If it is at all, the first Labour government is usually remembered as a footnote in history. Unlike its second period in power, it did not end in the collapse and controversy of the 1931 ‘betrayal’. There was no battle of ideas over what to do to counter the Wall Street crash. And, unlike 1945-51, it lacked achievements – in fact, it is not even remembered for what it tried to achieve.
This assiduous, lucid and comprehensive book is a necessary corrective to that. John Shepherd and Keith Laybourn are two of the most eminent Labour historians of the era and Britain’s First Labour Government reflects their considerable expertise and insight.
As a government, there is limited scope for describing its achievements for they are few. It achieved no minimum wage, no nationalisation, no comprehensive education – indeed, it did not try to. Ramsay MacDonald knew that the majority of the British electorate had voted neither for Labour nor for socialism. He sought to use the opportunity of government to demonstrate that Labour was sufficiently competent that in a future election voters might give the party a working majority. He sought to discredit the contention of Labour’s detractors that it would run the ship of state onto the rocks. And broadly he succeeded.
Did the 1924 Labour government achieve much else? For Shepherd and Laybourn, ‘John Wheatley’s Housing Act was a singular success in encouraging the building of council housing at a time when there was a severe shortage of housing for rent.’ But they succeed also in sketching the contours of the 1924 government’s other, less well known, plans: a National Grid for electricity, and, Peter Hain might well be surprised to find, the potential creation of a Severn barrage.
In surviving between January and November 1924, this minority Labour government exceeded the hopes of most contemporaries and helped establish the Labour party as one of the two major parties of government. For Shepherd and Laybourn, it ‘legitimised Labour as the new representative of progressive forces in British politics’. This entailed not just supplanting the Liberals, but also the clear marginalisation of the Communist party of Great Britain, which alternated between condemnation of Labour and attempts to hijack it. While Marxist parties grew in continental Europe and Russia, in Britain the Communist party remained unable to break out of the fringe – it never secured serious democratic credibility as a political party and that is in part a measure of Labour’s success.
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Greg Rosen is author of Old Labour to New: The Dreams That Inspired, the Battles That Divided
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Britain’s First Labour Government
John Shepherd and Keith Laybourn
Palgrave Macmillan | 272pp | £60