Ramsay MacDonald

Prime minister of United Kingdom (1924, 1929-1935)

• Born: October 12, 1866
• Birthplace: Lossiemouth, Morayshire, Scotland
• Died: November 9, 1937
• Place of death: At sea, en route to South America

The most significant figure in the development of the Labour Party, MacDonald guided it through his voluminous political writings, his organizational acumen and skills, and his actions as prime minister of its first two governments. The party became in practice more reformist than socialist. It grew as a broad-based party aspiring to govern rather than a small pressure group within Parliament.

Early Life

James Ramsay MacDonald was born in the small fishing village of Lossiemouth, in Morayshire, Scotland, the illegitimate son of a ploughman and a farm servant. His mother, Anne Ramsay, a determined but warmhearted woman, never married and supported herself and her son as a seamstress. Influenced by an exciting schoolteacher, MacDonald became a pupil-teacher for four years (1881-1885), developing skills in analysis, speaking, leadership, and organization in his teens. Because class distinctions were of less significance in the Scottish Highlands, MacDonald was rising on his own merits. As a young man, he had already developed both his romantic and pragmatic tendencies, had an inquiring mind (he always loved geology and biology and once thought of becoming a chemist), and had become a local public speaker. He was impressive physically: handsome with wavy hair (and he was soon to wear a mustache), tall and trim, with a dignified though rugged bearing. Although throughout his career he constantly returned to Lossiemouth, almost as a second home, the adventurous MacDonald left it at age nineteen for opportunities elsewhere: He headed to Bristol in 1885 and moved to London in 1886.

Life’s Work

Personable, eager, and articulate, MacDonald immediately joined political clubs (the Social Democratic Federation branch in Bristol and the Fabian Society in London). He served as the private secretary of a radical Liberal parliamentary candidate from 1888 to 1892 and also worked as a journalist. The young, late Victorian socialist lived in a world of politics, ideas, and middle-class surroundings. After a frustrating association with the Liberal Party, MacDonald joined the new Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1894 but was defeated in the parliamentary elections the following year. In 1896, he married Margaret Gladstone, an upper-middle-class socialist and social worker, with whom he eventually had four children. In their closely knit family, Margaret provided MacDonald great emotional and political support. After MacDonald’s wife, younger son, and mother all died in 1911, he was often lonely and moody.

In 1896, MacDonald joined the ILP’s national administrative committee; he served until 1909 and kept close links with it until the late 1920’s. Selected secretary at the founding of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 (the precursor of the Labour Party), the thirty-three-year-old MacDonald contributed vitally to its success. The party was composed primarily of trade unions and socialist organizations (such as the ILP). Careful to nurture union support, MacDonald nevertheless steered it away from merely being either a union-dominated parliamentary pressure group or a working-class party. Personally advocating socialism, MacDonald ensured that the party itself became a nondoctrinaire, broadly based party. He called it a party of “opinion” (that is, of attitudes, goals, and concepts), not a party of class. MacDonald also chiefly determined Labour’s relationship with Liberals, helping to arrange the secret Labour-Liberal pact of 1903 by which the two parties agreed not to compete against each other in selected constituencies in 1906 (which helped MacDonald and some other Labourites be elected) and cooperating with Liberals in Parliament, especially when from 1910 to 1914 the minority Liberal governments needed Labour support in the House of Commons. MacDonald championed Great Britain’s constitutional and parliamentary process as the only way to produce changes both immediate ameliorative measures and basic structural socialist ones. He was an excellent parliamentarian: a superb debater skilled in parliamentary procedure and usually astute in determining parliamentary tactics for his party, even though the Labourites were acknowledged as an unwieldy group.

MacDonald was an exciting, effusive speaker and a prolific writer of pamphlets, articles, and books. Generally stressing social justice and social democracy, his works deeply influenced the Labour movement and installed MacDonald as the party’s leading theoretician. Yet his greatest status came through Parliament (serving as M.P. for Leicester, 1906-1918; Aberavon, 1922-1929; Seaham, 1929-1935; and the Scottish Universities, 1936-1937). In 1912, he relinquished the party secretariat to Arthur Henderson after becoming the first effective leader of the parliamentary Labour Party (1911-1914 and 1922-1931). Although rivals rather than friends, Henderson and MacDonald complemented each other in organizational work and political direction of the party. MacDonald resigned the party leadership in August, 1914, when Labour supported British entry into World War I . He did not leave the party; he continued as its treasurer and as a member of its national executive committee. Not a pacifist, he sought a negotiated peace and a postwar organization to prevent future wars. Vilified during the war, he was not reelected M.P. in 1918 and was further distressed by the harshness of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Always a socialist internationalist, he helped establish the Labour and Socialist International (basically a reincarnation of the older prewar Second International) and rebuffed Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s attempt to destroy Democratic Socialist parties through his rival Communist International.

By 1922, MacDonald’s wartime stance and concern for international harmony had become more acceptable, and he was returned to Parliament and reelected party leader. In the December, 1923, election, the ruling Conservative Party lost its majority, and surprisingly, Labour (now the second largest party) took office, though it needed Liberal support. As prime minister, MacDonald succeeded in demonstrating that Labour had become one of the two major parties and that this professed Socialist Party could capably administer the government. Serving also as foreign minister, he inaugurated full diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, championed the new League of Nations, and sought to link disarmament and arbitration of disputes with France’s desire for security. As anticipated, Labour lost office later in 1924, and MacDonald’s status declined. His qualms about the 1926 General Strike proved to be correct; thus the merits of his parliamentary approach seemed greater. Reasserting his mastery over the party by the late 1920’s, he led it in 1929 to victory as the largest party, though still without a majority in Parliament, and as prime minister formed a second minority Labour government, in power from 1929 to 1931.

While forced to appoint Henderson as foreign secretary, MacDonald asserted his own responsibility for improving relations with the United States. Strengthened Anglo-American ties were demonstrated as the two countries extended their naval disarmament program at the 1930 London Conference. MacDonald’s friction with Henderson, though, jeopardized other British actions, especially Henderson’s attempt for a coherent policy toward improved Franco-German relations.

On domestic matters, MacDonald wanted again to demonstrate Labour’s capability to govern and to improve conditions for those adversely affected by Great Britain’s decade of high unemployment (approximately 10 percent throughout the 1920’s, spiraling during the world depression to 16 percent in 1930 and 22 percent in 1931). The party lacked acceptable bold ideas on how to reduce the rate, even though MacDonald immediately on taking office created an unemployment committee of four cabinet members to devise a strategy. Recognizing its failure, MacDonald replaced it with one he himself chaired, but it, too, foundered. Expanding unemployment discredited the Labour Party, which was based on working-class support and which had strongly criticized the preceding government’s inaction. Unemployment benefits costs also increased, much of which came from the general treasury. While not as inflexible as the obdurate Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, MacDonald shared Labour’s fiscal tenets of a balanced budget, free trade, and the existing gold standard. Thus, while advocating a future socialist reorientation of society, MacDonald and Labour sought to govern within the existing economic system. When in August, 1931, an international financial crisis led to a British gold drain, orthodox views insisted that confidence abroad in Great Britain would be restored if the government displayed fiscal restraint. The cabinet agreed with a recent alarming official report that the most practical immediate governmental cuts in expenditures must be primarily in unemployment benefits.

Half the cabinet members (strongly backed by leaders of the Trades Union Congress) hesitated to make major reductions affecting the unemployed, so the Labour government resigned. MacDonald then shocked his party by forming a coalition National Government, including the Conservative and Liberal parties. Although realizing that the bulk of the Labour Party would go into opposition, MacDonald was nevertheless disappointed when only a few followed him.

MacDonald’s premiership of the National Government, 1931-1935, was the most controversial period of his career. The National Government’s reduction of unemployment payments did not restore sufficient confidence abroad to end the gold drain, so Great Britain left the gold standard in September. He accepted Conservative Party demands for a new election in October, and his former party (which had now expelled him from membership) was decimated in Parliament. The next year, the Conservatives persuaded Great Britain to abandon free trade and institute wide-ranging protective tariffs, which caused some free trade Liberals to leave the coalition. The National Government was no longer national: With only a small “National Labour” contingent and a rump “National Liberal” party, it was dominated by the Conservatives with their vast parliamentary majority. With little influence (except on some international and imperial issues), MacDonald lingered in the premiership, unwilling to resign either to protest publicly over any governmental action or to acknowledge his declining influence. In his late sixties, rapidly aging, suffering from glaucoma, and often mentally confused, he finally resigned as prime minister only to continue in the cabinet impotently as lord president of the council. Decisively defeated in 1935 by Labour in his mining constituency, he returned to Parliament early the next year in a by-election at a safe seat. Finally retiring from the cabinet in 1937, the septuagenarian MacDonald died at sea on vacation on November 9, 1937. After a public funeral in Westminster Abbey, his ashes were buried beside his wife’s at Lossiemouth.

Significance

Ramsay MacDonald’s career bridged Labour’s transition from a loose band of small, struggling organizations to a major party forming the government of Great Britain. For more than three decades, he was the single most significant individual in defining and guiding the party’s development. He held each of its major offices and served on its national executive committee. A radical and a socialist, he sought attainable goals, many of which involved governmental programs for collective action to help the common people. Fundamentally a democrat, MacDonald championed Great Britain’s constitutional and parliamentary process. His main contribution was by words and action to shape the political efforts of Great Britain’s radical socialist workers’ movement into an effective parliamentary party.

Vain and ambitious, MacDonald thrust himself to national influence and power, yet he was fundamentally a man of principle. While never resigning from the party, he nevertheless twice gave up its leadership, not knowing whether it meant political suicide. He refused to accept the party’s decisions to support the war in 1914 and oppose unemployment cuts in 1931. Both times the trade unions opposed him, although the Socialist ILP supported him the first time. Yet in both cases (and both were sudden, unplanned responses to crises), he followed his conscience in his perception of the national interest.

MacDonald’s commitment to socialism continues to be questioned. His two Labour governments made no new bold socialist initiatives. The lack of a parliamentary majority, the weakened British economy, and the caution of most other cabinet members were contributing factors, but MacDonald himself was also responsible. He was more interested in providing acceptable governments than socialist ones. Rather than betraying socialism as some critics charged, MacDonald had never been primarily interested in a basic restructuring of society in the immediate future, a goal that he considered unattainable. Social democracy and international affairs were his great interests, and his socialism essentially pertained to social justice, that is, to social and economic reforms in the distribution of goods within society. To obtain these reforms, the party needed wider electoral support and cooperation with the Liberal Party, especially prior to World War I. He abhorred any sudden revolution, be it communist or syndicalist. He helped prevent the new Communist International from dominating the international socialist movement, and as prime minister and foreign minister, he sought to improve Franco-German relations.

MacDonald died unwanted by his new allies and despised by his old party, his policies of the 1930’s in shambles: Great Britain was by then off the gold standard, applying protective tariffs, maintaining social welfare programs unsuited to the scope of the Depression’s serious unemployment, and unwilling to work with communist Russia against a rearming Nazi Germany. Intact, though, was the Labour Party, with the composition that he helped forge, determined both to be an independent party and to stay within the constitutional system, although this time determined to develop coherent plans for major programs when it next took office. It was a party that identified its goals as being national ones, not class ones. MacDonaldism, though not MacDonald, survived within the party.

Bibliography

Bassett, Reginald. 1931: Political Crisis. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958. The August crisis was meticulously researched (except for the MacDonald papers, which were then not available and except for interviews of participants still living) to produce this exhaustive study. Complex and detailed as it sorts out the chronology among contradictory sources, it demonstrates the confusion and resulting bitterness and frustration of that controversial episode in MacDonald’s career.

Bealey, Frank, and Henry Pelling. Labour and Politics, 1900-1906: A History of the Labour Representation Committee. London: Macmillan, 1958. This thorough and seminal work demonstrates MacDonald’s enormous political and organizational skills. Only in his thirties, he, as secretary, perceived that the newly formed Labour Representation Committee could become an independent party but only by cooperating with Liberals in parliamentary elections and in Parliament itself, all of which was accomplished, primarily through MacDonald’s organizational abilities.

Carlton, David. MacDonald versus Henderson: The Foreign Policy of the Second Labour Government. London: Macmillan, 1970. This fine work demonstrates that even during deteriorating world conditions, the government tried valiantly to pursue the party’s general international aspirations supporting international law, mutual disarmament, and international harmony. Complicating matters was the personal (not policy) tension between the prime minister and foreign minister, which actually is only a minor theme of the book.

Howell, David. MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis, 1922-1931. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. A study of the Labour Party during MacDonald’s prime ministry.

Lloyd, Trevor. “James Ramsay MacDonald.” In British Prime Ministers in the Twentieth Century, edited by John P. Mackintosh. 2 vols. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977-1978. In this fine essay focusing on MacDonald as prime minister, Lloyd considers that portion of his career anticlimactic after his great contributions in Labour theory and organization. Sensitive but critical, Lloyd describes the aloof MacDonald unable to work well with backbenchers or cabinet members and too interested in external affairs while too little informed on economics.

Lyman, Richard W. The First Labour Government, 1924. New York: Russell and Russell, 1957. This standard work examines all three parties, the 1923 and 1924 elections, and Labour in office. Lyman is basically favorable to MacDonald and the Labour Party, approving their decision to form a temporary government to demonstrate their moderation and acceptability.

MacDonald, Ramsay. Ramsay MacDonald’s Political Writings. Edited by Bernard Barker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1972. Barker’s perceptive introductory essay warns against the traditional biological emphasis on MacDonald’s concept of “evolutionary socialism.” Instead, he stresses the theme of social justice in an expanding industrial society. All or major portions of MacDonald’s most significant works are represented: Socialism and Society (1905), Socialism (1907), Socialism: Critical and Constructive (1921), Parliament and Revolution (1919), and Parliament and Democracy (1920).

Marquand, David. Ramsay MacDonald. London: Jonathan Cape, 1977. This impressive, sympathetic, and massive biography captures the very complex public and private MacDonald, often through pertinent, extensive quotations from his diary and letters. Marquand stresses MacDonald’s consistency in advocating that the party (and MacDonald) should not be dominated by trade unions or be class-bound but rather be directed toward the entire society’s interests.

Skidelsky, Robert. Politicians and the Slump: The Labour Government of 1929-1931. London: Macmillan, 1967. Highly critical of MacDonald and the second Labour government, Skidelsky considers them out of their element in attempting to cope with the widening economic and financial crises, which the author considers the major governmental issues.