Public panic and Leftist plots – Labour’s chaotic rise 100 years ago
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Whatever one’s political outlook, the centenary of the first Labour government – which, led by Ramsay MacDonald, came to power in January 1924 – carries great significance. A two-party system that had for more than a quarter of a millennium been maintained by Whigs and Tories, and then Liberals and Conservatives, seemed for a moment to have become a three-party one. And yet when, after just nine months, the MacDonald administration fell, the reversion to a two-party system – which persists to this day – was not as before. The great paradox was that although the first Labour government ended in rapid failure, it secured the party as one of the two leading contenders for power in the United Kingdom over the next century.
The general election of December 1923 – the second in just over a year – occurred for reasons hard to comprehend today. Stanley Baldwin, who had succeeded the dying Bonar Law as leader of the Conservative Party and as prime minister earlier in the year, decided that the high unemployment then affecting the country would be more easily addressed if a policy of protectionism were introduced. The Conservatives, however, had won the 1922 election on a programme of free trade: and Baldwin, honourably and with a majority that would easily have allowed him to govern until 1927, went to the country to secure a mandate for the change of policy. With only 258 seats, the party lost its majority; Labour won 191; and the Liberals, united for the first time since the Asquith/Lloyd George split of 1916, held the balance of power with 158 seats.
In this thoroughly-researched and scholarly history, David Torrance argues (as others have before him) that Asquith agreed to keep Labour in power for those nine months because he was sure the government would fall in some degree of chaos, and that he, at the age of 72, would return as prime minister. That was not to be: many expectations were thwarted during the administration’s tenure, and Asquith failed to predict the terminal effect that the Liberals’ support of a struggling minority would have on his ambitions of a return to power.
Much of the press fell into great excitement in the winter of 1923-4 as the possibility of a Labour administration became a reality. In its, and the public’s, imaginations, the arrival of a Leftist regime could only follow the template of Russia in 1917: the overthrow of the monarchy and perhaps even the murder of the Royal family, aristocrats hanging from lamp-posts and a wholesale attack on the bourgeoisie. What happened bore no relation to such fears at all.
Partly because of the innate conservatism of MacDonald, and the Gladstonian rectitude of the man he chose to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, the first Labour government was remarkably like a Liberal administration. Indeed, by including men such as Viscount Haldane as Lord Chancellor and Charles Trevelyan as Minister of Education – both veterans of the Asquith administrations – it had plenty of other cause to resemble one. MacDonald, who was well-travelled, decided to be his own Foreign Secretary, and one of the main achievements of the nine months was a renegotiation of the international arrangements for the payments of reparations after the Great War. The other positive legacy was the Housing Act steered through parliament by John Wheatley, which helped to resuscitate the programme of building much-needed houses.
Sadly, a combination of inexperience and conspiracy undid the government. MacDonald interfered in the attempted prosecution of a Leftist agitator who had published a call for the Armed Forces to rise against the state, and then shamelessly lied about having done so. This error forced the Liberals to withdraw support, and helped to convince many in the country that the Labour movement was a haven for revolutionaries. Then, during the campaign, the “Zinoviev letter” – which we now know to be a forgery – claiming a close relationship between the Labour party and the Bolshevik leadership in Moscow surfaced in Britain, and was leaked (probably by the secret service) to the Daily Mail. The Mail’s proprietor, Lord Rothermere, later an admirer of Hitler, boasted to Lord Beaverbrook that the letter had swayed 100 seats; but MacDonald, for his part, thought the die was cast long before that, and he was right. The country was not ready for Labour rule.
Though his book – like others lately from Bloomsbury – only sporadically appears to have been edited, Torrance gives detailed pen-portraits of the main characters of the government, at least three of whom were born illegitimate, including MacDonald himself. The Wild Men brings superbly to life figures such as Wheatley and the Technicolor Jimmy Thomas, whom history should not have forgotten. But the real hero is King George V, who had every right to be nervous, but behaved so impeccably that the Labour party ended up devoted to him – and, like them, the monarchy also survives a century later. The book is a tribute to the successful functioning of the British Constitution. Let us hope that that, too, is still true after all these years.
The Wild Men is published by Bloomsbury at £20. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
