{"id":236,"date":"2024-01-09T17:31:56","date_gmt":"2024-01-09T17:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/?p=236"},"modified":"2024-01-09T17:31:56","modified_gmt":"2024-01-09T17:31:56","slug":"ramsay-macdonald-first-labour-pm-but-also-airman-and-man-of-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2024\/01\/09\/ramsay-macdonald-first-labour-pm-but-also-airman-and-man-of-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Ramsay MacDonald: first Labour PM, but also airman and man of action!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ever sharp MP and political thinker Jon Cruddas was on yesterday\u2019s Radio 4\u2019s \u2018Start the Week\u2019 talking about his new book: A Century of Labour<\/em> marks the centenary of the first Labour Government.\u00a0 Ramsay MacDonald formed his first \u2013 minority \u2013 administration on 22 January 2024, combining the premiership with the position of Foreign Secretary.\u00a0 Notwithstanding John Wheatley\u2019s Housing Act, foreign policy was probably the party\u2019s biggest achievement in office: MacDonald played an arbitrary role in ending the stand-off between France and Weimar Germany over reparations.\u00a0 By the autumn of 1924 Labour was out of office and facing five years of Stanley Baldwin in Downing Street.\u00a0 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 \u2018steady as she goes\u2019 rarely secures re-election).\u00a0 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 \u2018the voice of Geneva [home of the League of Nations]\u2019.<\/p>\n

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The split in the second Labour minority government in August 1931 and MacDonald\u2019s leadership of a Tory-dominated National Government saw him enter Labour mythology as a traitor to his class and his party.\u00a0 MacDonald\u2019s visible physical and mental decline in the early 1930s compounded Labour members\u2019 negative view of their former leader.\u00a0 In 1977 David Marquand\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Monday\u2019s radio programme was notable for Cruddas highlighting MacDonald\u2019s 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\u2019s coalition government for supporting the European left\u2019s Stockholm peace conference).\u00a0 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Similarly, MacDonald appointed as Secretary of Air his old friend Christopher Thomson, unusual as a left-leaning son of Empire, war hero, and Francophile.\u00a0 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\u2019s understanding of colonial responsibility).\u00a0 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).\u00a0 Above all he endeavoured to associate Labour in the voters\u2019 minds with flying: party propaganda portrayed MacDonald as a thoroughly modern politician, campaigning across the country courtesy of Brigadier Thomson\u2019s biplane.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Unlike Hoare, Thomson looked to airships rather than fixed-wing aircraft as the agents of imperial consolidation.<\/p>\n

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Throughout the 1920s Ramsay MacDonald and Christopher Thomson enjoyed an unlikely friendship.\u00a0 The latter\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The Prime Minister was devastated by Thomson\u2019s sudden death, the loss of the state built R101 coinciding with trade union and backbench criticism of his government\u2019s failure to address rising unemployment and chronic social deprivation triggered by the Great Crash.\u00a0\u00a0 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\u2019s Airship The Life and Tragic Death of the World\u2019s Largest Flying Machine<\/em> (One World, 2023).\u00a0 Labour\u2019s endeavours to exploit the nation\u2019s 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\u2019s Treasury to fund the RAF\u2019s defence of the Schneider Trophy: Supermarine\u2019s super-speed seaplane did indeed secure a third successive victory and permanent retention of the Trophy, success achieved courtesy of a \u00a3100,000 donation from the millionairess Lady Huston.<\/p>\n

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The early Labour Party\u2019s 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<\/em>.\u00a0 The air ace Edward \u2018Mick\u2019 Mannock believed socialist principles \u2013 solidarity, mutual respect and shared responsibility \u2013 were the key to effective aerial combat.\u00a0 Had he not died in the summer of 1918 then later that year Mannock VC would have been Labour\u2019s general election candidate in his adopted town of Wellingborough.\u00a0 Although bereft of their war hero Labour still won in Wellingborough, just as today\u2019s party is quietly confident of winning the byelection triggered by the enforced resignation of Peter Bone.\u00a0 A lazy description of the Northamptonshire town is that this is historically a safe Tory seat firmly pro-Brexit.\u00a0 Looking back across a hundred years reveals a radical alternative, with Labour the predominant political force.\u00a0 Mannock was famous for flying to Wellingborough when on leave in order to meet up with old comrades.\u00a0 Did a campaigning Ramsay MacDonald similarly arrive by aeroplane, posing as British socialism\u2019s man of action?\u00a0 Labour\u2019s first prime minister may have worn a wing collar, but he effortlessly portrayed the New Jerusalem as a triumph of cutting edge technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ever sharp MP and political thinker Jon Cruddas was on yesterday\u2019s Radio 4\u2019s \u2018Start the Week\u2019 talking about his new book: A Century of Labour marks the centenary of the first Labour Government.\u00a0 Ramsay MacDonald formed his first \u2013 minority \u2013 administration on 22 January 2024, combining the premiership with the position of Foreign … <\/p>\n

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