931, saving the nation meant endorsing an agenda that was economically regressive and led to a regime that, throughout the ’30s, effectively sought an alliance of those with something to lose – however little – against the workless and the poor. As Labour leader, MacDonald, the personification of the Victorian virtues of thrift and industry, showed little empathy towards the unemployed; he was susceptible to sensational press reports about affluent life on the dole. His attitude to trade unions had always been ambivalent, too. He recognised them as central to the party, but was prone to place their sectionalism in opposition to his vision of socialism. Pre-war syndicalism, wartime trade union patriotism, the miners’ leader A. J. Cook’s oratory – all aroused MacDonald’s contempt as fatally as the events of 20 August 1931. He discovered that the party he had led was not a new form of progressivism garnished with socialist rhetoric, but a party whose advances since 1918 had been based on strongly unionised communities. Such supporters were typically not the left critics MacDonald derided; they were men and women who wanted fair treatment from employers and government. When MacDonald made his choice in August 1931, he effectively denied the identity of the party he had led into office.
The National Government did not conform to its initial prospectus. Further financial pressure led to the abandonment of the gold standard – the preservation of which had been a key objective of the new administration. What should have been an embarrassment was spun into a great economic and political opportunity. The only threat was the possibility of a Labour government. Conservative pressure for an election grew; here was a chance to destroy Labour for the most patriotic of reasons.
MacDonald was expelled from the Labour Party at the end of September. After much bargaining and agonising, he led the National Government into a vicious election campaign that achieved its objective. Any residual sympathy for him within the Labour Party died. MacDonald unexpectedly held Seaham, but he seemed bemused by the overall outcome, with a massive Conservative majority won under National Government auspices: ‘Once again, I record that no honest man should trust in too gentlemanly a way the Conservative wire-pullers.’188 MacDonald had always been naive about the inequalities of power he faced as a Labour leader, and about the determination of the privileged to retain what they had. In this, he was at one with the party he led.
172 The outstanding biography is David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, London, Jonathan Cape, 1977; see also the new introduction to the second edition, published in 1997, and Marquand’s entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Vol. 35, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 268–83. For an earlier assessment, see C. L. Mowat, ‘Ramsay MacDonald and the Labour Party’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville eds, Essays in Labour History 1886–1923, Hamden CT, Archon Books, 1971, pp. 129–51. Lord Elton followed MacDonald’s lead in 1931: his first and only volume of a projected biography, published in 1939, ends in 1919. Some sense of his interpretation of MacDonald’s later career can be found in his obituary in Labour’s Newsletter, 20 November 1937. For an analysis by a supporter of MacDonald in 1931, see Reginald Bassett, Nineteen Thirty-One: Political Crisis, London, Macmillan/New York, St Martin’s Press, 1958.
173 For Labour politics under MacDonald’s leadership, see: David Howell, MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis 1922–1931, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002; Neil Riddell, Labour in Crisis: The Second Labour Government 1929–1931, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999.
174 For the disintegration of the Progressive Alliance and its consequences, see Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2010, Chapters 1–2.
175 New Leader, 24 November 1922; Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, Portrait of the Labour Party, London, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929, pp. 174–5; Margaret Cole ed., Beatrice Webb’s Diaries 1924–32, London, Longman, 1956, p. 112, entry for 2 August 1926.
176 See: McKibbin, op. cit., 2010, Chapter 2; Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour 1918–1924, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971; Philip Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire 1926–1932, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
177 Howell, op. cit., 2002, Chapter 19.
178 For MacDonald’s dominance, see Howell, op. cit., 2002, Chapter 4; for the comment, see Manchester Guardian, 6 October 1930.
179 For Henderson, see: Mary Agnes Hamilton, Arthur Henderson, London, W. Heinemann, 1938; Ross McKibbin, ‘Arthur Henderson as Labour leader’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 23, 1978, pp. 79–101; Fred Leventhal, Arthur Henderson, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1989; Christopher Wrigley, Arthur Henderson, Cardiff, GPC Books, 1990. The PLP meeting in May 1930 is discussed in Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931, London and Melbourne, Macmillan, 1967, pp. 184–9.
180 For early disquiet, including ministerial suggestion of trade union dictatorship, during the second Labour government, see ‘Discussion at TUC general council on relations with Labour government’, 26 June 1929 (TUC Archive MS 292 750 1/10).
181 The scenes and suspensions can be followed in HC Deb., 5th ser., vol. 165, 27 June 1923.
182 Oswald Mosley’s scepticism on the return to gold was expressed in his 1925 pamphlet ‘Revolution by Reason’.
183 Keynes’s comment is in his ‘Sir Oswald Mosley’s manifesto’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 13 December 1930. For the debate about feasibility of alternative policies, see: Skidelsky, op. cit., 1967; Ross McKibbin, ‘The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government’, Past and Present, Vol. 65, 1975, pp. 95–123; Duncan Tanner, ‘Political leadership, intellectual debate and economic policy during the second Labour government 1929–1931’ in E. H. H. Green and Duncan Tanner eds, Political Leaders, Moral Values and the Reception of Economic Debate, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 113–50, McKibbin, op. cit., 2010, pp. 69–86.
184 Howell, op. cit., 2002, pp. 264–78; Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, London and Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1975, pp. 199–233. For Milne-Bailey, see TUC research department memorandum, 17 August 1931 (TUC Archive MS 292/420/2).
185 See: Marquand, op. cit., Chapters 25–6; the minutes of the joint meeting of the Labour Party NEC and the general council of the TUC, 3 p.m., 20 August 1931; the minutes of a ministerial meeting with representatives of the general council, 9.30 p.m.; MacDonald’s comment in his diary, 21 August 1931.
186 Sankey’s diary (Sankey Papers c285).
187 Jack Lawson to Ramsay MacDonald, 1 September. 1931; Will Lunn to Ramsay MacDonald, 30 August 1931; Gordon Macdonald to Ramsay MacDonald, 29 August 1931 (all in MacDonald Papers 1315).
188 MacDonald’s diary, 29 October 1931.