In the week of the centenary of the formation of the first Labour government, Richard Johnson assesses the 1924 government's achievements and the 'eerily common challenges' that Keir Starmer shares with Ramsay MacDonald.
A heavy fog and freezing temperatures set the scene for the first Labour government. On 24th January 1924, a curious stream of men passed through the doors of 10 Downing Street, their faces momentary illuminated by the flashing bulbs of the press photographers. Some were immaculately turned out in full court dress. Others donned ill-fitting, hastily borrowed approximations. Some came in their normal working suits.
The arrival of the first Labour Cabinet was excitable but chaotic. Some ministers had chosen to walk from Buckingham Palace, where they had just received their seals of office. Stephen Walsh, the new War Secretary, arrived to hearty cheers of ‘Come on, Steve!’. The new Colonial Secretary, Jimmy Thomas, by contrast arrived rather grandly in a plum-coloured limousine, waving gamely at the crowd.
Divided by mode of transport, what united these Cabinet ministers -- and distinguished them from nearly all of their predecessors -- was their proletarian origins. Walsh, a young orphan, was sent down the Lancashire mines from the age of 13. Thomas was the illegitimate son of a Welsh maid, raised by his washerwoman grandmother. He started work at 9, and, by the ripe age of 12, began a lifelong career on the railways. Both men rose through the union movement to become Labour Cabinet ministers.
Not every member of the new government had such humble origins. Arthur Ponsonby, sent to the Foreign Office, had been born in Windsor Castle to Queen Victoria’s private secretary. The Agriculture Minister Noel Buxton was the son of the Governor of South Australia. Viscount Chelmsford, who had somewhat begrudgingly agreed to serve in the Labour government, was the former Viceroy of India. Chelmsford was nearly eliminated from the Cabinet on day one when the taxi carrying the President of the Board of Trade, Professor Sidney Webb, nearly collided with him outside Downing Street.
The last man to enter Number 10 was the new prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. The illegitimate son of a Scottish farmhand, raised by his mother (a maid), MacDonald was raised in poverty in Morayshire before moving to England where he became involved in the fledgling Independent Labour Party (ILP) and helped to found the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, considered the birth of the Labour Party.
The transition from a new political party to a new government in just 24 years was, in MacDonald’s assessment, an ‘insane miracle’. The mere fact of the Labour government, comprised with many working-class ministers (and a female member in Margaret Bondfield), was undoubtedly an extraordinary and wondrous step in the democratic history of Britain, likened by the contemporary press to Magna Carta and the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Yet, beyond the mere fact of its existence, the 1924 Labour government performed few miracles. It was beset by high expectations which were ultimately unmet. It had not won the election so much as the Tories had lost it. The government was plagued by industrial strife, policy misdirection, and inflexible political leadership. To top it off, the government had no majority.
For many in the labour movement, the 1924 government was a bitter disappointment. One Labour MP wrote acerbically to MacDonald, ‘No abiding mark, except possibly in the foreign sphere, will have been left by the first Labour Government with power. In this eventuality, the cause of Labour might be retarded for a generation’.
As Keir Starmer prepares his own entrance to Downing Street, there are some lessons to be learned. In spite of the century which divides Starmer from MacDonald, there remain eerily common challenges which he must address if he wishes to avoid a similar ignoble fate.
Have a Clear Policy Programme
Labour’s first problem was that it entered government in 1924 with few ideas of what it wanted to do. In major areas of policy, not least economic policy, Labour lacked a coherent policy agenda. Clement Attlee, who was elected to Parliament for the first time in 1922, explained that this failing could partly be blamed on the political cycle short-circuiting. The Conservatives had won a sizeable majority in the November 1922 election. Few in Labour had expected another election thirteen months later, let alone to be the victor. The party programme had not had time to develop as it might have in a four- or five-year Parliament. There is some plausibility in this argument.
But, there was a deeper problem. Labour had become so accustomed to opposition that it was not thinking like a government. For some in the Labour Party, socialism was fundamentally oppositional. Parliament was an unparalleled public platform to put the ideological case for socialism to the wider world – or at least for it to be recorded in the annals of Hansard.
Labour MPs made long, impassioned speeches in the House of Commons that denounced the evils of a capitalist system and spoke boldly of the New Jerusalem to come, but there wasn’t a great deal of thinking about the practical policies that would be required to get there. MacDonald despised this indulgence, writing in his diary, ‘Some members do no work but much talking and wish to turn the floor of House into a sort of national street corner soap box’.
Keir Starmer will face a Parliamentary Labour Party in which the majority of Labour MPs will have no experience of being in government, himself included. Today, the problem of ill-discipline is not confined to House of Commons debates. Instead, Labour MPs may be inclined to use social media as their proverbial soap boxes. As Starmer discovered when it came to the Israel-Gaza conflict, party discipline may be difficult to maintain when Labour MPs are forced to take votes that are unpopular with their members.
Equally, under Starmer, the Labour Party has been reticent about sketching a clear programme for government. There remain sizeable gaps in the Starmer policy agenda. What is the answer to the social care crisis? How will Labour repair the broken higher education funding model? How will Labour address long-term wage stagnation? These questions need answering before entering government.
Work with the Unions
In the first week of the first Labour government, train drivers in the ASLEF union went on strike. Exactly a century on, the same union has announced further strike action.
In 1924, the ‘Big Four’ railway companies had tried to force through reduced pay and longer hours for drivers. Much to the irritation of the striking train drivers, the Labour government declined to intervene on their behalf. ASLEF's leader John Bromley was furious. ‘If the success of the Labour Party and of a Labour Government can only be built on such serious losses in wages and conditions, I am not sure that the workers will very much welcome a Labour government’, he warned.
The following month, industrial relations worsened when nearly 200,000 dockers went on strike. Once more, MacDonald showed little sympathy with the striking workers. Then the following month, London underground workers went on strike. MacDonald responded by invoking the Emergency Powers Act 1920. As TGWU leader Ernest Bevin later put it, MacDonald ‘rushed down to Windsor’ to ask for the King’s approval for emergency powers to break the strikes. They ended before emergency powers were used, but Bevin never forgave MacDonald for this betrayal.
The bitter disappointment of the first Labour government called into question the benefits of a parliamentary strategy for union members. This caused an increased industrial militancy within the union movement, ultimately culminating in the General Strike of 1926. Once more, MacDonald failed to rally to the strikers’ cause. In the aftermath, Bevin refused to be seen in public with MacDonald: ‘I am not prepared to go on a platform in support of the leader whom I regard as having been wantonly guilty of stabbing us in the back at the moment when we had the whole forces of capital unleashed against us’.
Throughout his leadership, Keir Starmer has tried to put considerable distance between himself and the union leadership. After the pandemic, Britain witnessed a rise in industrial activity, not seen in decades. Rather than support the strikes, Starmer criticised them and banned shadow ministers from appearing on the picket lines.
In the short term, Starmer taking a tough line on the unions might yield political gains (although even this is not certain). In the longer term, a hostile attitude towards the unions and a breach of trust with union leaders could lead them to seek redress in more antagonistic and long-lasting industrial action, which could prove highly disruptive to a Starmer government.
Keep a Broad Church
One of the ironies of MacDonald’s leadership was that he was elected as the candidate of the party’s left only to spend his time as leader trying to crush the power of the left within the party. In this, MacDonald shares clear comparisons with Keir Starmer, who was elected on the basis of continuity with the left-wing policies of the previous leadership, yet has reneged on most of them, expelled his predecessor form the party, and removed left-wing Labour MPs from the frontbench.
For the most part, MacDonald excluded the Labour left from his first government. Days before the formation of the government, the leading Labour left-winger George Lansbury warned King George V ‘to keep his finger out of the pie’ of politics because the last time a King ‘stood up against the common people of that day [he] lost his head’. With these remarks as a helpful pretext, MacDonald refused to give Lansbury a Cabinet position, privately deriding him as ‘the John Bull of Poplar’.
However, it was the left of the party that delivered that government’s one major domestic policy achievement. John Wheatley was that Cabinet’s ‘only one out-and-out left-winger’. The Housing Act 1924, known more widely as the Wheatley Housing Act, substantially increased central government subsidies to local councils to build social housing. It led the construction of half a million new council homes and was the first housing bill to require that the new homes were equipped with an indoor bathroom.
Keir Starmer has used his time as leader to remove virtually every Shadow Cabinet figure seen to be a supporter of the Corbyn leadership. This has resulted in a Shadow Cabinet of his ideological bedfellows, which might prove convenient from a management perspective. Excessive factionalism, however, can be self-defeating. It can make it harder for Starmer to hold the party together when the going gets tough in government, and it risks dampening policy creativity. Especially for a government that might be seen as lacking boldness and ideas, it would not be a bad idea for Starmer to consider appointing competent ministers with a zeal for policy change from the left.
What legacy do you want to leave?
Although there are currently two Labour MPs named after Labour’s first leader Keir Hardie, there has never been a Labour MP named after the first Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald. There are good reasons for this beyond MacDonald’s undistinguished first stint as prime minister. His second term as prime minister was even more disastrous, nearly destroying the Labour Party altogether in what Clement Attlee called ‘the biggest betrayal in British political history’.
But, even judged from the first government, there is much to be desired. MacDonald had a remarkable life. A working-class autodidact from rural Scotland rose from total obscurity to become the first Labour prime minister. But the mere fact of being prime minister is not enough.
Winning an election and forming a government can feel like a great triumph, even an ‘insane miracle’, but it’s not a legacy of its own. If as the next Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer wants to avoid the pitfalls of the first one, he needs to avoid the temptations of excessive factionalism and govern boldly in partnership with the whole labour movement.
Dr Richard Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary University of London. His next book, Keeping the Red Flag Flying: The Labour Party in Opposition since 1922, will be published by Polity in April.