Abstract
Britain’s second Labour government has been the subject of a great deal of academic controversy and repeated attempts at reappraisal, from Reginald Bassett’s (1958) study of the crisis of 1931 to Neil Riddell’s more recent (1999) analysis of Labour in Crisis. This new collection of essays, prepared to mark the 80th anniversary of the 1929–1931 government, provides a useful overview of these debates and also offers some significant new assessments of its own.
One of the most substantial contributions to the volume is Andrew Thorpe’s chapter on the 1929 general election. Thorpe uses the 1931 census to provide extensive data on the social composition of Labour’s vote, allowing him to re-examine Duncan Tanner’s (1997) argument that Labour had increased its appeal to the middle classes in 1929. The data he examines on male occupations and residential occupancy per room suggests that although Labour did make more advances in middle class areas than in the elections immediately preceding or succeeding 1929, most of its gains were in predominately working class areas.
Daniel Ritschel’s chapter makes a convincing case against the established account of Oswald Mosley’s alternative economic programme as being rooted in Keynesianism. Instead, he traces Mosley’s economic thought through the Independent Labour Party (ILP)’s schemes for a living wage, ‘socialist credit control’ and national economic planning, showing how in Mosley’s hands these strands of thought developed into an authoritarian corporatist ideology. Importantly this predated Mosley’s turn towards continental fascism. This is an interesting corrective to the lingering view that the pre-British Union of Fascists Mosley was one of Labour’s ‘lost leaders’, whose unheeded advice could have pointed Labour towards a Keynesian social democratic settlement. As Ritschel concludes: Mosley had crafted by early 1930 an idiosyncratic hybrid that was less than a year removed from its metamorphosis into the proto-fascist Corporate State and less than two years from his public embrace of fascism itself late in 1931. If he was, indeed, a ‘lost leader’, this may not have been as great a tragedy as had once been thought. (p. 84)
Chapters on Labour’s agricultural, labour and consumer policies help to focus the volume on what Labour was and was not able to achieve in office. The latter, by Nicole Robertson, challenges prevailing views by portraying Labour as a proactive and innovative government, at least in the area of consumer protection. Although neither the Consumers’ Council Bill or Hire Purchase Bill were enacted at the time, both anticipated later developments in this area and showed that the government was not simply staggering between crises, it was also able to take a positive line on an area of policy which has often proved difficult for Labour.
The memory of 1931 is examined by David Howell, who looks at how an ‘approved history of 1931’ (p. 217) became embedded in Labour’s culture, providing models and warnings which would shape the options available to would-be leaders of the future. The ‘myth of betrayal’ has been examined elsewhere (Lawrence, 2000), but Howell’s suggestion that the ‘usable version of the past’ constructed in response to 1931 ‘legitimised a viable alliance between trade unionists and middle- and upper-class progressives’ offers an interesting new angle (p. 218).
The book is not limited to the Labour government itself, nor indeed to the left. In addition to chapters examining Labour’s relationships with the ILP, the USSR and its own backbenchers, Richard Carr’s consideration of the Conservatives elected after 1918 reminds us that the 1929–1931 period was also marked by divisions on the opposition benches. These ‘rebellious and intellectually inquisitive’ young Tories (p. 185) believed the state would have to take a more interventionist role than that envisaged by the leaders of their party yet, like Labour, they were unable to offer coherent solutions to the problems facing the nation.
This is a useful and informative addition to the literature on Britain’s second Labour government. It provides a good introduction to the debates and controversies surrounding this administration, while also making several thought-provoking interventions. Its focus on the policy areas where Labour was more successful in achieving its aims than has previously been thought allows for a nicely nuanced analysis, while the authors’ gentle reconsiderations of some established interpretations of the period are both balanced and incisive.