The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ last for four more days. Chamberlain for the Conservatives and Sir John Simon for the Liberals said the same; the two opposition parties would ‘turn them [the Labour government] out immediately the House met’ (being August, Parliament was in recess), insisting that it was MacDonald’s duty to avoid the crash. The Conservatives would give him ‘any support in our power for that purpose, either with his present, or in a reconstructed government’, and Samuel committed the Liberals to that line too — stressing the immense urgency of the situation.

      The General Council of the TUC, seeing no ‘equality’ in the sacrifice they were being asked to make, and convinced that the situation was not quite so desperate as was being alleged, refused to agree to any cuts in benefits or in the pay of teachers or policemen (‘Pigs,’ spluttered Sidney Webb, meaning the TUC) — though it was prepared to condone those for judges and ministers. ‘Practically a declaration of war,’ MacDonald noted in his diary; he must have felt he was staring at a brick wall. The bankers insisted on cuts; the trade unions insisted on no cuts. As for support within Cabinet, according to his son Malcolm, MacDonald was ‘disgusted with the behaviour of many of his colleagues; they lack grasp of the situation and the guts to face it … He will carry on if he can, but it is more likely that the situation will be such that he has no alternative but to resign.’ At 10.30 a.m. on Sunday, 23 August 1931, MacDonald set out for the Palace apparently intending to resign ‘with the whole Cabinet’, but the King made it clear that should the Labour government resign, his view was that MacDonald should attempt to ‘carry the country through’ with Conservative and Liberal support.

      That evening nine of the eleven members of the Labour Cabinet (including the key player, the Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson) made it clear that they would not agree to a 10 per cent cut in unemployment benefit, by far the most important part of the package. Clearly the government could not continue. MacDonald was confronted with some unpalatable choices: the Labour government could resign, hand over to the Conservatives and Liberals and oppose the cuts in unemployment benefit from the opposition benches, when in fact MacDonald considered them to be necessary; he could resign the Labour leadership and support the cuts; or agree, in his daughter Sheila’s words, to be ‘P.M. of coalition govt. (this is what King wants) Wld. have to face whole antagonism of Labour movt. Seeming desertion of principle & playing for office. Lose hold of party.’ MacDonald havered: on 24 August he returned to the Palace.

      The King again tried to persuade him that resignation would be a dereliction of duty: MacDonald must put country before party and head a National Government. The Prime Minister agreed that in the circumstances he would be prepared to remain as head of a government in which the Conservative and Liberal leaders Baldwin and Samuel would also serve ‘until an emergency bill or bills had been passed by Parliament, which would restore once more British credit and the confidence of foreigners’, after which time Parliament would be dissolved and a general election would be fought along party lines. ‘Certain individuals, as individuals, [would be invited] to take on their shoulders the burden of government’ in the new configuration. ‘MacDonald has been crawling along the hedgerows in search of Labour ministers these last few days,’ wrote Hugh Dalton, who was not trawled. In the event, Snowden, Thomas and Lord Sankey, the Lord Chancellor, were the only three Labour Ministers who agreed to serve in the National Government.

      ‘It was a banker’s ramp’, charged the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Christopher Addison, on the day of his resignation. The TUC also suspected as much, and the Daily Herald made the accusation public on 25 August. Bankers, it was claimed, had used the economic crisis to dictate government policy. But no one in government had doubted the bankers’ insistence that the budget had to be balanced: it was how it was to be balanced that was at issue. The American banks made a loan dependent on a balanced budget, but insisted that the way in which that was achieved was ‘quite outside our province’. But in the end, since the other two political parties were insisting on cuts in unemployment benefit payments as a condition of their support, while the TUC and an important and sizeable minority of MacDonald’s own Cabinet would not agree the 10 per cut, the Cabinet resigned.

      ‘Well — we have what is called a “National Government” — Conservatives, Liberals, and Mr Ramsay MacDonald and a few friends,’ wrote the Conservative MP for Barnard Castle, County Durham, Cuthbert Headlam, sceptically. ‘I cannot see how such a combination … is going to do any good … except on paper this is not a coalition. It is a collection of people collected together to save the situation … their task, if carried out properly will make them very unpopular — they cannot go on for long without quarrelling among themselves for their policies are widely divergent.’

      MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas were expelled from the Labour Party, and Arthur Henderson assumed the leadership. In September Snowden’s budget (attacked by Keynes as being ‘replete with folly and injustice’) raised taxes, proposed a range of cuts in public workers’ salaries and cut 10 per cent (though not the 20 per cent recommended by the May Committee) off unemployment pay. On 21 September, with a renewed run on the pound (partly as a result of the Invergordon Mutiny, when naval ratings refused to muster when faced with disproportionate pay cuts), the Bank of England abandoned the Gold Standard, a situation that the National Government had been brought into being to avoid. Within a year this allowed interest rates to fall to as low as 2 per cent and brought about the ‘cheap money’ that would help build Britain’s industrial recovery.

      The election that was called for October 1931 was essentially a fight between Labour and the rest: and the rest won. In 1929, 287 Labour MPs had been elected; in 1931 this was cut to fifty-two, and that included Scottish ILP Members (who eventually disaffiliated from the rest of the ILP under their leader James Maxton in July 1932, believing they could answer the need the ILP perceived among the working classes for a more radical socialist party). Labour was all but annihilated everywhere except in coalmining areas. Arthur Henderson lost his seat, as did Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison. Only one former Labour Cabinet Minister, George Lansbury, was returned, though two Junior Ministers, the men of tomorrow, Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps, just managed to hang on. The so-called National Government, which was composed mainly of Conservatives and members of a terminally divided Liberal Party, swept the board with 554 seats.

      Thomas Jones felt like ‘the Scotch minister who had prayed earnestly for rain, and then had the whole contents of a drainpipe emptied over him’ when he heard of the rout. ‘The election results are astounding,’ wrote Samuel Rich, a teacher at the Jews’ Free School in London, who considered that ‘teachers are the worst hit in the land, except the poor unemployed’ when he received his first reduced monthly salary of £29.7s instead of the former £32.6s on 23 October 1931. ‘There will be no opposition … “Socialism in our Time” is off,’ he wrote in his diary, underlining ‘off’ heavily, twice.

      Indeed, it seemed to many that Labour would never again come to power democratically. Hugh Dalton talked darkly about bringing the Durham Light Infantry to London to replace the Brigade of Guards. When Hugh Gaitskell was adopted as Labour candidate for Chatham for the 1935 general election he was rueful: ‘The Labour Party … tried to get better conditions out of capitalism … leaving the economic power in the hands of the same people as before … The only way in which Socialism could be got was shortly and fairly sharply … [T]hey should get the power, proceed with measures of Socialisation, and smash the economic power of the upper class.’ Cripps, for his part, would hint at ‘adopting some exceptional means such as the prolongation of the life of Parliament for a further term without an election’, and ‘overcoming opposition from Buckingham Palace’, though when taxed that this sounded a bit like treason, he affected surprise that ‘anybody should have thought I was referring to the Crown’.

      ‘The one thing that is not inevitable now is gradualness,’ Cripps insisted. The Webbs agreed, and in September 1932 the Fabian-inspired SSIP was merged with the minority wing of the ILP that had stayed in the Labour Party to form what became the Socialist League, another intellectual pressure group, this time with a clear, if broad, Marxist agenda, with Harold Laski and H.N. Brailsford among its СКАЧАТЬ