The ever sharp MP and political thinker Jon Cruddas was on yesterday’s Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ talking about his new book: A Century of Labour marks the centenary of the first Labour Government. Ramsay MacDonald formed his first – minority – administration on 22 January 2024, combining the premiership with the position of Foreign Secretary. Notwithstanding John Wheatley’s Housing Act, foreign policy was probably the party’s biggest achievement in office: MacDonald played an arbitrary role in ending the stand-off between France and Weimar Germany over reparations. By the autumn of 1924 Labour was out of office and facing five years of Stanley Baldwin in Downing Street. Those five years saw Baldwin consolidate his control of the Conservative Party, notwithstanding the self-inflicted wound of electoral defeat in December 1923 and a further loss of power in 1929 (a continuity message of ‘steady as she goes’ rarely secures re-election). That same period saw MacDonald similarly solidify his position as Labour leader, seeing off a call for more red-blooded socialism from old comrades in the Independent Labour Party and sealing his reputation in Europe as ‘the voice of Geneva [home of the League of Nations]’.
The split in the second Labour minority government in August 1931 and MacDonald’s leadership of a Tory-dominated National Government saw him enter Labour mythology as a traitor to his class and his party. MacDonald’s visible physical and mental decline in the early 1930s compounded Labour members’ negative view of their former leader. In 1977 David Marquand’s masterly biography of MacDonald prompted a grudging reappraisal of his role in Labour so swiftly supplanting the Liberals as the progressive alternative party of government; this after all was a unified alliance of democratic socialists dating from as late as 1918. Monday’s radio programme was notable for Cruddas highlighting MacDonald’s centrality to the ILP before the First World War and his uneasy partnership with Arthur Henderson in ensuring that, unlike other social democrat movements in Europe, the split between pro- and anti-war factions proved only temporary (a reconciliation helped by Henderson having been eased out of Lloyd George’s coalition government for supporting the European left’s Stockholm peace conference). In 1924 MacDonald stepped up to the challenge and formed a working administration in the face of deep scepticism and outright opposition (although not from George V or indeed Baldwin, who both recognised Labour’s inaugural leaders as the voice of revisionist moderation): where his party lacked necessary personnel and expertise, not least in the House of Lords, he looked further afield, for example, reassuring the Army by persuading a former Viceroy of India, Viscount Chelmsford, to take over the War Office.
Similarly, MacDonald appointed as Secretary of Air his old friend Christopher Thomson, unusual as a left-leaning son of Empire, war hero, and Francophile. The newly ennobled Lord Thomson combined his establishment credentials with membership of the Fabian Society and an enthusiasm for initiative, innovation and the imperial mission that was rooted firmly in science and egalitarianism (echoed twenty years later by the Attlee government’s understanding of colonial responsibility). Thomson worked ceaselessly to identify the Labour Party with modernity and technological advancement (echoed forty years later by Harold Wilson on the cusp of office). Above all he endeavoured to associate Labour in the voters’ minds with flying: party propaganda portrayed MacDonald as a thoroughly modern politician, campaigning across the country courtesy of Brigadier Thomson’s biplane. Like Sam Hoare, his Conservative predecessor and successor as Secretary for Air, Thomson saw the rapid advances in aviation during the after the First World War as vital to the future cohesion and well-being of the Empire. Unlike Hoare, Thomson looked to airships rather than fixed-wing aircraft as the agents of imperial consolidation.
Throughout the 1920s Ramsay MacDonald and Christopher Thomson enjoyed an unlikely friendship. The latter’s enthusiastic promotion of the R101 project led to disaster in October 1930 when the giant airship on its maiden flight to India crashed in France killing all aboard. The Prime Minister was devastated by Thomson’s sudden death, the loss of the state built R101 coinciding with trade union and backbench criticism of his government’s failure to address rising unemployment and chronic social deprivation triggered by the Great Crash.  Thomson and the tragic tale of the R101 is now the subject of a well-researched, compulsively readable book by the American historian H.C. Wynne: His Majesty’s Airship The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine (One World, 2023). Labour’s endeavours to exploit the nation’s aerial achievements ended with the deadly failure of the R101 (in contrast with its privately built rival, the Barnes Wallis designed R100) and the subsequent refusal by Philip Snowden’s Treasury to fund the RAF’s defence of the Schneider Trophy: Supermarine’s super-speed seaplane did indeed secure a third successive victory and permanent retention of the Trophy, success achieved courtesy of a £100,000 donation from the millionairess Lady Huston.
The early Labour Party’s association with aviation precedes even Lord Thomson: it starts in the skies above the Western Front, as I suggested over twenty years ago in Mick Mannock, Fighter Pilot: Myth, Life and Politics. The air ace Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock believed socialist principles – solidarity, mutual respect and shared responsibility – were the key to effective aerial combat. Had he not died in the summer of 1918 then later that year Mannock VC would have been Labour’s general election candidate in his adopted town of Wellingborough. Although bereft of their war hero Labour still won in Wellingborough, just as today’s party is quietly confident of winning the byelection triggered by the enforced resignation of Peter Bone. A lazy description of the Northamptonshire town is that this is historically a safe Tory seat firmly pro-Brexit. Looking back across a hundred years reveals a radical alternative, with Labour the predominant political force. Mannock was famous for flying to Wellingborough when on leave in order to meet up with old comrades. Did a campaigning Ramsay MacDonald similarly arrive by aeroplane, posing as British socialism’s man of action? Labour’s first prime minister may have worn a wing collar, but he effortlessly portrayed the New Jerusalem as a triumph of cutting edge technology.
