The first Labour government took office on 22 January 1924. In the 1918 general election the Labour Party had received 2,245,000 votes and only elected 57 MPs, but by the 1922 general election its vote had risen to over 4 million and it elected 142 MPs. In the December 1923 general election, Labour polled 4,348,000 votes, electing 191 MPs. The Conservatives were still the largest party with 259 MPs, but with Liberal support (159 MPs) Ramsay MacDonald went on to form a minority government. The Conservatives willingly acquiesced in this experiment.
Whereas in Germany it had taken the 1918 Revolution to bring the Socialists to power and in Italy the ruling class had dispensed with parliamentary democracy altogether, installing Mussolini in power in 1922 rather than risk the Socialists coming to power, in Britain the ruling class actually installed a Labour government in office. Nothing better illustrates the fact that the ruling class were completely unafraid of the Labour Party than the manner in which the first Labour government took office. From the very beginning they had Labour’s measure.
The first Labour Cabinet included more former public schoolboys (eight) than it did trade unionists (seven) and, of course, the new Prime Minister sent his own sons to public school, a good indication that he was more intent on joining the ruling class than he was on overthrowing it! Even though MacDonald had been supported by the Labour left in the leadership elections, he proceeded to appoint more Tories and Liberals to his Cabinet than he did left-wingers. Only two left-wing MPs were brought into the Cabinet, Fred Jowett and John Wheatley, the same as the number of old Harrovians!
The tremendously popular George Lansbury was left out, apparently because of royal objections, but MacDonald regarded him as dangerously radical, no better than a Communist. Instead, the Labour right was reinforced by Lord Chelmsford, a staunch Tory and former Viceroy of India, who was installed as First Lord of the Admiralty, a key appointment at that time. He was joined by another Tory, Lord Parmoor, and five former Liberals, including Lord Haldane. In the best of British parliamentary traditions, MacDonald appointed his golfing partner, General C B Thomson, to the Air Ministry and gave him a peerage. As the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, pointed out, the new Cabinet “had a reassuring effect upon that section of public opinion which had been in terror about the advent of a Labour Government”. With the likes of Lords Parmoor, Chelmsford and Haldane on board, no one could possibly imagine that Labour was intent on “carrying out the Socialist Revolution”.155
One early source of controversy was how ministers should conduct themselves when presented to the king, George v. MacDonald insisted they wear court dress, top hats, blue gold-braided dress coats, and white knee breeches. Only two Cabinet members refused, Jowett and Wheatley, who turned up in conventional suits, although Wheatley spoiled his act of defiance by “going down on both knees and actually kissing the king’s hand”.156 The rest were completely won over. According to MacDonald himself, the king was always “cordially correct, human and friendly. The king has never seen me as a Minister without making me feel that he was also seeing me as a friend”.157 The new Colonial Secretary, J H Thomas, in a chapter entitled “Some Cherished Memories of the Royal House” in his appalling memoirs, praised the king for the fact that he “never…reminded me of the disparity between our social positions. And I say without unctuousness that I always felt that the sympathy and kindness extended to me by the Royal House was…a noble gesture towards those whom I represented”. The king, Thomas hilariously proclaimed, was “the staunchest of democrats…with a giant’s courage”.158
Labour ministers found they had a taste for royal garden parties, society functions, rubbing shoulders with the rich and powerful, who they found were actually quite decent people once you got to know them, friendly, welcoming, and generous. Ministers’ wives and daughters were presented at court. They had arrived. There is, of course, something particularly distasteful about working class men and women who, whatever their politics, had often had hard lives bowing and scraping to a hereditary royal parasite whose only claim to distinction was that he was the son of another royal parasite. Labour’s wholehearted embrace of this thoroughly corrupt system is beautifully captured by a complaint MacDonald made of being approached by a trade union leader for a peerage. He had to turn the man down because his son was an agricultural labourer: “it was impossible because when this man died his son would succeed to the peerage, and the position of an agricultural labourer as a peer would be impossible”.159
MacDonald had earlier promised the king that there would be no “extreme legislation” and that Labour intended “to carry on the Government on sound lines”, and now had to apologise to him for the singing of The Red Flag at the party’s victory celebrations at the Albert Hall. He hoped the king would “understand the very difficult position he was in vis-à-vis to his own extremists” and promised “by degrees…to break down this habit”. Indeed, the following year MacDonald sponsored a competition in the Daily Herald to find a more congenial replacement for The Red Flag, although without success.160 One leading Conservative, J C C Davidson, was full of admiration for the way George v handled his relations with the new Labour ministers. As we have already seen, the court had decided on a policy of deliberately cultivating Labour politicians during the war and this continued afterwards. The king, Davidson observed, was “a died-in-the-wool conservative…very right-wing… But he managed to persuade the Labour Party that he was entirely neutral”. He had shown “a very great deal of self-discipline”. The result was that MacDonald, Thomas and co had become “more royalist than the king”.161
How important was this grovelling to the monarchy? What it illustrated was the extent to which the Labour Party had already become “a ladder by which men climbed to place and power” rather than having anything to do with “working class emancipation”. The author of these words, John Scanlon, a left-wing journalist at the time, went on to describe MacDonald as wanting to make Labour “as like the other great parties as was humanly possible” and to “prove that nobody had anything to fear from the Labour Party”. He was always concerned with how Labour looked to “the best people”.162
Another contemporary Beatrice Webb,163 whose husband, Sidney, was actually in the Cabinet, even though her politics had little in common with Scanlon’s, was similarly appalled. On 3 March 1924, she wrote in her diary that MacDonald “prefers the company of Tory aristocrats and Liberal capitalists to that of trade union officials and ILP agitators”. Later that same month she noted that it would be wrong to call MacDonald a “traitor” because “he was never a socialist”. She characterised his politics as a “version of reformist conservatism”.164
What MacDonald was concerned with was demonstrating to the ruling class that the Labour leadership could be trusted to look after the interests of British Capitalism and of the British Empire. There would have to be moderate sensible reform, although the working class could not expect to be coddled. Socialism was something that might come about one day, a long time in the future, if the ruling class were agreeable, although MacDonald was always vague about this. One immediate problem, however, was what to do about working class militancy?
The coming to power of a Labour government together with a measure of economic recovery encouraged a revival of trade union militancy. Many workers felt that with their government in power now was the time to fight for wage rises and improved conditions. They could not have been more wrong. The new government found itself confronted with a dock strike that saw the Cabinet meeting every day, sometimes twice a day, to discuss the situation. Not how to support the dockers, of course, but how to get them to accept the employers’ terms and whether it would be necessary to break the strike. Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, complained:
There seemed to be an epidemic of unrest and strikes, and threats to strike were of almost daily occurrence. Two or three weeks after the Dock Strike had been settled a strike in the transport services in London broke out which caused great public inconvenience. There was serious talk of the workers in one of the principal electric stations coming out on strike in sympathy with the transport workers. There was trouble in the coalfields which seemed at one time likely to lead to a stoppage, but fortunately that disastrous course was averted. There was a large number of sectional and unauthorised strikes, the cause of which could be traced to Communist activity within the Trade Unions…all this caused the Government great anxiety.165
Arthur Henderson, the Home Secretary, was particularly concerned. He predictably refused to reinstate the sacked and blacklisted police strikers from 1919 despite protests from both inside and outside Parliament. His position on this question was, his biographer writes, “indistinguishable from that of right-wing Tories”.166 He was the first but certainly not the last Labour Home Secretary to find himself in this sort of position.
Henderson continued to receive the weekly Special Branch reports on the state of revolutionary organisations in the country and the trade unions remained under close surveillance. Later when the TUC General Council was reluctantly preparing to call the General Strike in 1926, a panic-stricken J H Thomas warned them that the government knew about everything they were doing. When he had been a minister in MacDonald’s government, he told them he had received intelligence reports on industrial disputes: “on my desk every morning full details, photographs of letters that had passed, speeches made at private meetings—oh my God!”167 He, of course, made no protest against this at the time.
Henderson himself was terrified of Communist influence within the unions and of the prospect of revolutionary politics linking up with industrial unrest. On 3 April, he actually warned Sidney Webb of the danger of revolution: “The epidemic of labour revolts reminds him…of what was happening in Russia in 1917 against the Kerensky government”. As Beatrice Webb responded, “little bands of wrecking Communists are undoubtedly at work” and “MacDonald’s present pose as an aristocratic charmer and courtly society man” did not help. There were, she went on, “unpleasant resemblances between Kerensky and MacDonald”.168
Even MacDonald, who took little interest in domestic affairs, took fright. Hugh Dalton, a future Labour Chancellor, remembered MacDonald complaining about workers’ militancy in his memoirs where he quoted from his diary of the time. MacDonald, he wrote, “deplores all strikes”.
Strikes by the dockers and miners are threatened. This sort of thing will “knock us out” if it goes on. What is wanted is to “preach Socialism” in the country and the importance of political action. “Some reductions” of wages may be justifiable. Strikes may prevent trade revival. The military might have to be used to run lorries. “The complexities of the situation” may even become such as to compel us to have “a national Government”, “nearly a Coalition but not quite”. We may have “to bring some of ours out”. Men never want to strike, unless they are instigated by their leaders.169
So great was the concern that the Cabinet set up an Industrial Unrest Committee to investigate CP involvement in the unrest.
When Labour first took office, the senior Tory J C C Davidson briefed his “old friend Josh Wedgwood” regarding the strikebreaking apparatus, the Supply and Transport Organisation, that the Tories had established: “I told him that, whoever was in power, it was his duty to protect the Constitution against a Bolshevik-inspired General Strike… I begged him not to destroy all I had done and not to inform his Cabinet of it”.
Davidson was under the impression that Labour was some sort of left-wing party that would dismantle the Supply and Transport Organisation. Far from it! The Labour government actually prepared to make use of the Tories’ strikebreaking preparations during both the dock strike and the London transport strike. The docks dispute was settled before the government could take action. As for the bus and tram workers, they had walked out on 21 March, a power station had shut down in sympathy and the tube workers were preparing to come out in support on 28 March. The government invoked the Special Powers Act and prepared to break the power station strike by drafting in 800 naval stokers, but this dispute was also settled before they could take action. Both Wheatley and Jowett went along with all this.
There could be no ambiguity regarding whose side the Labour government was on. From the first Labour government up until the most recent, Labour has fought industrial militancy and broken strikes.
One other strike is worth considering for what it tells us about the peculiar mentality of Labour ministers. Some 7,000 workers preparing the Wembley British Empire Exhibition walked out on unofficial strike for 2d an hour on 31 March. Mass picketing shut the whole site down. The government was convinced that the strike was Communist-inspired and Thomas reported to the Cabinet that the king who “had set his heart on the Exhibition being a success… was in despair”. According to Clynes, ministers met union leaders and told them “of the king’s feelings; and in the end patriotism prevailed, thus adding another example to the many where royal intervention, direct or indirect, has saved a difficult situation”.
This was, of course, not the whole story. Ministers met full-time union officials not the strike leaders and persuaded them to do their patriotic duty of not supporting their members (OBEs all round!). The union leaders condemned the strike (one of them was thrown into the ornamental lake that was under construction for his pains), the press mounted a full-scale witch-hunt against the strike leaders and some 500 police were drafted in to disperse the pickets, protect scab labour and break the strike.170
While taking a firm stand against industrial militancy, MacDonald was quite happy to accept a generous gift from a businessman friend, Sir Arthur Grant of McVitie’s Biscuits. He gave MacDonald shares worth between £30-40,000 and the use of a Daimler motor car. Quite coincidentally, of course, Grant received a peerage. To rub salt into the wound, Grant was not even a Labour supporter, but a Conservative. The unkind cry of “Biscuits” followed MacDonald wherever he went.
Special Branch surveillance and harassment of the CP continued under the Labour government and was, in the end, to precipitate its premature downfall. One episode provided concrete evidence of the extent of the surveillance. On 13 April, two Special Branch detectives were caught eavesdropping on a meeting of the CP’s London district committee. They escaped, but left behind three notebooks. On 18 April, the Workers’ Weekly printed photographs of the notebooks together with extracts that demonstrated the extent of surveillance. Readers were told that this was “the most damning evidence that has ever fallen into the hands of the working class in this country of the means whereby the Capitalist State maintains its rule”. The paper promised that the notebooks “will be precious exhibits in the future Museum of British Revolution”!171 Even though Henderson, the Home Secretary, strongly defended Special Branch surveillance of the left in the Commons, nevertheless the episode caused the government considerable embarrassment.
What brought the government down though was its later decision to prosecute the Workers’ Weekly for the Open Letter it published on 25 July calling on soldiers, sailors and airmen to join the struggle to “smash capitalism for ever and institute the reign of the whole working class”. It went on: “Refuse to shoot down your fellow workers! Refuse to fight for profits! Turn your weapons on your oppressors!”172 On 5 August, the paper’s acting editor, John Campbell, was arrested and charged under the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act. The outcry this decision provoked led the government to back down. Not only was Campbell a disabled decorated war veteran, but a number of left Labour MPs indicated that if the prosecution went ahead they would publicly associate themselves with the Open Letter. It was the decision to back down that precipitated the government’s fall. MacDonald chose to treat a Liberal proposal for a Select Committee to investigate the episode as a vote of confidence (he was worried it would reveal that he had lied about the episode) and was heavily defeated by the combined Tories and Liberals.
The election of October 1924 was turned into a red-baiting exercise by the Conservatives who made good use of a forged directive supposedly from a senior Soviet official, the Zinoviev letter, to discredit Labour (they paid £5,000 for it). The Labour Party was portrayed as either Communist, soft on Communism or unable to stand up to the Communists. The Tories were swept back into power, but while the number of Labour MPs elected fell to 151, the Labour vote actually went up by 1,134,351. It was the Liberals who were the real victims of the Zinoviev Letter scam, with their voters running to the Conservatives for protection from the Red menace. The Liberals lost over a hundred seats. A Conservative government took power, determined to complete the job of rolling back the unions.