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This chapter considers Angell's efforts as a Labour politician. At first an enthusiastic leftist, he moderated his views from the autumn of 1920, and became somewhat detached from party work after buying Northey Island in 1923 and failing the following year to sell his increasingly pro-League-of-Nations foreign policy either to the first Labour government or to its backbench critics. Yet he aspired to be a Foreign Office minister, and, having secured election to parliament in 1929, was disappointed not to be included in the second Labour government. A compensation was that as the public turned against the First World War it regarded his ‘illusion’ thesis as having been vindicated. Though thus partially rehabilitated as a pundit, he remained intellectually too eclectic to offer a single, clear message: for example, he began claiming that he personally believed in the efficacy of non-resistance and so supported the League of Nations only as a second-best policy. And he failed in his attempts to understand why the public was prone to foreign-policy illusions and to devise an educational antidote. Unhappy on the back benches, and unable either to condemn Ramsay MacDonald for agreeing to a National Government during the financial crisis of August 1931 or to support him, he retired from parliament.

Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government of 1924 promised a new approach to the League. It rejected the Treaty of Mutual Assistance as militaristic, but was slow to advance a positive policy, though it was under strong pressure to adopt the ‘optional clause’ providing for the compulsory jurisdiction of the Permanent Court in justiciable cases. MacDonald agreed to work with the new French premier Edouard Herriot to resolve the security question, but nothing had been done before they arrived at Geneva in August 1924. After MacDonald's departure the British and French delegates agreed to draw up a Protocol on arbitration, security, and disarmament which was largely drafted by the Czech Eduard Beneš. Although it was strongly backed by Arthur Henderson, who effectively took over the leadership of the British delegation, MacDonald believed that it conceded too much to French demands. The Labour government collapsed before a final decision on the Protocol could be made.

This chapter analyses the growing possibilities for co-operation between the early Labour Party in Britain and the newly resurgent Congress movement in India. It does so through examination of four visits to India made in the years after 1907 by British progressives: Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, the Radical journalist Henry Nevinson, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The visitors' divergent impressions and recommendations are assessed, and it is argued that they found themselves torn between perceptions of familiarity and authenticity. Much of what they saw in India seemed familiar to them from metropolitan experience, but in consequence, imitative and inauthentic. On the other hand, differences in demands and styles of campaigning were at once reassuring in their authenticity, but worrying in their unfamiliarity. In consequence, the visitors' views reflected in large measure their own assumptions about the way in which progressive advances could be made, and hence about democracy and modernity.

By the mid-1920s, a pattern of factionalism had developed within the Miners' Federation of Great Britain which would characterize the union for many years. The Right included most District Officials who emphasized a realistic defence of miners' interests backed by thorough expression of loyalty to the Labour Party. The character of the Left was sharpened by the formation of the Miners' Minority Movement in 1924. Its initial strategy of an alliance between Communists and other left-wingers reflected current Communist concerns to achieve a broad left alliance within the trade unions and the Trades Union Congress. This factional alignment crystallized slowly. In 1924, the ‘proper’ relationship between the Communist Party and the Labour Party remained unclear. The unions still jealously protected their power to select their delegates to Labour Party meetings without outside interference. This chapter also looks at Arthur Cook and his politics and industrial leadership compared with Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald.

Analysis of Independent Labour Party (ILP) politics after the electoral advance of 1922 is easily distorted by knowledge of what followed. In May 1923, Ramsay MacDonald assessed his first few months as leader. He had envisaged the expanded Parliamentary Labour Party as offering the chance to provide an effective and electorally credible opposition. H. N. Brailsford, who had been appointed editor of the New Leader – hitherto the Labour Leader — as part of Clifford Allen's campaign to modernize the ILP, saw the ILP commitment to constructive socialism and ethical propaganda as radically different from any theatrical dramatization of the class struggle. MacDonald envisioned a modernized propaganda paper which would offer information on party activities. This chapter examines Allen's desire to reform the ILP and how it failed, along with the demise of New Leader as a socialist paper.

As the Labour Party's political and industrial leaderships moved rapidly to define and to consolidate their position after the August 1931 collapse of the Labour Government led by Ramsay MacDonald, achievement of these objectives was hindered by accumulating tensions between Labour politicians and trade union leaders. Walter Citrine, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) General Secretary, had been central to the bargaining over delicate issues between the Labour Government and the TUC. Increasingly, he had become dismayed about what he saw as Government insensitivity towards legitimate concerns of trade unions. Trade union priorities were central to the post-MacDonald Labour Party and they were expressed most forcibly by Ernest Bevin, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union. This chapter looks at Bevin's approach to politics, loyalism, and iconoclasm as a union leader towards the Labour Party.

This chapter examines the views of British Progressives at the start of the 20th century. The period saw the arrival of a new complicating development that revitalized the old debate about whether India could develop along Western lines. The focus is on Progressive opinion because it was only among those who believed that India couldachieve home rule, rather than among those who believed that it could not, that serious debate about the necessary preconditioning of political freedom occurred. The chapter examines the impressions of British Progressives who visited India in the years after the renewal of nationalist agitation. These are J. Keir Hardie in 1907, H. W. Nevinson in 1907-8, J. Ramsay MacDonald in 1909, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1911.

When the Labour Party led by Ramsay MacDonald took office for the second time in June 1929, Walter Citrine, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), hoped that his organization's relationship with the Government would be more harmonious than with its predecessor in 1924. The unhappiness of trade unions about the 1924 Government stemmed in part from the response of a Labour Government to industrial action by a union affiliated to the Labour Party. During the second Labour Government, labour disputes were initiated typically by employers seeking pay cuts and cost-cutting changes in a context of depression. Against the factors favouring distinctiveness and independence, trade unions in the late 1920s placed much weight on the election of a Labour Government; the corollary was that the Government-TUC relationship should be harmonious and productive. This chapter examines the politics behind the Labour-TUC relationship and how both parties responded to issues such as rising unemployment.

In March 1923, Philip Snowden rose in the Commons to propose a motion whose terms demonstrated that, in the complex political arguments and alignments of the 1920s in Britain, socialism and the supercession of capitalism was a major theme. Snowden was supported by other senior figures within the Parliamentary Labour Party: Ramsay MacDonald, J. C. Clynes, and Arthur Henderson. Their presentations offered a significant statement of Labour's political identity as perceived by its most authoritative figures. Snowden's lengthy and characteristically lucid indictment of capitalism was in terms of efficiency and morality. The cumulative consequence was an unintended shift from pure capitalism towards socialism. The belief in evolutionary change was complemented by a confidence in the moral superiority of socialist politics. Those who became socialists were not just perceptive; they had made an ethical choice. Commendations of ethical and evolutionary socialism were supported frequently by claims of British exceptionalism.

As the 1926 coal dispute entered its last month, Ramsay MacDonald reflected despondently on the state of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). His relationship with the pre-war ILP was often troubled. Differences over electoral and parliamentary tactics produced disputes with the ILP Left. In the period immediately before 1914, MacDonald, now chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), seemed to be loosening his ties with the ILP. His critical response to Britain's intervention in August 1914 meant his resignation from the PLP Chairmanship and his distancing from strongly patriotic Labour MPs and trade union leaders. He turned back to the ILP with its internationalist and anti-militarist sentiments. MacDonald's emphatic rejection by the West Leicester electorate in December 1918 confirmed his dependence on the ILP for organizational and emotional support. This chapter looks at the ILP's history and its role in politics in Britain during the 1920s.

The leaders of the Miners' Federation of Great Britain responded positively to the record of the 1924 Labour Government in their public statements. The administration's minority status could provide a credible explanation for any shortcomings, and the Government's brief period in office was contemporaneous with a temporary improvement in miners' wages. Nevertheless, there were private concerns about the character of the relationship between the Federation and the Government which highlighted broader issues about the appropriate status of trade union priorities within the agenda of a Labour Party administration. The Minister for Mines, Emmanuel Shinwell, was a strong supporter of Ramsay MacDonald, and an acerbic critic of what he regarded as Left-Utopianism. In contrast, two Scottish Miners' Members, Duncan Graham and James Welsh, saw Shinwell's selection as an affront to miners' reasonable expectations. This chapter examines the crises that affected the coal industry in Britain and the politics underlying the Labour Government's response.

The Labour Party meeting held in the spring of 1924 featured two new party recruits, Oswald and Cynthia Mosley. The inclusion of a woman was indicative of the degree to which the Labour Party was integrated into the dominant culture, an integration which limited any iconoclasm and involved an effective acquiescence in inequalities. In the election of November 1922, Labour gained three seats in Sheffield, a city where Liberalism was in confused retreat. These parliamentary successes were the prelude to a Labour majority on the city council four years later. In a heavily industrial city, these advances seemed indicative of the party's potential strength amongst specific working-class occupations. Yet none of Sheffield's Labour victors in 1922 came from the trade union movement. For some recruits, the Labour Party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden seemed attractive. In the 1920s, this pattern of recruitment seemed to highlight a shift in progressive politics that fitted into a broader vision of Labour's Forward March. This presentation simplified the complex routes by which Liberals crossed into the Labour Party.

The second Labour Government entered office at the worst of times. When the Labour Party took office, unemployment stood at 1,164,000. By July 1931, it had risen to 2,750,000. The easy belief that a Labour Government would be different had gone. The realization was evident in the deteriorating record of the party in by-elections. In August 1931, this weakened administration faced a sudden crisis, culminating in the resignation of the Labour Government with the exception of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Snowden, and the Government's most senior trade unionist, Jimmy Thomas. All three took office in a new National Government, alongside Conservatives and Liberals. The National Government under MacDonald's leadership introduced a programme of cuts but, faced with further financial crisis, took Britain off the Gold Standard. This book examines the internal politics of the Labour Party, with emphasis on the impact of trade unions on party organization and procedures. The analysis also looks at the complexities of political identities within the party and the broader labour movement.

The first week of the first Labour Government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, saw a national strike by members of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF). Most of their footplate colleagues in the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) did not stop work, a division that produced considerable inter-union acrimony. The senior official of each union had experience in British politics: John Bromley of ASLEF and Jimmy Thomas of NUR. A shared political partisanship did not soften inter-union rivalries, and Bromley's commitment to the Labour Party did not reduce his readiness to protect his members' wage standards in the context of a Labour Government. The 1924 labour disputes occurred in a relatively buoyant economic context, but from 1929 deepening economic depression made industrial action a statement of despair as much as a bargaining tactic. From 1925 to 1930, the Labour leadership was given a backing by the trade unions that was remarkable in both breadth and depth.