Leaders: Ramsay MacDonald 1911-14 and 1922-31

Ramsay MacDonald (1866 1937)

AJP Taylor once wrote that ‘MacDonald, was a pathetic, almost tragic figure. Yet it is difficult to feel sorry for him. He was the architect of his own downfall.’ There is, indeed, some truth in this statement, although the economic circumstances of the early 1930s had more to do with his fate than Taylor admits. Nevertheless, no twentieth century British political leader has been more reviled than Ramsay MacDonald. His decision to offer the resignation of the second Labour government and to accept the King’s Commission to form a National Government during the financial crisis of August 1931 provoked much animus amongst his former supporters and sustained the view that he had planned to ditch the second Labour government all along. It was for a long time, an axiom that his actions in 1931 marked him as a traitor, and William Lawther W remarked that MacDonald was ‘bereft of any public decency’. To many Labour activists, the man who helped form the Labour Party had helped to undermine it.

(James) Ramsay MacDonald was born in Lossiemouth in Scotland on 12 October 1866, the illegitimate son of Anne Ramsay and, possibly, John MacDonald, a ploughman. He was educated at a local school and expected to become a teacher but, in 1880, took up various clerical posts in Bristol and London. He acquired wide political experience in the late 1880s, joining the Social Democratic Federation whilst in Bristol, working for Thomas Lough, a Liberal Radical MP, and in socialist circles. He had ambitions of becoming a Liberal MP but his candidature for Southampton was thwarted in 1894 and he turned, instead, to the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the first major socialist party to be committed to electoral politics, in July 1894, becoming the ILP and Labour Electoral Association candidate in Southampton in 1894, on whose behalf he was thoroughly trounced in the 1895 General Election.

During the early 1890s MacDonald joined the Fabian Society, a body of largely middle class socialists committed gradual social change through and municipal politics. He acted as a Fabian lecturer in 1892, touring South Wales, the Midlands and the Northeast. In 1896 and 1897 he was also a member of the Rainbow Circle, which first met in the Rainbow Tavern, Fleet Street, London, and brought together some collectivist Liberals such as Herbert Samuel, who believed that the old Liberal Party was about to disintegrate. The group published papers and, briefly, the Progressive Review , in the hope of encouraging the formation of a new centre party in British politics. MacDonald’s own hope was that a centre party with socialist ideas would emerge. This desire, as well as his interest in foreign policy, were two abiding passions which MacDonald pursued throughout his political career.

MacDonald married Margaret Gladstone in November 1896 and this provided him with the financial security he needed to develop his political career, since Margaret brought with her a settlement of up to £300 per year. The couple moved to 3 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, which was later to be a base for the Labour Representation Committee, an alliance of socialists and trade unionists which was later renamed the Labour Party, in its formative years. Margaret died on 8 September 1911 but bore MacDonald six children, one of whom, Malcolm (born in 1901) followed Ramsay into politics.

MacDonald’s career began to blossom in the 1890s. He joined the Executive Committee of the Fabian Society in 1894 and sat on the National Administrative Council of the ILP in 1896. He remained a prominent member of the ILP until the First World War, often acting as chairman, or secretary. Thereafter, he drifted away from the ILP, although he did not formally resign until May 1930. His contribution to the ILP would fill most lifetimes but his real claim to fame arose from the fact that he was largely responsible for the early development of the Labour Party.

The Labour Representation. Committee was formed in February 1900 and formally changed its name to the Labour Party at the beginning of 1906. MacDonald was its secretary from 1900 to 1912, its treasurer in 1911 and 1912, and chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 1911 to 1914. From the start he was committed to winning trade union support for the embryonic: organisation and was helped in this respect by the attack upon trade union funds by the Taff Vale Judgement of 1901. Yet such support only emerged slowly and, with only four MPs in 1903, MacDonald embarked upon a series of eight secret meetings with Jesse Herbert, confidential secretary to Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal Chief Whip, to arrange the infamous ‘Lib-Lab’ pact of 1903. This allowed the Labour Party candidates a straight run against the Conservatives in about thirty Parliamentary seats; in return for a similar arrangement for the Liberals. In the 1906 general election only five of the twenty nine successful LRC candidates faced Liberal opposition and the arrangement had worked for Labour.

The general election result was a personal triumph for MacDonald who was able to run a Party which now had its own Parliamentary Party, initially led by James Keir Hardie. MacDonald also helped to direct the Party towards a gradualist, and eventually socialist, direction by creating a Socialist Library to he contributed his own books, such as Socialism and Society (1905) and Socialism and Government (1909). The dominating theme of his work was that a form of Social Darwinism ensured that private organisations would get bigger, the state would have to intervene, and that socialism would emerge from the success, not the failure, of capitalism. Because of the influence of MacDonald and the Webbs during the First World War, these essentially Fabian views became the defining influence in the socialism the Labour Party espoused after 1918.

From 1906 to 1918, MacDonald was MP for Leicester, sometimes secretary of the Labour Party and, for four years, chairman of the Parliamentary Party (PLP). However, he was strongly criticised for helping lead the Party and the PLP into alliance with the Liberal Party. Nonetheless, his reputation for radicalism was restored, briefly (though it allowed him to win the post of Labour Leader in 1922), by his opposition to Britain’s involvement in the First World War. This resulted in venomous attacks upon him by the press. The most notable instance of this was the occasion when Horatio Bottomley, editor of John Bull, published MacDonald’s birth certificate and revealed that he was illegitimate, registered as James MacDonald Ramsay after his father. Bottomley further suggested that MacDonald was both an impostor and a traitor, and should be taken to the Tower of London and shot at dawn. This and similar hostility to MacDonald’s, wartime position led to the loss of his Parliamentary seat at Leicester in the 1918 general election and him losing a by election in a Labour seat in 1921.

In the immediate post war years, relieved of his Parliamentary duties, MacDonald concentrated his efforts upon building up the Labour Party. Nevertheless he was returned as Labour MP for Aberavon in 1922 and, shortly afterwards became Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, largely as a result the support of Independent Labour Party MPs who, influenced by the dominant group from Clydeside, voted almost to a man for MacDonald in the leadership contest. After Stanley Baldwin failed to win support for his protectionist measures in the 1923 General Election and after some delay, MacDonald was invited to form the first Labour Government at the beginning of 1924. This was a minority government and lasted little more than ten months. MacDonald was both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, becoming the first Prime Minister to assume that dual role since Robert Cecil, the third Marquess of Salisbury. The defeat of the first Labour government at the General Election of 1924 occurred in the climate of the infamous ‘Zinoviev Letter’, or the ‘Red Letter Scare’, which suggested that the Soviet Union was intending to use the Labour Party in its revolutionary objectives. Whether this letter was real or a fake, it seems to have made only a small difference to a Party which seemed certain to be, and was, defeated.

During the next five years MacDonald led a Labour Party to which he was increasingly becoming a stranger. Yet in the May 1929 general election, MacDonald was returned for the parliamentary seat of Seaham , having left his less safe Aberavon seat, and, at the head of the largest party, formed his second, minority, Labour government. Unfortunately within six months of its return the Wall Street Crash had occurred and, as a result of the world recession, unemployment rose from about one million to three millions in less than two years. The Labour Government grossly overspent its budget and faced a financial crisis in August 1931. The Cabinet attempted to find the spending cuts demanded the opposition parties but split over the decision to cut unemployment benefit 10 per cent. MacDonald offered the resignation of his government to King George V but returned with a mandate to form a National Government, which was to include both the Conservative and the Liberal parties, as well as any National Labour support he could muster.

These actions led L. MacNeill Weir to produce his book The Tragedy of Ramsay MacDonald (1938), which suggested that MacDonald was never a socialist, was an opportunist who had schemed to ditch the Labour government, and was guilty of betrayal. However, David Marquand has suggested that such accusations are, at best, half truths. Indeed, he argues that MacDonald was probably as good a socialist as any other leading figure in the Labour Party and that he was a principled opportunist (he gave up the Labour leadership, to oppose the First World War), who did not scheme to replace the Labour government with a coalition but may have been guilty of betraying his former Labour supporters.

MacDonald was Prime Minister of a National Government, which won a landslide victory at the 1931 general election between 1931 and 1935. During this period his Premiership depended upon the support of the Conservative Party which encouraged moves towards protectionism. Apart from being Prime Minister, MacDonald indulged himself in foreign policy and was deeply involved in two conferences in 1932 the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the Lausanne Conference, which was concerned with German reparations. Thereafter, his career declined and he found himself attacked by both his former colleagues, such as Philip Snowden, and his new political friends. He went into physical and mental decline and was forced to, resign as Prime Minister on 7 June 1935. Subsequently, he lost his seat at the 1935 general election to, Emmanuel Shinwell who had put him forward as Parliamentary Labour Party leader in 1922. MacDonald was found a seat for the Scottish Universities but thereafter played a diminishing role in the activities of the National Government. MacDonald died of heart failure on 9 November 1937 while cruising in the Caribbean on the Reina Pacifico. His body was returned to Britain and cremated on 26 November 1937. His ashes were interred in the, Spynie graveyard, near Lossiemouth, next to those of his wife.

AJP Taylor was, perhaps, rather harsh in his assessment of MacDonald’s failures. MacDonald was certainly a tragic figure but he was not entirely the architect of his own downfall for the economic conditions of 1929 to 1931 and the divisions within the Labour Party, also helped to determine the events of 1931. It must also be remembered that whilst he is seen as a traitor within the Labour Party he did much to build up the Labour Party into the second party of government between 1900 and 1931. Not surprisingly Chris Wrigley concludes that MacDonald remains a mixture of saint and sinner in Labour history. The key biography on MacDonald is David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (1977). In addition Chris Wrigley has written an excellent short chapter James Rarnsay MacDonald, 1922 193 1, in Kevin Jefferys (ed.), Leading Labour: From Keir Hardie to Tony Blair (1999).

Professor Keith Laybourn