One hundred years ago this week, on January 22, 1924, Ramsay MacDonald became Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister.

He was one of six so far. The others were Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony Blair — and the Blair-appointed, unelected Gordon Brown.

Another centenary occurred this week: Lenin’s death and Stalin’s rise to power, but that’s another story.

1920s Labour

Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party was a mix of workers and intellectuals, with each group having its own political philosophy.

Historian David Torrance’s article for UnHerd, ‘Labour was never a revolutionary movement’, tells us that MacDonald had to manage the expectations of both while solving the nation’s problems (emphases mine):

… MacDonald himself could see the bigger picture. And his account of a historic day betrayed both his shock at what had just happened, as well as his apprehension at what was to come: “Without fuss, the firing of guns, the flying of new flags, the Labour Gov[ernmen]t has come in… Now for burdens & worries. Our greatest difficulties will be to get to work. Our purposes need preparation, & during preparation we shall appear to be doing nothing – and to our own people to be breaking our pledges.”

This was prescient. Over the next nine months Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister would find himself battling on a number of fronts: for acceptance by voters, co-operation with not one but two opposition parties in Parliament (Liberals and Conservatives) and most of all for support from his own colleagues, many of whom were deeply uneasy that a party with only 191 MPs had taken office at all.

The Labour Party as represented in Parliament was complex. Its structure betrayed its chaotic inception, more a fusion of local bodies and ideological factions than a combined party under a unitary authority. The civil servant Percy Grigg described a “Trade Union element”, which was more interested in moderate “bread and butter” politics than the abstract economic and social doctrine favoured by the party’s faction of “intellectuals”. And this second grouping included both former Liberals and those who had emerged from the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a separate but affiliated group. Grigg called the ILP-ers “Montagnards” after the most radical political group during the French Revolution, and remarked they followed “the lead of the Clyde in Scotland and Mr. [George] Lansbury in England”. Inclined to be unhappy at the moderation displayed by the trade unionists and intellectuals, the Montagnards would only be satisfied with the building of the New Jerusalem.

… After two months in government, Ramsay MacDonald — consumed by international as well as domestic affairs — grew concerned at the failure of his backbenchers to respond adequately to the “new conditions”. Some of what he called the “disappointed ones” had become “as hostile as though they were not of us”.

… MacDonald worked hard to make … housing legislation a reality, formally recognised the Soviet Union and brokered a new settlement between France and Germany, something he hoped would boost trade as well as soothing post-war wounds. But with only 191 MPs, and a ministry dependent on Liberal votes, he couldn’t do everything …

The rest of the MacDonald story is well known. His first administration lost a confidence vote in October 1924 …

An election was held and the Conservative MP Stanley Baldwin was returned to power.

Five years later, in June 1929, MacDonald became Prime Minister again:

of another minority government, although this time Labour was the single largest party with 287 seats. In the midst of rising unemployment and a sterling crisis, the government agreed to resign in August 1931, but then the King persuaded MacDonald to head a “National” government. Labour’s National Executive Committee voted to expel all those who remained in office, and in the election that followed, the National government was returned with a majority of nearly 500 (mostly Tories) and the “official” Labour Party was reduced to just 52 MPs.

As his was a National Government, the Cabinet had to comprise MPs from other political parties, not just Labour. Wikipedia says:

The National Government’s huge majority left MacDonald with the largest mandate ever won by a British Prime Minister at a democratic election, but MacDonald had only a small following of National Labour men in Parliament. He was ageing rapidly, and was increasingly a figurehead. In control of domestic policy were Conservatives Stanley Baldwin as Lord President and Neville Chamberlain the chancellor of the exchequer, together with National Liberal Walter Runciman at the Board of Trade.^[88]…

MacDonald was deeply affected by the anger and bitterness caused by the fall of the Labour government. He continued to regard himself as a true Labour man, but the rupturing of virtually all his old friendships left him an isolated figure.

Welsh Labour

Most Britons connect Wales with Labour from its inception to the present day. They are not wrong, but the reality is more nuanced.

Professor Brad Evans from the University of Bath described the rise and decline of Welsh Labour in another UnHerd article, ‘How Labour lost the Welsh Valleys’:

Last year, I found myself back in the Rhondda valley and the village where I spent most of my childhood. As I walked through its typically inclement grey terraced streets, I came upon the boarded-up premises of the Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club. Dereliction and a sense of decaying nobility are common features of the streets here, with clubs, institutes, chapels and all other sites of congregation looking the same. This vacant building that held many notable trade union meetings was one of the longest-running working men’s establishments in the Rhondda. Now it stands as a monument to failure. What can be said about such a relic, whose name alone testifies to everything this valley once stood for?

Because these former mining valleys in the wilds of Glamorgan were the cradle of working-class politics in Britain. Revolutionary socialism is almost as old as the mining communities in these hills: the red flag of socialism was flown for the very first time in anger over the skies of Merthyr Tydfil in 1831. And, in time, this people and landscape gave rise to the British labour movement and the party that bears its name, a party that knew who it represented and what it wanted to change.

Keir Hardie, Labour’s founding father, was elected MP for the Merthyr and Aberdare constituency only a few years before he would oversee the transition from the Independent Labour Party to the more familiar abbreviated title in 1906. A former miner who first entered the darkness of the pits at just 10-years old, he knew first-hand the toils and struggles faced by these hardened communities, and never forgot them in Parliament, wearing a deerstalker and tweed jacket in place of the expected top hat and tails. But Hardie himself never lived to see the party he conceived in power. An idealist and a pacifist, he died a broken man in 1915, as his contentious objections to the First World War (on the basis of the working-class dead and war profiteering) went unheeded.

Of Ramsay MacDonald, Evans writes:

Just nine years later though, and 100 years ago this week, the Labour Party did form its first government. It was led, though, by a Scot, Ramsay Macdonald, later expelled as a traitor and a turncoat for his collaboration with the Conservatives.

Even so, South Wales remained loyal to Labour:

as the Labour Party split and reformed, mutated and reorganised, South Wales remained its natural home. It was here that institutions later synonymous with the party, such as the National Union of Miners, were first established. And the area produced the radical autodidactic streak that gave Labour’s second prime minister, Clement At[t]lee, his greatest lieutenant: Nye Bevan gained his education in the libraries and reading rooms of Tredegar’s Miners’ institutes, arguably the most impressive educational bodies promoting the socialist cause anywhere in Europe.

Everything went well until one day in 1966, a mining disaster still remembered to this day:

… in the valleys of South Wales, a different tragedy bears a single name: Aberfan. That was the village where, on the morning of 21 October 1966, approximately 105,000 cubic metres of discarded coal waste slid into the community and engulfed the Pant Glas school and houses below. Half the town’s children were wiped out by the black avalanche that sped down the slopes, along with 28 adults.

I will add here that Queen Elizabeth II was so moved that she took an extraordinary step: she visited Aberfan in the wake of the tragedy to see what had happened and to converse with the townspeople. Monarchs had not been known for visiting the scenes of disasters outside of wartime.

Unfortunately, the people of Aberfan trusted Labour, and Labour broke that trust in the years that followed:

Aberfan had already been foretold through numerous warnings, and in previous slippages in both the village itself and nearby. But even as the slurry settled and the spoil began to be cleared, the story was only just beginning … John Collins, whose entire family was taken by the black mountain, later said: “I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people — a Labour government, a Labour council, a Labour nationalised coal board.” This Establishment cover-up was fatal. As veteran BBC broadcaster Vincent Kane later added: “Half a dozen or so organisations or individuals should have brought help to those stricken people, but instead they betrayed them.”

The central figure in this episode was Lord Robens who, as Chairman of the National Coal Board, continually presented himself as a defender of coal, while overseeing widespread pit closures. His arrogance was matched only by the lack of compassion he showed towards the families of the bereaved. Insult piled upon injury as the official tribunal into the cause of the disaster was marred by misinformation, delays and attempts to obstruct the truth. And the victims could see it — as a father of one of the bereaved children cried out when giving evidence: “Buried alive by the National Coal Board. That is what I want to see on record. That is the feeling of those present. Those are the words we want to go on the certificate”.

Worse was to follow: it was at the behest of the Labour Minister for Wales — the valleys-born George Thomas, later Lord Tonypandy — that the villagers themselves were required [to] pay to remove remaining slag heaps still towering over their homes from the disaster relief fund. But this tragedy was to become the epicentre of a far greater conjuncture, where Wales began to reckon with all the false promises of industrialisation and unionism.

In the decades that followed, the people of South Wales looked for something to replace Labour but there was nothing:

If there is no history of South Wales without Aberfan, there is no complete history of the Labour Party which does not chapter the devastation and fury it sowed in this heartland. And, while the latter part of the Sixties was marked by the beginnings of a turn away from Labour, the following decade saw nothing arrive to replace it. Voter turnout in elections started to decline, while industrial action by the miners threw the country into darkness, a faction of the working class seemingly at war with the country — and, after the 1974 election, at war with a Labour government too.

Even Neil Kinnock’s time as Labour leader could not restore the people’s confidence in the party:

A son of the valleys, the Tredegar-born Neil Kinnock, would later assume the helm as Margaret Thatcher instigated a very different kind of revolution. An impressive intellect and pragmatist, Kinnock’s accent and bearing connected the party back to its past. He could speak with genuine feeling of the strength of those communities, “who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football”. But that would in part be his undoing: a conservative national press constantly mocked his “boyo” persona. And while he could give voice to South Wales through his own, it ultimately became the voice of political defeat, as the pits central to valley-life were shut and sealed, something the Labour Party proved powerless to stop …

Kinnock was probably the last leader of the Labour Party as it was originally conceived. But he was ultimately given the impossible task of trying to lead a party born in another age, a product of the dire need to have political representation to counter the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism. Now, it has lost its identity, just as much as the people it represented were losing theirs.

Tony Blair seemed to end all hope:

… as Blair opened more of the country to the punishing writ of the free market, the last vestiges of industry petered out. The last of the pits closed, and some of the most prominent local employers such as Hoover in Merthyr and the Polikoff’s and Burberry factories in the Rhondda, dramatically cut their workforce, until their inevitable closure a decade or so later.

Ironically, it was through Blair’s initiative of devolution, which gave Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland their respective assemblies — some would say parliaments — that Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, came to prominence:

With the National Assembly for Wales established in 1997 following devolution in the Principality, the strength of support for Plaid Cymru, which had been gathering momentum since Aberfan, was now evident in the valley heartlands. By 1999 they would even manage to win seats in the once unimaginable ward of the Rhondda, where the old joke ran that even a Smurf would win should they be dressed in red. Blair’s appeal to Middle England was traded in Wales, and the party barely scrapes ahead of the Conservatives nationally now.

Evans concludes:

Today, as the party seeks to commemorate 100 years of its electable “progress”, it should turn is attention the places which gave the party its name and yet where poverty and abandonment persist. While you can be sure that disdain for the Conservative Party is still strongly felt, the Labour Party is regarded with something equally dangerous: an apathetic rolling of the eyes by a people whose rolling hills speaks to the layered memories of resigned weathering. Even as another Keir looks set to return the Labour Party to power, Ton and Pentre Labour and Progressive Club won’t suddenly reopen. Suspended in neglect, its rooms will remain empty as another electoral season passes. And all the while, what passes for progress will continue arriving at these towns from elsewhere, just explanations that try and fail to make sense of the greatest dereliction — the dereliction of the mind and soul of a people.

Left wing versus Right wing economics

While John Maynard Keynes was a member of the Liberal Party, Labour have adopted a Keynesian approach to economics, particularly in contrast to that of Friedrich Hayek, as can be seen in the chart below (click here for a larger version):

Note Keynes’s advocacy of a short-term focus, the belief that people have an ‘animal spirit’ (irrationality), that bad businesses should be kept afloat and, perhaps most important of all, that government acts in the public’s best interest.

Hmm.

As a commenter to another UnHerd article, Tom McTague’s ‘Labour is stalked by treachery’, put it:

To the leftist, the good is the enemy of the perfect.

The article explains how one can arrive at that conclusion:

The conservative philosopher Maurice Cowling wrote that the essence of liberalism was the belief that “there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences” in life (which he said was plainly false). In The Meaning of Conservatism, Roger Scruton argued that this was the liberal faith that lay at the heart of today’s “spirit of improvement” — the inclination of the liberal, as he put it, to “change whatever he cannot find better reason to retain”. Conservatives like Scruton and Cowling, by contrast, do not believe all difficulties and differences can be reconciled — or, in fact, should be. To govern is to weigh up competing goods and to make least worst choices based on incomplete information.

I couldn’t agree more.

Keir Starmer, who might well become the UK’s next Prime Minister, is known for his policy flip flops. He, too, operates on a ‘spirit of improvement’ and ‘change’ level. The problem is that you can’t please everyone:

In one obvious sense, he has already been tried and found guilty of betrayal by the Left for breaking the promises he made to secure the leadership. During the Labour leadership campaign, Starmer pledged to “reverse the Tories’ cuts to corporation tax” only to then order his MPs to vote against the Tories’ own decision to reverse their own cuts themselves. He also pledged to “defend free movement as we leave the EU”, only to then make keeping out of free movement a red line in any future relationship with the EU. But the fundamental challenge for Starmer is that it is impossible for him to reconcile all of the competing promises he has made to the wider electorate and so will, inevitably, betray someone …

Today, Labour’s economic plan remains markedly empty …

The obvious danger for a future Starmer government is that without an economic strategy, there won’t be enough money to build a new Britain or fix its crumbling public realm. Instead of doing all three of the missions Starmer set himself, he will not be able to do any. And so difficult choices will follow. Should this happen, it will not be long before the ghost of Ramsay MacDonald once again starts to haunt the Labour party.

Even behind the scenes, Labour prove themselves to be contradictory.

On January 3, Guido Fawkes pointed out Labour’s hypocrisy when it comes to using consultants:

The FT has dug into the numbers this morning and found that, despite Labour squawking about government use of consultants and promising “tough new rules” to restrict it, the party has massively increased its own work with companies. Labour got £287,000 in donations of staff time from consultancies in the year to September 2023, which is up four times from only £72,000 in 12 months before …

The biggest contribution of hours came from EY UK which provided £138,000-worth. Readers might remember [shadow chancellor] Rachel Reeves using her party conference speech in October to say Labour “will slash government consultancy spending, which has almost quadrupled in just six years”. 

Leftist mindset

In March 2023, Will Lloyd, who works at the Labour-supporting New Statesman, wrote a fascinating article for The Times, ‘Yes, the left are as miserable as they seem’, in which he contrasts them with conservatives:

If you can count on the left for anything, it is earnest miserablism. Political movements are more than the sum of policy papers and press conferences. Over time they acquire their own characteristic idioms, gaits and dress codes. Beards are more common on the left than the right, for instance …

Joylessness, too, comes with this territory, a stereotype that has remarkably solid groundings in social science. Left-wing political views tend to shake hands with high neuroticism, which is associated in individuals with anxiety and overthinking, and in political movements with consistently blowing elections. In the US, a 2021 paper by Catherine Gimbrone, Lisa Bates, Seth Prins and Katherine Keyes entitled “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalising symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs” took the emotional temperature of 12th-grade (year 13) students between 2005 and 2018. It found that liberal girls, with liberal boys following them, experienced surging rates of depressive symptoms. Conservative teenagers, perhaps inured to inequality or the climate crisis or the rise of populism by their beliefs, were not nearly so sad.

Were these distressed teenagers left-wing because they were miserable, or miserable because they were left-wing? The paper does not quite give an answer. I wonder if both can be simultaneously true. Misery, in any case, was tied to ideology.

Considering these findings, the economist Tyler Cowen claimed that “you cannot understand the American public intellectual sphere” without a grasp of the close connection between left thinking and depressive tendencies. The same holds in Britain, and not just among public intellectuals. Over the past ten years I have attended demos, protests, drum circles, vigils, Marxist reading groups, union meetings and picket lines. At each of these gatherings there was usually talk of “joy” and “care”, though little of either in evidence.

I know few natural Tories, fewer cradle Labourites, and many born-again, creedal leftwingers. The Tories … have wafted through these crisis years without once discussing therapy with me, or reaching for antidepressants. The same cannot be said of the others.

Once you are aware of this link between private sadness and publicly proclaimed left-wing beliefs, it is difficult ever to forget. New Labour’s behind-closed-doors difficulties begin to make more sense when you understand that many of its leading players were not the happiest warriors …

Of course, the right has its own pathologies. An obdurate lack of empathy and, more recently, a bovine, unconvincing embrace of “man in the street” aspirations …

But there is a reason why the ingenious left-wing German essayist Walter Benjamin railed against “left-wing melancholia” in the Thirties. There is a reason, too, why the most brilliant British left thinker of his generation, Mark Fisher, wrote most insightfully about depression, not capitalism. A movement that longs, in its depths, for a utopia that will never be built is usually going to be unhappy. This constant state of unfulfilled desire, the painful political equivalent of unrequited love, is the birthmark the left can never truly hide.

Don’t let American squalor happen here

This brings me to my last article from UnHerd, ‘Why American cities are squalid’.

I’m not sure that the article explained why this is, although one of the comments to it certainly did — Democrat control:

There aren’t many Republican cities (this chart shows 10 of 51 cities over quarter of a million):

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/08/08/chart-of-the-week-the-most-liberal-and-conservative-big-cities/

And those are the smaller/less diverse/higher trust ones like Jacksonville, Fl and Anchorage, Alaska.

I will let readers examine the article and the comments for themselves, because they are too depressing to detail here: violent deaths, vagrants urinating on public transport, a homeless person defecating in the middle of a food court and so on.

I worry about Glasgow with its upcoming shooting galleries that will make a declining city even more unsafe.

I worry even more about London, with its high rate of stabbings and homeless in shop doorways.

What could that could lead to? Every American city I know about on the decline started with a high crime rate. From there it went to homelessness, open consumption of drugs in the street and uncontrolled behaviour, e.g. using public spaces as a toilet.

What all these cities had and have in common are Democrat mayors and Democrat-controlled councils.

Conclusion

Which brings me back to Labour. Look at how they cared for the people of Aberfan. They cared nothing about the good people of Aberfan.

Labour won’t care about you, either. They’ll say anything to get in power then ignore their many promises, left unfulfilled.