‘Members have always played a vital role in urging Labour to be bolder in power’

The challenges faced by the Labour Party in 1924 as it sought government for the first time have remarkable resonances with today.

The first challenge was internal. Labour MPs needed to persuade socialists and working class voters that the Labour Party could achieve their aims through parliamentary democracy. Britain had never had a socialist government before. Some on the left doubted that socialism could be achieved through Britain’s existing constitutional order. Communists, for example, demanded more sweeping structural and revolutionary change.

The second challenge was to persuade the wider country that Labour was fit to govern. On the eve of the formation of the Labour government, Winston Churchill warned in apocalyptic terms: “The enthronement in office of a socialist government will be a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great states only on the morrow of defeat in war.”

More prosaically, Labour MPs had limited governing experience. A handful had served during the wartime government. Labour’s wartime leader Arthur Henderson, for example, had served as Education Secretary and paymaster general, but its present leader Ramsay MacDonald had no ministerial experience, having opposed the war.

Competent, if unspectacular

For nine months in 1924, Labour governed competently if not spectacularly. Labour made no challenge to the British constitution, and Labour ministers proved popular in unlikely corners, including with King George V himself. 

The party’s record was fairly undistinguished, except in two areas. The first was in foreign affairs, where Ramsay MacDonald appointed himself as his own Foreign Secretary. In that role, he helped to bring about the Dawes plan, which resolved the question of outstanding German war reparations. 

The second was in housing. The health minister, John Wheatley, substantially increased central government subsidies to local councils to build social housing. His legislation 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.

Convincing the country, not the party 

Ironically, the first Labour government did a better job convincing the country it was fit for office than its own grassroots. Although Labour lost the October 1924 election, it gained one million more votes than the previous general election just ten months earlier. Five years later, Labour would be back in power. 

Yet, for the Labour grassroots and trade unionists, the 1924 government was a bitter disappointment. One Labour MP wrote: “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.”

Another Labour MP claimed there was virtually nothing to distinguish MacDonald’s Labour government from Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government.

The leader of the ASLEF train drivers’ union denounced MacDonald for failing to support his workers who went on strike in the government’s first week: “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.”

A pattern of disappointment

Reflecting on a century of Labour, bitter recrimination and accusations of inadequate socialist commitment are a recurring theme after the fall of a Labour government.

At the 1952 Labour Party conference in Morecambe, the first after the fall of the Attlee government, speakers denounced the previous Labour government for failing to extinguish capitalism once and for all. 

At the 1979 conference after the fall of the Callaghan government, Labour’s general secretary Ron Hayward denounced his own party leader and government. “I come not to praise Callaghan but to bury him,” Hayward roared. 

Keighley MP Bob Cryer argued: “We were not defeated at the last election because we carried out party policy but precisely because of the opposite.” Voicing support for the previous Labour government was taken as a sign of inadequate socialist conviction. Left-winger Joan Lestor chided a fellow MP when she caught him applauding Callaghan during the leader’s conference speech. “What a scandalous thing to do,” she hissed.

Since 2010, the party has wrestled with how to confront the previous government’s legacy. Labour has now elected three leaders who stood on campaign manifestos which, to differing degrees, presented the previous Labour government as inadequate. When Ed Miliband sought the Labour leadership, he pronounced: “To win next time, it is the New Labour comfort zone that we must escape… It is my rejection of this New Labour nostalgia that makes me the modernising candidate.”

Reasons to be uncheerful

So, what are we to make of this century of disappointment? There are two readings. One is to say that once Labour MPs find themselves in power, they become corrupted by the capitalist, elitist system. They lose sight of the ordinary voters, trade unionists and socialists who helped them to get into office and, ultimately, betray them.

The other interpretation is that a certain level of disappointment with Labour in power is inherent to the culture of the Labour Party. This is not because Labour governments are always bad and fail to do good things. It is because Labour members are hungry for a new society where power and wealth are truly in the hands of the many and not the few.

This hunger can be constructive or destructive for the Labour Party. At times, these recriminations can become personal and vitriolic. The trick is for the disappointment to be channelled for positive purposes.

The flame of socialist idealism

Barbara Castle once challenged Labour members to keep the red flame of socialist idealism alive, even in the darkest of times.

Members play a vital role in encouraging Labour governments to be bolder, to achieve more, to shift the consensus of what is seen to be possible. 

As long as they do, unlike the Conservatives, Labour will never run out of ideas or passion to build a better country.

This article is part of a series to mark the centenary of the first ever Labour government, guest edited by the Labour MP and writer Jon Cruddas, who has written a new history, ‘A Century of Labour’ (Polity Books).