8th February 2002

In 1931, during the world economic crisis, the bankers ordered the then Labour government to make massive cuts in public expenditure to restore "stability" and the cabinet met several times to decide how to respond but the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald who, along with Keir Hardie, was one of the founders of the party, believed that he had no alternative but to capitulate to this pressure and he tried to get his colleagues to agree but some of them refused to go along with it.

MacDonald asked the National Executive of the Labour Party if they would support him and the NEC told him that they would go along with whatever he recommended, but the TUC flatly refused and indicated that if he did make the cuts they would come out against him.

He had however been secretly negotiating with the Tories and the Liberals to enter into a Coalition to make the cuts and carry them through the Commons, then himself resigning as the Labour prime minister but being immediately re-appointed as the head of this new National Government which called for the dissolution of parliament to pave the way for a general election against the opposition of the Labour party.

The cabinet minutes for the period have long been released under the thirty year rule and they describe exactly how this situation developed, covering both the end of the Labour government and the first meeting of the new National government, also under Ramsay MacDonald, which record the congratulations which he received from his Tory and Liberal colleagues.

MacDonald fought that election against the party he had worked to found and virtually wiped it out, with only fifty one Labour MPs left in parliament, but leaving him still at number 10 for a further four years, and two more after that as Lord President of the Council under Stanley Baldwin.

During that election campaign, in which all the affiliated unions stayed loyal to Labour, Philip Snowdon, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who defected with Ramsay described the Labour Party as "Bolshevism run mad" and thus used the Red Scare against his old comrades who had placed their faith in him.

For the next fourteen years Labour was in opposition, gaining a hundred more seats in 1935 and then, ten years later, winning a landslide victory which gave us the Welfare State, Full Employment, full trade union rights and the National Health Service.

Reading this week of the attack on those who want the public services to be publicly funded, publicly owned and publicly accountable as "Wreckers" brought back these memories for it was almost as if the trade unions representing public sector workers were being accused of favouring "Bolshevism run mad" and as if some ministers were implying that the Tories, which introduced privatization under Mrs Thatcher, were their natural allies in following business friendly policies.

I have never heard the bosses of Railtrack, ENRON or Marconi who have failed so miserably described by ministers, as wreckers though that charge might well have been made and those who worked for those companies are bitterly resentful at the way they have been treated.

The prime minister once said that "New Labour is a new political party" and so much of what it does and says confirms that view and awakens in me a deep fear that history may be repeating itself on the 1931 model, leaving Labour fatally damaged in the eyes of the electors but leaving the PM safe in Downing Street with support from Tories an Liberals.

Some on the Left use this argument to justify their decision to leave the party arguing that it has gone beyond recall and now that its own internal democracy has been virtually destroyed it cannot ever recover, but those who say that are forgetting the other part of the story, namely that, in 1931 it was the trade unions that saved the party and re-equipped it for its later victories.

That process is already under way again with the brilliant advertising campaigns now being launched by the unions in support of the public services, and winning wide popular support from those who depend on them, so wide in fact, that even the Mail on Sunday has announced that it intends to argue for the Post Office to be retained as a public service.

I walked from home to Transport House to join the Labour Party on my birthday, sixty years ago this April and intend to die in it - though not quite yet - but I never joined New Labour and have no intention whatever of doing so, which, if it goes on like this, might prove to be too right wing to be electable.

The Left will never be able to agree on a common ideological position, because Socialism, like many other faiths, it positively breeds sectarian differences, but at least we can all work together for jobs, peace and freedom whatever party we are in and the campaigns on globalization, privatization, pensions and the war have brought us all together in a way that respects our differences but emphasizes our common aims.

The story of the betrayal of 1931, now over seventy years ago, may seem remote to many readers of the STAR, but I shall personally never forget it, because in 1930, as a five year old, I met MacDonald, when he still was the Labour PM, and he gave me a chocolate biscuit, so I have been a bit suspicious of all Labour leaders with chocolate biscuits ever since - and there are quite a few about now but no-one in the trade union movement seem to be tempted, and are staying loyal to the real Labour party.

8/2/2002