Book review: The Men of 1924 by Peter Clark

The first Labour government, Ramsay MacDonald’s 1924 minority administration, took office 100 years ago this month.

Labour’s collective memory of its first two terms – the party returned to office in 1929 – is shadowed by conspiracy and betrayal: the forged Zinoviev letter published on the eve of the October 1924 election implicating ministers as Bolshevik fellow travellers, and MacDonald’s break from his colleagues to lead a Tory-dominated National Government in 1931.

But The Men of 1924 by Peter Clark, written to mark the anniversary, tells a story both more prosaic and resonant: that of an incoming Labour government challenged by febrile economic and international circumstances, and the need to win trust after a long period of Conservative rule.

Labour’s path to power just 24 years after its founding was opened by the transformative conditions of the Great War. The party secured a parliamentary foothold in 1910, with 40 seats. But by December 1923 it was the second largest party, winning 191 seats, allowing it to govern with Liberal support. The mutual sacrifice required by the war had solidified an evolving sentiment that all classes were worthy of political representation. State direction of the wartime economy had tested socialist economic ideas. And Labour figures had held senior positions in the wartime coalition.

Radical profile, cautious politics

The administration that took office in January 1924 changed the image of British governments forever. 11 Cabinet members were from working-class backgrounds, most leaving school at 15. But they were ferocious autodidacts, steeped in the writings of Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris.

With the government’s radical profile and programme promising investment and social insurance, expectations were high. But it faced severe constraints. The indebted British economy was losing ground. Unemployment was soaring. There was an empire to manage amidst an international order torn asunder by war. And with revolutionary sentiment abroad the party had to prove its trustworthiness to an establishment ever alert to the ‘Red Menace’. The Russian Revolution had overthrown a nobility with ties to the British upper classes, and Germany had nearly followed.

MacDonald prioritised ‘security and confidence, based on goodwill’ over radical reform, concerned to prove the party as being  ‘just and worthy of respect’. And although the class profile of the new government was startlingly different, it was more of a progressive coalition than a socialist administration, including Liberals and Tories.

MacDonald’s syncretic philosophy was representative of the government’s politics, spun from several strands of early 20th century progressive thought. He advocated a Fabian ‘scientific politics’ that interpreted socialism as ‘the method of evolution applied to society’. With its organic imagery his evolutionary socialism had Burkean undertones, accounting for his ease with the establishment. Clark writes: ‘In the way he had emerged from nowhere, was able to charm drawing rooms … he resembled the young Disraeli.’

And his competent administration did go some way to building that trust. It had little opportunity to reduce unemployment but was able to extend benefits and national insurance. Its Housing Act established the principle that the public sector should build homes for rent and not for purchase. It worked to ease the burden of postwar reparations placed on Germany, and to end French occupation of the Ruhr.

Censure, defeat – and return

But it was not able to shake off populist fears that it was entangled in communist conspiracy. Rumblings in the right-wing press concerning the government’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union became louder when the Cabinet reversed mutiny charges against a radical journalist, and pressed a vote of censure. Interpreting the reprimand as a vote of no confidence, MacDonald called an election just nine months after Labour had taken office.

The narrative that the government was in league with the Bolsheviks was supercharged just days before the election when the Daily Mail published a letter purportedly sent by Grigory Zinoviev, the president of the Communist International, to a British Communist Party official calling for revolution. Reading the paper’s incendiary headline – ‘Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters: Moscow Orders to Our Reds: Great Plot Disclosed’ – MacDonald felt he had been ‘sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea’. The forgery’s origin has never been conclusively demonstrated.

But Clark attributes the election loss to the collapse of the Liberal vote rather than the letter: Labour actually won a million more seats, replacing the Liberals as the progressive alternative to the Tories. Labour returned to office five years later, this time as the largest party. MacDonald’s second minority government was able to enact more social legislation. But it was undone when Treasury orthodoxy demanded austerity in the wake of the Great Crash that the Cabinet could not accept.

When the government fell in 1931 MacDonald took the fateful decision – which he considered expedient at a time of national crisis – to serve as Prime Minister in a Tory-led coalition, in Clement Attlee’s influential assessment, ‘the greatest betrayal in the political history of this country’.

1924 and today

Clark’s crisp narrative does not linger on the MacDonald melodrama, sketching portraits of every member of the Cabinet. Above all, the book is a study in the pressures of governing under constraint. Perhaps ministers could have challenged economic conventions when so many who had elected it were suffering. But Keynesian tools for economic stimulus had not yet evolved.

The crisis that so quickly engulfed the Truss administration offers a visceral contemporary reminder of how quickly radical strategies can be overwhelmed by the markets, risks to which MacDonald and Snowden were acutely sensitive. Today’s leadership, of course, has been at pains to demonstrate awareness of the particular challenges facing Labour governments during economic and international unrest.

But it may enjoy the parliamentary majority MacDonald never had. In which case Attlee’s 1945 administration may offer a happier precedent for what can be achieved by a majority Labour government prepared to act boldly, even in tough times.