Cabinet's Finest Hour Page 2

  Attlee came back to England and was promoted to Major Attlee in February 1917. From then on many people continued to call him Major Attlee and, more affectionately, in Limehouse ‘the Major’.

  In June 1918 Attlee was sent to France and discharged from the army on 16 January 1919. In the ‘coupon’ general election called by Lloyd George, sometimes referred to as the ‘khaki election’, the Government list of MPs numbered 473. Three hundred and twenty two were conservative; Labour had 57. Attlee became Mayor of Stepney, appointed by the new Labour Council after the local elections in November 1919.

  In October 1922 Attlee, as the prospective candidate for Limehouse for the ILP, fought the sitting Conservative MP whose majority was 6,000. On 15 November 1922, the day after the election, it was announced Attlee had 9,688 votes – a majority of 1,899. Labour now had 142 MPs, a majority of which came from the ILP.

  In 1923 there was another general election, surprisingly called by the new Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Attlee won his Limehouse constituency with a large majority of 6,185 and Greenwood was also successful. While the Conservatives had the largest number of MPs, at 258, it no longer had the largest overall majority. Labour, who had 191, united with the Liberals and Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister in January 1924 when the king asked him to form the first Labour Government, albeit a minority one. It was destined to only last for a short time.

  At this point Arthur Greenwood was made parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Health and Clement Attlee became Under Secretary of State at the War Office. Forty-nine new Labour MPs were elected and there was a considerable increase in the number of ILP members, both being part of the Labour Representation Committee first convened on 27 November 1900. It was inevitably a short-lived government but a significant milestone had been passed in that a number of Labour MPs had gained experience of government for the first time.

  Four days before polling day Labour was hit by the publication of what turned out to be a forged letter in the Daily Mail. The various headlines were:

  CIVIL WAR PLOT BY SOCIALIST MASTERS

  MOSCOW ORDERS OUR REDS

  GREAT PLOT DISCLOSED YESTERDAY

  ‘PARALYSE THE ARMY AND NAVY’

  and

  MR MACDONALD WOULD LEND RUSSIA OUR MONEY!

  DOCUMENT ISSUED BY FOREIGN OFFICE AFTER DAILY MAIL

  HAD SPREAD THE NEWS.

  Publication of the so-called ‘Zinoviev Letter’ became an issue especially for women voters troubled by the portrayal of Labour in the press as ‘bloody Bolsheviks’. MacDonald, who besides being Prime Minister was Foreign Secretary as well, did not repudiate the Foreign Office when they took the letter at face value but protested angrily to the Russian Government about Zinoviev, whose real name was Apfelbaum, Chairman of Communist International. He was allegedly writing to the British Communist Party on ways of controlling the Labour movement. Attlee’s disillusionment with MacDonald began over his handling of the alleged Zinoviev letter.

  When the general election took place on 29 October 1924, both Greenwood and Attlee were re-elected and Hugh Dalton was elected for the first time for Peckham. Labour lost 40 seats and Baldwin became Prime Minister again with 412 Conservative MPs.

  Herbert Morrison, after a surprise victory in the 1923 election, lost his seat in Hackney South to a Liberal, the Conservatives having withdrawn. Morrison was the architect of the proposals the London Labour Party put to the Royal Commission on London Government in 1922. During this first spell as an MP, Morrison clashed with Ernest Bevin, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and Harry Gosling, the new Minister of Transport. MacDonald, urged on by Bevin, had supported the London Traffic Bill as a stop gap measure but Morrison voted against it. Bevin and Lord Ashfield, formerly Sir Albert Stanley, President of the Board of Trade in Lloyd George’s coalition wartime government, and who was chairman of the London General Omnibus Company, were in cahoots and both Ashfield and Bevin were depicted as “tycoons”. The nub of it all was that Bevin thought his Transport Workers would get “a better deal from Ashfield than from Morrison and the London County Council, LCC; after all, Ashfield’s bus workers were paid more than LCC train workers.”12 Morrison, for his part, saw Ashfield as wanting a “monopoly”, arguing, “I would prefer local government any day to Whitehall government”.13 There was the democratic dilemma of who should wield power – central or local government? Bevin wanted a member of his union and one member from Ashfield’s to represent their interests while Morrison wanted only representatives of local authorities. Bevin won out. Morrison’s official biographers wrote “By standing up to Bevin, Morrison earned his everlasting hatred. Bevin was a spiteful man who looked on opposition in very personal terms. For the rest of his life Bevin was to pursue Morrison with venom.”14 Whilst Bevin’s biographer wrote of the 1924 clash “there was another reason for Bevin’s impatience with the politicians in the Labour Party. He lived in a world dominated by industrial conflict, a world in which he had all the time to deal with hard, often unpalatable facts and take real decisions. The politicians lived in a different world where parliamentary manoeuvres, party resolutions and conference speeches were neither taken nor meant to be taken literally, a world in Bevin’s of make-believe, of shadow politics and sham decisions … the first task of the party was propaganda; it had to appeal and win over the unconverted. After the defeat of 1931 Bevin saw this clearly enough, but in 1924–5 he was too close to the immediate industrial conflict to take a long view of the Labour Party’s problems.”15

  In October 1926 Greenwood wrote an article in The Pilgrim: A Review of Christian Politics and Religion. It was edited by William Temple, the then Archbishop of Canterbury and a man sympathetic to Labour. The edition looked back on the General Strike and Temple, in an editorial, claimed that Prime Minister Baldwin had “acted rightly throughout” – right to refuse all arrangements that might give rise to the hope of subsidy, then yielding “rightfully” to the policy of the blank cheque. To Greenwood ‘the new spirit of Industry’ was the expression of a hope; the term ‘class war’ the expression of a fact. Describing the atmosphere in industry as “more hostile today than before”, he went on to argue using Christian terms “Nevertheless a ‘new spirit’” in industry “is essential on spiritual as well as material grounds”. He warned that “The escape from the ‘class war’ does not lie along a broad and easy road”. The way from the “class war to community of interest is the road from Capitalism to Socialism” and that the “spirit of co-operation cannot be born of the spirit of competition and private gain”. It was felt that it was still very difficult to evaluate the full effect of the General Strike but far from helping the miners it had damaged their cause. Overall, the General Strike was another blow to Labour’s claim to be able to govern. Years later Attlee told Kenneth Harris, one of his biographers, “I’d heard a General Strike discussed for fifteen years. When it came it collapsed because no one knew what to do with it, and most of them discovered they didn’t really want it.” In the wake of the strike, Scammell and Nephew factory owners had taken action against him and fellow Labour members because of Attlee’s chairmanship of the electricity committee of Stepney Council for pulling the fuse of their factory, though they had their own generating plant. Action was not taken against Conservatives on the committee so it was a flagrantly political action. And yet the High Court ordered Attlee to pay £300; fortunately he won on appeal. Had he lost, and on an MP’s salary of only £400, Attlee would have been financially embarrassed as he had been drawing down his family legacy and was from 1925–1940 always anxious about his lack of money.

  In the new Parliament Attlee was appointed a member of the Indian Statutory Commission in November 1927 having been given an assurance from MacDonald that this should not give rise to any misgivings as it would not affect his inclusion in any future Labour Government. Attlee spent some months in India in early 1928 and then from October 1928 until April 1929 visiting every province. India was the occa
sion for Attlee’s one very serious row with Churchill during the time of the War Cabinet. His real knowledge of India meant that as Prime Minister he was the driving force behind the granting of Independence in 1947 – one of the greatest acts of statesmanship in the 20th Century.

  The election in May 1929 gave Labour 289 MPs, 19 short of an absolute majority. MacDonald became Prime Minister but he did not offer or even see Attlee to explain why he was not in a government job. The other Labour MP on the Indian Commission, Vernon Hartshorn, was also excluded, whereas MacDonald gave Arthur Greenwood a big career boost and made him Minister of Health with a seat in the Cabinet. Greenwood improved widows’ pensions in 1929. His Housing Act of 1930 permitted slum clearance and rebuilding. In January 1931 he warned against cuts in social services as a means for balancing the budget, an argument which he held to throughout the summer financial crisis. The only MP clearly on the left at this time was the 70-year-old George Lansbury as the Minister of Works.

  It was not until 24 May 1930 that Attlee entered the Government as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster owing to Oswald Mosley’s resignation over the rejection of his radical proposals for dealing with unemployment. Although not in the Cabinet, Attlee for a short time had an important role as, in effect, economic adviser to MacDonald. A Cabinet paper he submitted recommended a Ministry of Industry. The appointment of Horace Wilson as industrial adviser to MacDonald meant that in March 1931, Attlee became Postmaster-General, though still not in the Cabinet. Meanwhile Philip Snowden, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed an ‘economy committee’ under Sir George May, an accountant, to propose cuts. It was suggested an estimated deficit of £120 million for 1932–3 should be reduced by £97 million by cutting unemployment benefits and the salaries of teachers, the military and the police. By mid-August the Cabinet reluctantly agreed £56 million in cuts. In what had become a political crisis, the Conservatives and Liberals said these cuts were not enough. The Liberal Party position might have been different had Lloyd George not been out of action having a prostate operation. MacDonald, who could accept £70 million, was then persuaded by King George V to form a National Government. MacDonald took four Labour Cabinet ministers with him, including Philip Snowden and Jimmy Thomas, the National Union of Railwaymen leader, as Lord Privy Seal.16 Oswald Mosley, earlier the scourge of unemployment and advocate of economic growth, en route to becoming a fascist and no longer supportive of the Labour Party, asked of the Labour Government, “What would we think of a Salvation Army that took to its heels on the Day of Judgement?”17

  On 24 August after the National Government had already been formed, Attlee and other ministers not in the Cabinet met with MacDonald in the Cabinet Room at No. 10. Attlee described how he “made us a long and insincere speech in which he begged us to remain with the party out of regard for our careers, but really because he had all the appointments fixed up and any adhesions would have gravely embarrassed him.”18 Attlee, thereafter, had no time for MacDonald and unlike Morrison, who had been Minister of Transport, never even considered staying with MacDonald. Morrison’s position remains to this day somewhat obscure. Sticking with the Labour Party and following Arthur Henderson into Opposition was for Attlee the only choice. Near the end of his life when interviewed on 16 September 1965, Attlee singled out for criticism how MacDonald “had no idea of treating his colleagues properly. He used to recall to me the contempt he had for his colleagues”.19 On other senior Cabinet figures he was asked:

  Q: What about Thomas?

  Attlee: Jimmy? Jimmy was a good fellow. He never knew quite where he was, like some others I’ve known. He hadn’t any clear idea of what was right and wrong.

  Q: And how about Snowden?

  Attlee: Snowden was quite genial you know. He was a very hard set free trader.

  Q: How did you view after 1931, these same men – MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas?

  Attlee: I regarded them as traitors.

  Attlee was not alone in his condemnation of MacDonald. Bevin also had little time for him: “Of all the Labour politicians, MacDonald, with his upper-class tastes, his lack of industrial experience and air of aloofness, had least sympathy with the trade union side of the movement. He and Bevin each embodied many of the characteristics which the other most disliked in the Labour movement and neither had much time for the other.”20 Attlee wrote to his brother Tom about how difficult it was to gauge MacDonald’s mind at any time. “It is, I think, mainly fog now. I think that while at the back of his mind he realises his own incompetence for the job which he has in hand, he sees himself in a series of images in the mirror, images which constantly fade and melt into each other. Now he is the Weary Titan, or the good man struggling with adversity; anon he is the handsome and gallant leader of the nation, or the cultured and travelled patron of art and letters...”21

  On 21 September 1931 the gold standard was suspended by the National Government and never reinstated. Britain had been impaled on it by Winston Churchill, who restored it on 28 April 1925 when Chancellor of the Exchequer and later accepted this was his greatest single mistake. The reaction of one Labour minister was “No one told us that we could do that”, and in that plaintive comment about the gold standard there was a deeper reality. Labour had taken power too soon and it still lacked the experience and intellectual financial knowledge that a party needs to govern well and which takes time to acquire.

  At the general election on 27 October 1931 Labour paid the price for their widely perceived incompetent handling of the financial crisis. Attlee just managed to hold on in Limehouse but with a greatly reduced majority. Greenwood lost in Nelson and Colne. Only 46 Labour MPs supported by five ILP members were elected against over 500 MPs who supported the ‘National’ Government. At the first meeting of the new Parliamentary Labour Party, exministers like Arthur Henderson, Herbert Morrison and Arthur Greenwood, having lost, were not present. George Lansbury, who had been First Commissioner of Works in the Government for two years, a Christian Socialist and pacifist, was elected leader and Clement Attlee deputy leader. Lansbury was an early campaigner for a state-run national health service and votes for women but he was not the person to rebuild the shattered party. Attlee was beset by money problems at this time and this was only relieved when Stafford Cripps, now an MP, donated £500 a year as an addition to his salary. In power terms, Cripps was too new as an MP to challenge Attlee. Attlee was now for the first time in Labour hierarchy ahead of Greenwood and it was a position he was never to relinquish. 22

  Somewhat surprisingly, Herbert Morrison, who lost his seat at Hackney South and was a potential challenger to Attlee, took time to recover his political ambition and did not put his name forward to even be a member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party in 1931. In 1932 Morrison took third place and first place in 1934, beating Attlee who was making his first appearance on the NEC as well as Hugh Dalton and Cripps. Even more surprising, Morrison was blocked from resuming as leader of London County Council by Lewis Silkin who people thought had been chosen “simply to keep the seat warm for Herbert”. While 43 years old, Morrison had been the youngest Cabinet minister. His biographers identified his behaviour then as going some way to explain why he never later became leader of the Labour Party: “He regarded the leadership of the LCC as his … When he was defeated, he became petulant. If rejected for the top job, he would accept no other. In 1932 he would not be deputy to Silkin, in 1935 he would not be deputy to Attlee, and in 1955 he would not be deputy to Gaitskell.”23 He did, however, agree to be deputy to Attlee from 1945 to 1955, becoming Lord President of the Council, co-ordinating the home front and Leader of the House of Commons, though he had lost the treasurership of the Labour Party to Greenwood in 1943. Nevertheless when Morrison did again become leader of the LCC in the spring of 1933 he continued to be a formidable organiser and effective administrator, though he did not return as an MP again for Hackney until the 1935 general election, leaving Attlee unchallenged. In that period Attlee quietly consolidated his p
osition among Labour MPs as a hard-working and conscientious House of Commons man.

  Herbert Morrison established Labour from the moment he was elected to the LCC in 1922 as an independent political force in London. In the country he was crucial in demonstrating Labour was not one under the control of the far left. This triumph over the left was Morrison’s enduring legacy. Unemployment was high in his borough of Hackney when he became Mayor in 1920 and Morrison immediately established a distress fund. It wasn’t long however before militants started on direct action, fighting with the police and even stealing some borough council coal. Morrison disowned this action and wrote to Prime Minister Lloyd George on 4 December 1920 that he had set his face against disorder and illegality and that the great bulk of organised labour adhered to “democratic constitutionalism”. This “fervour for constitutional behaviour brought him sharply into conflict with George Lansbury at Poplar. There the local Labour Party had decided, without consultation with the London Labour Party, that the local council should not levy rates for the precepts from the LCC and other local government bodies, as a protest against rising unemployment, the inadequacies of government action and the miserable scale of the relief.”24 Morrison’s attitude to Lansbury was further strained in 1924 over excluding Communists from the London Labour Party [LLP] whereas Lansbury wanted no barrier against them at all.25 In 1925 Morrison attacked Lansbury for disloyalty in still collaborating with Communists.

  Arthur Greenwood, by contrast to Morrison, returned to the House of Commons through a by-election in April 1932 and patiently began to bring the skills he had learned in Cabinet to the parliamentary party. Then at the end of 1933 Lansbury fell and fractured his thigh. He spent the next eight months in hospital in constant pain and was temporarily replaced by Attlee for nine months. It was a reminder to all that a party leadership election was coming. Greenwood never wrote an autobiography and there is nothing but an unpublished, totally inadequate draft biography which is in the Bodleian Library.26 It is hard to be sure, therefore, whether Greenwood really wanted the job of leader of the parliamentary party, or that of the Party National Secretary. He “most embodied the traditions of the party. A protégé of Henderson, he was a warm-hearted intellectual of modest political skills with wide support in the north of the country. He was also known to enjoy a few drinks.”27 Even then his drinking was probably becoming a factor in his failure to build up sufficient support within the parliamentary party in order to be able to defeat Attlee in 1935.