Ramsay MacDonald should be one of the great figures in Britain’s political imagination: the man who rose from nothing through force of personality and circumstance to become the country’s first Labour prime minister 100 years ago next week. But he is not. Few in Labour will even want to mark his anniversary. This is partly because, like most pre-Churchillian prime ministers of the 20th century, he has been eclipsed in our national imagination. But mainly it is because today MacDonald is a shunned figure: Labour’s Judas, the man who betrayed his party for power, a traitor to his class.
To understand Labour’s seething discomfort about its first prime minister is to begin to understand why that great angst-ridden movement seems unable to drag itself into power without cries of treason being raised against its own leaders.
MacDonald is shunned because of his fateful decision in 1931, during his second stint as prime minister, to form a “national government” coalition rather than go into opposition with the rest of his party who wouldn’t back the spending cuts he wanted to balance the budget during the Great Depression. MacDonald had offered the King his resignation, but was asked to stay on at the head of a new emergency government. He accepted and when he was expelled from Labour, created his own “‘National’ Labour Organisation” which he led to the biggest landslide in British electoral history, crushing his old party in the process.
The problem for MacDonald was that the vast bulk of this new national government wasn’t his. There were 473 Conservatives to only 13 new “National Labour” MPs and 68 Liberals. MacDonald had, in effect, enabled a Tory landslide, leaving his old party with just 52 seats. No wonder the Labour party felt betrayed by MacDonald. Imagine if something like this had happened after the great financial crisis of 2008, with Gordon Brown creating a national government to impose George Osborne’s austerity programme.
To understand just how appalled Labour was — and still is — by MacDonald’s behaviour, you need only take a look at its official account of what happened. “The 1924 government lasted only a few months,” reads the quickfire history of its first prime minister published on the Labour Party website. “Five years later came the election of the second. Dominated by the world economic crisis, the following two years were focused on action to tackle the unemployment of the Great Depression. It was not an easy Parliament and the 1931 election saw only 52 Labour MPs elected.” I suppose “not an easy parliament” is a fair description.
The party’s refusal to even mention MacDonald’s break reveals far more than it conceals: both how uncomfortable it is about that first failure as a political party, when it proved itself singularly incapable of managing the crisis it faced, and about the dangers of its own kind abandoning the cause once in power. “The fear of the great betrayal starts with MacDonald,” one senior Labour figure put it to me. “It starts there and has never left us.”
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