JANUARY 22, 2024
A hundred years ago today, Ramsay MacDonald formed the first ever Labour government. Richard Price assesses its achievement.
We’ve become used to thinking that we live in politically exceptional times. By the end of this year, we will in all likelihood have had four general elections and six prime ministers in nine years. Yet the six years following the end of the First World War were even more frenetic. Britain had four general elections and four different prime ministers covering seven periods in office.
Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government – the sixth in this sequence – was not the first government in the world with working class credentials. In 1871, the Paris Commune had briefly brought a coalition of Proudhonists, Blanquistes and Jacobins to power. Chris Watson’s Australian Labour Party government was in office for seven months in 1904. In November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in the former Tsarist empire. Six months later, Mensheviks in Georgia proclaimed independence from the Soviet Union. Germany’s social democrats came to power on the back of the November 1918 revolution.
Yet there was no doubting the symbolic importance of the first Labour government that took office a century ago on 22nd January 1924. George V wrote in his diary: “Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government.”
The Manchester Guardian noted that a majority of the members of the new government “are drawn from the humblest rank of society.” Peter Clark’s recent book, The Men of 1924, points out that its social composition was a sharp break with the past. Replacing the Tories were a group of men, the majority of whom had left school by the age of 15, and headed by the illegitimate son of a farm labourer and a housemaid. Five members of the government had started work by the age of 12, three had started working down coal mines before their teens, another was born to a single mother, one had been a foundling, and three were of Irish immigrant heritage.
The window of opportunity for Labour to form a government was the product of several years of extreme political instability. The end of war saw the rapid contraction of war industries, causing an initial recession, accompanied by the growth of trade union militancy. A short boom was followed by a sharp recession in 1920-21, accompanied by rising unemployment, which touched 23.4% in May 1921. Trade union membership, which had peaked at 8.3 million in 1920, fell back to 5.4 million in 1923. Deflationary trends saw prices fall.
Internationally, the Russian Revolution threatened to upend the international order. Germany, with the Ruhr occupied by France, was gripped by economic crisis. Ireland achieved independence at the cost of a bloody civil war. British rule was increasingly challenged in India.
For the only time in British history, there were three general elections in three successive years. The two parties of the British ruling class, the Tories and the Liberals, were riven by internal splits and feuds, and the growth of Labour’s electoral support inaugurated a decade of three-party politics, in which political calculations became much more complex.
At the 1922 general election, Labour made net gains of 85 seats and became the official opposition for the first time. Ramsay MacDonald became Party leader, which now became an official title, in addition to being Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He still retained some credit with the growing anti-war wing of the Party for his stance during the First World War. Anti-war MPs had lost their seats in the Khaki election of 1918, but the pendulum was beginning to swing, and by the mid-1920s, Labour was moving towards the kind of semi-pacifism it would hold to for the next decade.
The election saw the victory of five Red Clydesiders, who supported MacDonald for the leadership – something they would subsequently regret. Among the new intake were more MPs who weren’t sponsored by unions. Many were Independent Labour Party socialists, who tended to lean to the left of their trade union colleagues. At the same time, there was a steady drip-drip of Liberal defectors joining Labour.
While Churchill and his close ally Lord Birkenhead claimed that Labour was ‘unfit to govern’, Labour stressed its moderation and fiscal responsibility, promising to address “the difficulties of employers”. J.R. Clynes, who led the party up to the 1922 general election, and became deputy leader to MacDonald after, rejected the idea that there was any “mysterious reservoir of wealth” that could fund wage increases.
Meanwhile, the Labour leaders were fighting a war on their left flank against the influence of the Communist Party among the Labour left, and throughout the mid-1920 they took a series of administrative measures against it. Despite a membership of below 4,000 at the end of 1923, CP members were active as individuals in local Labour parties. But Labour Conference in July 1923 decisively rejected the latest attempt at Communist affiliation by 2,880,000 to 366,000.
After only eight months of the Tory ministry, Premier Andrew Bonar Law resigned, having been diagnosed as terminally ill. Stanley Baldwin, who took over, wanted to reverse Tory policy in favour of protectionist tariffs on imports, and incautiously called another election on 6th December 1923 to win a mandate. Labour’s main manifesto pledge was a capital levy on all individual fortunes in excess of £5,000.
It was a serious miscalculation on Baldwin’s part. Protectionism was unpopular – the public feared it would lead to higher food prices – and when the votes were counted the Tories had lost 86 seats. Labour gained 49 and the Liberals gained 43, leaving the Tories as the largest party, but unable to command a majority. Remarkably, this large number of seats changed hands without any major shift in the main parties’ support in the country. The Tories were down only 0.5%, Labour up 1% and the Liberals up 0.9%.
The parliamentary recess ran for five weeks, for the rest of December and well into January. In the days following the election there was talk of a coalition, and MacDonald’s support for a cross-party government of the centre was canvassed. As in the Blair years, there was some talk of a Labour-Liberal realignment of the centre, but it came to nothing. But by the middle of December the National Executive, the Executive of the Parliamentary Party and the TUC had ruled out a coalition. For the time being, Baldwin remained in office.
While the negotiations went on there was a right wing press campaign predicting doom, gloom and Bolshevism. As the Palace dithered as to who it would invite to form a government, railway workers’ leader Jimmy Thomas – who would cross the floor to join MacDonald’s National Government in 1931 – let it be known that Labour would introduce “no extreme legislation or violent administrative changes” and that MacDonald would not “play up to the Clyde division”. He went further, committing the incoming government to accepting the outgoing government’s budget and shelving plans for a Capital Levy.
Baldwin held on until January but when Parliament finally resumed on 22nd January Labour and the Liberals combined to vote down the King’s Speech by 72 votes, leaving the king no option but to call upon MacDonald to form a minority government. MacDonald caused amusement by attending the Palace in a frock coat of the type rarely seen since the First World War.
The election was notable for the victory of first three women Labour MPs, Margaret Bondfield, Susan Lawrence and Dorothy Jewson. Bondfield – a former shop assistant – became the first woman to serve in government when she was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour.
Very few Labour MPs had any experience of government. Arthur Henderson had served in both Asquith’s and Lloyd George’s wartime coalitions, with a few others in minor posts. The day after Labour took office, former Liberal Noel Buxton, who became Minister of Agriculture, told his outgoing Tory predecessor that “MacDonald’s idea is to show how respectable they are.” To demonstrate ‘continuity’, MacDonald drafted in forces outside the Labour Party. His Cabinet contained four ex-Liberals, two Tories and one ex-Tory. Labour had only three members of the House of Lords, but MacDonald declined to create significantly more.
In opposition Labour had often spoken about unemployment. Although it had fallen from its peak in 1921 to 11.9% when Labour took office, it remained stubbornly high, rarely dipping below 10% the rest of the decade. In government, Labour failed to take adequate measures. Its leaders thought the way to cure unemployment was a better foreign policy – “the re-establishment of normal peaceful conditions throughout the world” – rather than any assault on the bastions of power, wealth and privilege. To this end, MacDonald served as his own Foreign Secretary. There was no significant interventionist programme of public works, with the result that when the government fell in October 1924 it had hardly made a dent in the unemployment rate, which remained at 10.9%.
The new left in the Party was largely side-lined except for Clydesider John Wheatley at Health. Fred Jowett as Commissioner of Works was the left’s only other representative. Philip Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer had moved a long way from his socialist evangelism in the early years of the century to a grey, rigid orthodoxy. He too would cross the floor in 1931.
The British Empire covered about one-quarter of the world’s land surface and ruled over one-fifth of its population. But the incoming government had little in the way of progressive ideas. Right winger Jimmy Thomas was Colonial Secretary and former Liberal Imperialist Richard Haldane chaired the Committee of Imperial Defence like a ‘private empire’. While claiming to be working towards Dominion Home Rule in India, the government warned Indian Congress leaders not to take any “ill-considered or premature action.” There was one break with the past, with the diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in February 1924. An Anglo-Soviet trade agreement followed in August.
The one piece of government legislation that had a lasting impact was John Wheatley’s Housing Act. It increased government subsidies paid to local authorities to build municipal housing for rent to low paid workers. It specified decent space standards and the provision of bathrooms. The act remained in operation until 1933 and produced 508,000 houses, all but 15,000 of which were built by local authorities. There were also a number of modest yet worthy social reforms, including increases in benefits, some improvements in welfare facilities and extension of educational opportunities.
Wheatley was also responsible for another victory for the left. In 1922 Poplar Council had been issued with an Order by the then Liberal Minister of Health that made paying unemployment relief at a scale higher than the official one illegal. Wheatley rescinded it unilaterally without consulting MacDonald.
With barely 30% of the seats in the Commons and heavily dependent on Liberal votes, MacDonald’s government was never likely to last long. Yet MacDonald’s aim was to remain in power as long as possible. In reality, the only choice available was to influence the manner of his downfall. The Parliamentary Party’s Liaison Committee, chaired by Robert Smillie, called on the government to “deal drastically and fundamentally” with some of the accumulated “great social evils” and if defeated, that it should go to the country with a clear alternative platform. Instead, MacDonald soldiered on, emphasising the government’s responsibility and moderation, and most histories of the period repeat the line that its one achievement was to show that Labour was ‘fit to govern’.
In its 25th July 1924 edition, the Communist Workers Weekly carried an open letter to members of the forces by its editor J.R. Campbell, calling upon them not to shoot strikers. The government’s Attorney General, Sir Patrick Hastings recommended prosecution under the 1797 Mutiny Act, but pressure from Labour backbenchers caused it to be withdrawn. Tories, Liberals and the right wing press responded by claiming the government was in hock to extremists.
A Tory motion of censure was defeated, but a Liberal motion in favour of a Select Committee to investigate the circumstances leading to the prosecution being dropped was carried. MacDonald treated this as an issue of confidence, and requested a dissolution of Parliament and a fresh election.
The red scare that had been generated put Labour on the defensive. It deepened with the publication of the infamous ‘Zinoviev Letter’ in the Daily Mail, four days before the election on 29th October. The letter purported to be a letter to the British Communists, urging them to take advantage of the normalisation of relations with the Soviet Union to press forward revolutionary action. It is now widely accepted to have been a White Russian forgery, with some involvement by MI5.
The election result saw sweeping Tory gains that gave them 412 seats on a swing of 8.8%. Although the Zinoviev Letter is widely credited with Labour’s defeat, the extent is debatable. Labour’s vote actually rose by just over a million votes, and its vote share by 2.6%, although this was partly due to it contesting more seats. Despite this, Labour lost 40 seats, although the big losers were the Liberals who lost 118 seats as middle class voters rallied to the Tories as the party of order.
So are there ‘lessons for today’ to be drawn in the time-honoured way from events 100 years ago? Perhaps what we should note is how contemporary so many of MacDonald’s traits seem – the scrapping of pledges to tax the rich; the marginalisation of the left of the Party, while reaching out to forces to its right; the pose of acting as an honest broker between employers and workers; the retreat in the face of witch-hunting; the absence of an over-arching narrative and mission; abiding by inherited Tory budgets.
Richard Price is a member of Leyton & Wanstead CLP.
Image: Ramsay MacDonald. https://picryl.com/media/ramsay-macdonald-cropped-975b23. Creator: National Portrait Gallery London | Credit: National Portrait Gallery London via Picryl.com Copyright: public domain PDM 1.0 DEED Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal
Ibrahim Hooper
