Abstract
On leaving his Whitehall office on a cold January evening in 1924, Thomas Jones, Assistant Cabinet Secretary, saw the newspaper placards announcing: ‘Lenin Dead [official]. Ramsay MacDonald Premier.’1 After six weeks of political uncertainty and rumours, Britain’s first-ever Labour government had taken office with its Scottish leader as prime minister and foreign secretary. The general election in December 1923 had produced an inconclusive result — Conservatives 258, Labour 191 and Liberals 158. Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative Prime Minister, had waited to resign until defeated in the new Parliament on 21 January 1924. At this time, democratically elected left-wing governments had already taken office in Western Europe — in Sweden (as a Social Democratic — Liberal coalition in 1917 and in 1920 as a minority administration) and in Germany (where the SPD joined the 1918 coalition in the Weimar Republic).2 In Australia, seen as a laboratory for social democratic politics, the ministry formed by the Australian Labour Party in Queensland in 1899 before federation — albeit for a few days — was the first Labour government in the world. New Zealand was also a pioneer of Labour administrations, where the first Labour MP was elected in 1905, the New Zealand Labour Party founded in 1916 and a majority Labour government led by Michael Savage was returned in 1935.3
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Notes
Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary Volume 1: 1916–1925, ed. Keith Middlemas (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 266 (diary entry; 22 January 1924).
Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 1996), ch. 2.
Interview with John Fisher (grandson of Andrew Fisher 1862–1928, Prime Minister of Australia in 1908, 1910–13, 1914–15 and a minister in the world’s first Labour government in 1899), University of Sydney, 21 November 2003. For a photograph of Andrew and Margaret Fisher with Ramsay and Margaret MacDonald with their daughter Joan in 1911, see David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), between pp. 352 and 353.
Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 18971963, Vol. HI: 1914–1922 (New York and London: Chelsea House in association with R. R. Bowker, 1974), p. 2921.
Harold Nicolson, King George V: His Life and Reign (London: Constable, 1984), p. 384.
David Jarvis, ‘Stanley Baldwin and the Ideology of the Conservative Response to Socialism 1918–1931’ (University of Lancaster, PhD thesis, 1991), p. 139 quoted in Martin Pugh, “‘Class Traitors”: Conservative Recruits to Labour, 1900–30’, in English Historical Review, vol. cxiii, No. 450 (1998), p. 38.
Lloyd George to Megan Lloyd George, 4 February 1924, in Kenneth O. Morgan (ed.), Lloyd George Family Letters, 1885–1936 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973), p. 202.
For the Gill Bennett Report, see Foreign and Commonwealth Office, ‘A Most Extraordinary and Mysterious Business’: The Zinoviev Letter of 1924 (London: Historians, LRD, No. 14, 1999).
For Margaret Bondfield, see Mary Agnes Hamilton, Margaret Bondfield (London: Leonard Parsons, 1924).
For Clement Attlee, see Robert Pearce, Attlee (London: Longman, 1997).
Beatrice Webb’s Diaries, 1912–24, pp.17–18, quoted in R. T. McKenzie, British Political Parties: The Distribution of Power within The Conservative and Labour Parties (London: Mercury Books, 1963), p. 305.
D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, particularly ch. 27; K. Laybourn, The Rise of Labour: The British Labour Party, 1890–1979 (London: Edward Arnold, 1988), ch. 5.
Jonathan Lawrence, ‘Labour — the myths it has lived by’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds), Labour’s First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 351–4.
See David Marquand’s entry on Ramsay MacDonald in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, pp. 1–2, 647–55; Layboum, The Rise of Labour, ch. 5.
Richard Lyman, The First Labour Government (London: Chapman & Hall, 1957).
David Howell, MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis, 1922–1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 21.
Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (London: Merlin Press, 1972); Michael Newman, ‘Ralph Miliband and the Labour Party: from Parliamentary Socialism to “Bennism” ’, in John Callaghan, Steven Fielding and Steve Ludlam, Interpreting the Labour Party: Approaches to Labour Politics and History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), ch. 4.
Paul Foot, The Vote: How It Was Won and How It Was Undermined (London: Viking, 2005), pp. 267–70, 427.
Pat Thane, ‘Labour and Welfare’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds), Labour’s First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 90–4. For centenary histories, see also Brian Brivati and Richard Heffernan (eds), The Labour Party: A Centenary History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Keith Layboum, A Century ofLabour: A History of the Labour Party, 1900–2000 (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000).
Andrew Thorpe, A History of the British Labour Party (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001 edn), p. 51.
Keith Laybourn, ‘The Failure of Socialist Unity in Britain, c.1893–1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, vol. iv (London: Royal Historical Society, 1994), pp. 153–75.
Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 136–7. McKibbin gives slightly different figures but indicates that the union percentage was 60 per cent in the 1922 general election, 52 per cent in 1923 and 57 per cent in 1924.
For examples of socialist failure in the 1895 election, see David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 129–282 passim.
John Shepherd, George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 77.
Kenneth O. Morgan (ed.), Labour In Power, 1945–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 9; David Howell, ‘When was “The Forward March of Labour?” ’, Llafur, vol. 3, (1990), p. 59.
Jack Reynolds and Keith Laybourn, Labour Heartland (Bradford: University of Bradford, 1986), pp.75–82; Laybourn, A Century of Labour, pp. 52–3.
Robert Taylor, ‘PLP’s first 100 years’, Tribune, 10 February 2006, pp. 8–9. See also, Geoff Hoon, “Organised socialism has risen in the night” ‘, ibid., pp. 10–11; David E. Martin, ’ “The Instruments of the People? The Parliamentary Labour Party in 1906”’, in David E. Martin and David Rubinstein (eds), Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays Presented to John Saville (London: Croom Helm, 1979), ch. 7.
John Shepherd, ‘Labour and Parliament: The Lib.-Labs. as the First WorkingClass MPs, 1885–1906’, in Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 208–1O.,
Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘The High and Low Politics of Labour: Keir Hardie to Michael Foot’, in Michael Bentley and John Stevenson (eds), High and Low Politics In Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 286–7.
Pamela M. Graves, Labour Women: Women in British Working-Class Politics, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), passim.
Bob Holton, British Syndicalism, 1900–1914: Myths and Realities (London: Pluto Press, 1978), passim.
Ross McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910–1924 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 82–6.
Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the LabourParty, 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 420–1.
Trevor Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914–1935 (London: Collins, 1966), pp. 84–92.
Margaret Cole, Growing Up Into Revolution (London: Longmans, 1949), p. 86.
Chris Wrigley, Arthur Henderson (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1990), 114–21; F. M. Leventhal, Arthur Henderson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 64–72.
Kenneth D. Wald, ‘Advance by Retreat? The Formation of British Labour’s Electoral Strategy’, Journal of British Studies, 27:3 (July 1988), pp. 284–5.
Arthur Henderson, ‘The Outlook for Labour’, Contemporary Review, cxiit, (February 1918), p. 122 (emphasis added).
G. D. H. Cole, A History of the Labour Party From 1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 140–1.
For a recent study, see Matthew Worley (ed.), Labour’s Grass Roots: Essays on the Activities of Local Labour Parties and Members, 1918–45 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
For the Poplar Rates Revolt, see John Shepherd, George Lansbury: At the Heart Of Old Labour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), ch. 11.
Herbert Morrison, ‘London’s Labour Majority’, LabourMagazine, 8 (1929/30), p. 68, cited in Stefan Berger, ‘Labour in Comparative Perspective’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds), Labour’s First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 315.
Dominic Wring, ‘Selling Socialism: Marketing the Early Labour Party’, History Today (May 2005), pp. 41–3.
The best history of The Daily Herald is Huw Richards, The Bloody Circus: TheDaily Herald and the Left (London, Pluto Press, 1997).
Duncan Tanner, ‘The Labour Party and Electoral Politics in the Coalfields’, in Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman and David Howell (eds), Miners, Unions and Politics, 1910–47 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), pp. 59–92.
Kenneth 0 Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government, 1918–1922 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 213–15.
David Powell, British Politics, 1910–1935: The Crisis of the Party System (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 118–23.
Harold Laski to O. W. Holmes, 13 December 1923, in Mark DeWolfe (ed.), Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916–1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 569–7O.,
Michael Newman, Harold Laski: A Political Biography (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), pp. 69–71; Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left (London: 1993), passim.
There is an extensive literature. The main works include: Ross McKibbin, Evolution; Keith Laybourn and Jack Reynolds, Liberalism and the Rise of Labour, 1890–1918 (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1984); Keith Laybourn, ‘The Rise of Labour and the Decline of Liberalism: The State of the Debate’, History, 80 (June 1995), pp. 207–26; P. F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Wilson, Downfall; Kenneth O. Morgan ’ The New Liberalism and the Challenge of Labour: The Welsh Experience, 1885–1929’, in Kenneth D. Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History: Responses to theRise ofLabour (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 159–82; Michael Bentley, The Climax ofLiberal Politics: British Liberalism in Theory and Practice (London: Edward Arnold 1987); Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Lyman, The First Labour Government; Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald; Howell, MacDonald’s Party; Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour (Cambridge and London, Cambridge University Press, 1971).
Duncan Tanner, ‘Socialist Parties and Policies’, in Martin Pugh (ed.), A Companion to Modern European History, 1871–1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp.144–5O.,
James Joll, Intellectuals in Politics: Three Biographical Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), pp. 26–8. We are grateful to Professor Kenneth O. Morgan for this reference. See also, Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, pp. 52–3.
Sidney Webb to William Robson, 16 December 1923, Norman Mackenzie (ed.), The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Volume 111: Pilgrimage, 1912–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 186.
Egon Wertheimer, Portrait of The Labour Party (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930), pp. 275, 284.
J. R. MacDonald, Socialism and Society (Independent Labour Party: 1905), p. xix.
Richard Lyman, The First Labour Government (1957), pp. 14–15.
New Leader, 14 December 1923.
C. R. Attlee, As It Happened (London: Heinemann, 1954), pp. 58, 62.
J. H. Thomas, When Labour Rules (London: Collins, 1920), pp. 7, 9.
Jonathan Davis, ‘Left Out in the Cold: British Labour Witnesses the Russian Revolution’, Revolutionary Russia, 18:1 (June 2005), pp. 71–81.
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Shepherd, J., Laybourn, K. (2006). From Foundation Conference to Government. In: Britain’s First Labour Government. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287365_1
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