one side, of socialism on the other.
FIRST LABOR GOVERNMENT
It was obvious that the government would be defeated when parliament met.
Then, according to constitutional precedent, the king would send for the
leader of the next largest party, Ramsay MacDonald. Harebrained schemes
were aired for averting this terrible outcome. Balfour, or Austen
Chamberlain, should take Baldwin's place as Conservative premier; Asquith
should head a Liberal-Conservative coalition; McKenna should form a non-
parliamentary government of 'national trustees'. None of these schemes came
to anything. Asquith was clear that Labor should be put in, though he also
assumed that he would himself become prime minister when, as was bound to
happen soon, they were put out. In any case, George V took his own line:
Labor must be given 'a fair chance'. On 21 January the Conservative
government was defeated by seventy-two votes.1 On the following day
MacDonald became prime minister, having first been sworn of the privy
council—the only prime minister to need this preliminary. George V wrote in
his diary: 'Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would
have thought of a Labor Government!'; and a few weeks later to his mother:
'They [the new Ministers] have different ideas to ours as they are all
socialists, but they ought to be given a chance & ought to be treated
fairly.'2
MacDonald was a man of considerable executive ability, despite his lack of
ministerial experience; he had also many years' training in balancing
between the different groups and factions in the Labor movement. On some
points he consulted Haldane, who became lord chancellor, principally in
order to look after the revived committee of imperial defence. Snowden,
MacDonald's longtime associate and rival in the I.L.P., became chancellor
of the exchequer. MacDonald himself took the foreign office, his consuming
interest; besides, he was the only name big enough to keep out E. D. Morel.
The revolutionary Left was almost passed over. Lansbury, its outstanding
English figure, was left out, partly to please George V, who disliked
Lansbury's threat to treat him as Cromwell treated Charles I. Wheatley, a.
Roman Catholic businessman who became minister of health, was the only
Clydesider in the government; to everyone's surprise he turned out its most
successful member. Broadly the cabinet combined trade unionists and members
of the U.D.C. It marked a social revolution despite its moderation: working
men in a majority, the great public schools and the old universities
eclipsed for the first time.
The Labor government recognized that they could make no fundamental
changes, even if they knew what to make: they were 'in office, but not in
power'. Their object vas to show that Labor could govern, maybe also that
it could administer in a more warm-hearted way. The" Left did not like this
tame outlook and set up a committee of backbench M.P.s to control the
government; it did not have much effect. The Labor ministers hardly needed
the king's exhortation to 'prudence and sagacity'.1 All, except Wheatley,
were moderate men, anxious to show their respectability. They were willing
to hire court dress (though not knee-breeches) from Moss Bros. It was a
more serious difficulty that they lacked experience in government routine.
Only two (Haldane and Henderson) had previously sat in a cabinet. Fifteen
out of the twenty had never occupied any ministerial post. Inevitably they
relied on the civil servan:s in their departments, and these, though
personally sympathetic, were not running over with enthusiasm for an
extensive socialist programme.
EDUCATIONAL REFORM
Wheatley was the only minister with a creative aggressive outlook. His
Housing Act was the more surprising in that it had no background in party
discussion or programme, other than Labor's dislike of bad housing
conditions, Unlike Neville Chamberlain or even Addison, Wheatley recognized
that the housing shortage was a long-term problem. He increased the
subsidy;2 put the main responsibility back on the local authorities; and
insisted that the houses must be built to rent. More important still, he
secured an expansion of the building industry by promising that the scheme
would operate steadily for fifteen years. This was almost the first
cooperation between government and industry in peacetime; it was also the
first peacetime demonstration of the virtues of planning. Though the full
Wheatley programme was broken off short in 1932 at the time of the economic
crisis, housing shortage, in the narrowest sense, had by then been
virtually overcome. Wheatley's Act did not, of course, do anything to get
rid of the slums. It benefited the more prosperous and secure section of
the working class, and slum-dwellers were lucky to find old houses which
the council tenants had vacated. The bill had a passage of hard argument
through the house of commons. Hardly anyone opposed its principle outright.
Men of all parties were thus imperceptibly coming to agree that the
provision of houses was a social duty, though they differed over the method
and the speed with which this should be done.
One other landmark was set up by the Labor government, again almost
unnoticed. Trevelyan, at the board of education, was armed with a firm
statement of Labor policy, Secondary Education for All, drafted by the
historian R. H. Tawney, who provided much of the moral inspiration for
Labor in these years. Trevelyan largely undid the economies in secondary
education which had been made by the Geddes axe, though he also discovered
that Labor would be effective in educational matters only when it
controlled the local authorities as well as the central government. More
than this, he instructed the consultative committee of the board, under Sir
Henry Hadow, to work out how Labor's full policy could be applied, and he
deserves most of the credit for what followed even though the committee did
not report until 1926. The Hadow report set the pattern for English
publicly maintained education to the present day. Its ultimate ideal was to
raise the school-leaving age to 15. Failing this (and it did not come until
after the second World war), there should be an immediate and permanent
innovation: a break between primary and secondary education at n.1 Hence
the pupils at elementary schools, who previously stayed on to 14, had now
to be provided for elsewhere or, at the very least, in special 'senior
classes'. Here was a great achievement, at any rate in principle: a clear
recognition, again imperceptibly accepted by men of all parties, that the
entire population, and not merely a privileged minority, were entitled to
some education beyond 'the three R's'. It was less fortunate that the new
system of a break at 'eleven plus' increased the divergence between the
publicly maintained schools and the private schools for the fee-paying
minority where the break came at 13.
The reforms instituted by Wheatley and by Trevelyan both had the
advantage that, while they involved considerable expenditure over a
period of years, they did not call for much money in the immediate future.
This alone enabled them to survive the scrutiny of Philip Snowden,
chancellor of the exchequer. Snowden had spent his life preaching social
reforms; but he also believed that a balanced budget and rigorous economy
were the only foundation for such reforms, and he soon convinced himself
that the reforms would have to wait until the foundation had been well and
truly laid. His budget would have delighted the heart of Gladstone:
expenditure down, and taxes also, the 'free breakfast table' on the way to
being restored,1 and the McKenna Duties—pathetic remnant of wartime
Protection —abolished. No doubt a 'Liberal' budget was inevitable in the
circumstances of minority government; but it caused no stir of protest in
the Labor movement. Most Labor men assumed that finance was a neutral
subject, which had nothing to do with politics. Snowden himself wrote of
Montagu Norman: 'I know nothing at all about his politics. I do not know if
has he any.' Far from welcoming any increase in public spending, let alone
advocating it, Labor had inherited the radical view that money spent by the
state was likely to be money spent incompetently and corruptly: it would
provide outdoor relief for the aristocracy or, as in Lloyd George's time,
undeserved wealth for profiteers. The social reforms in which Labor
believed were advocated despite the fact that they cost money, not because
of it, and Snowden had an easy time checking these reforms as soon as he
pointed to their cost.
UNEMPLOYMENT
The Labor government were peculiarly helpless when faced with the problem
of unemployment—the unemployed remained at well over a million. Labor
theorists had no prepared answer and failed to evolve one. The traditional
evil of capitalism had been poverty: this gave Labor its moral force just
as it gave Marxists the confidence that, with increasing poverty,
capitalism would 'burst asunder'. No socialist, Marxist or otherwise, had
ever doubted that poverty could be ended by means of the rich resources
which capitalism provided. Mass unemployment was a puzzling accident,
perhaps even a mean trick which the capitalists were playing on the Labor
government; it was not regarded as an inevitable outcome of the existing
economic system, at any rate for some time. Vaguely, Labor held that
socialism would get rid of unemployment as it would get rid of all other
evils inherent in the capitalist system. There would be ample demand for
goods, and therefore full employment, once this demand ceased to be a
matter of 'pounds, shillings, and pence'. The socialist economic system
would work of itself, as capitalism was doing. This automatic operation of
capitalism was a view held by nearly all economists, and Labor accepted
their teaching. Keynes was moving towards the idea that unemployment could
be conquered, or at any rate alleviated, by means of public works. He was
practically alone among professional economists in this. Hugh Dalton,
himself a teacher of economics, and soon to be a Labor M.P.,1 dismissed
Keynes's idea as 'mere Lloyd George finance'—a damning verdict. Such a
policy was worse than useless; it was immoral.
Economic difficulties arose for the Labor government in a more immediate
way. Industrial disputes did not come to an end merely because Labor was in
office. Ramsay MacDonald had hardly kissed hands before there was a strike
of engine drivers—a strike fortunately settled by an intervention of the
T.U.C. general council. Strikes first of dockers, then of London
tramwaymen, were not dealt with so easily. The government planned to use
against these strikes the Emergency Powers Act, which Labor had denounced
so fiercely when introduced by Lloyd George. It was particularly ironical
that the proposed dictator, or chief civil commissioner, was Wedgwood,
chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, who was generally held to be more an
anarchist than a socialist. Here was fine trouble in the making. The unions
provided most of the money for the Labor party, yet Labor in office had to
show that it was fit to govern. Both sides backed away. The government did
not actually run armed lorries through the streets of London,2 and Ernest
Bevin, the men's leader, ended the strikes, though indignant at ‘having to
listen to appeal of our own people. The dispute left an ugly memory. A
joint committee of the T.U.C. general council and the Labor party executive
condemned the government’s proposed action. MacDonald replied that ‘public
doles, Poplarism, strikes for increased wages, limitations of output, not
only are not Socialism, but may mislead the spirit and policy of the
Socialist movement.
