Cabinet's Finest Hour Page 3
Greenwood was well aware already that Arthur Henderson, a friend, who had been National Secretary of the party since 1922, was thinking over whether to retire. Greenwood decided to stand if he did, but so did Morrison who tried and failed to win the support of Henderson himself. Dalton claimed in his diary in 1934 that Henderson, still reluctant to retire, was actually forced out by the NEC. Morrison looked the clear favourite, but Ernest Bevin along with some other trade unionists were reluctant for the Secretary to also be an MP, believing this put too much power into the hands of one person. Their call for ‘one person, one job’ was an important factor, not just Bevin’s dislike of Morrison. It soon became clear that Greenwood was not prepared to give up being an MP and Morrison was unwilling to renounce his wish to enter Parliament as soon as possible. And yet the NEC came up with a compromise: the Secretary could be an MP, but the individual would have to resign the Secretaryship if they also decided to enter government as a minister. Bevin ensured that this compromise proposal was defeated at the conference winning only 841,000 votes against 1,449,000. When the vote was announced Morrison was described as “White, stiff-lipped and sick to the gills.”28 Bevin had outmanoeuvred him and George Middleton was elected National Secretary and wisely the post has never since been held by an ambitious politician.
In September 1935 the League of Nations met at Geneva and Sir Samuel Hoare, the Foreign Secretary since 7 June that year, declared Britain would stand firm supporting collective resistance to any aggression. On 25 September Mussolini ordered the Italian Army to enter Abyssinia from Italian Somaliland. It was the Hoare-Laval Pact, which he developed with the French Foreign Minister, detailing the partition of Ethiopian land (Abyssinia) that lead to widespread anger and Hoare’s resignation on 19 December 1935. In October, the NEC at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton put down a resolution giving full support to the League. Stafford Cripps had resigned from Labour’s National Executive on the eve of the conference and spoke from the floor against the resolution claiming that it risked committing Labour to supporting a “Capitalist and imperialist war” and that sanctions might entail war. Whereas Dalton said of League of Nations sanctions: “A threat of sanctions may be enough to prevent war. If not, the actual use of sanctions, economic and financial, without any military or naval action, may be difficult to re-establish peace even if Mussolini breaks it … Are we going to play a part of a great comrade among the nations, or are we going to slink impotently away into the shadows, impotent by our own choice; unfaithful to our solemn pledges, not a comrade but a Judas among the nations...”29 Attlee, as deputy leader, spoke in favour. Lansbury, a Christian pacifist, made an emotional speech of his belief that “force never has and never will bring permanent peace and permanent goodwill in the world”, stating that his disagreement with the official policy affected his leadership and he would raise this at the next meeting of the parliamentary party. “It may be that I shall not meet you on this platform any more.”30
The conference ovation was warm, respecting his long-held pacifist views. This aroused the anger of Bevin who went to the rostrum and denounced Lansbury: “It is placing the Executive and the Labour movement in an absolutely wrong position to be hawking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what you ought to do with it.”31 Morrison, summing up for the Executive, was however conciliatory, far too conciliatory for Bevin who saw what Morrison was after – namely gaining support from the left in any party leadership election which was obviously coming soon. While Morrison shook hands with Lansbury as he left the platform, saying, “Stand by your beliefs, George,” and was well-received by conference, Bevin was left complaining, “I say all the nasty things, while others get the credit” considering there to be “too many namby-pambies about.” When reproached for his brutality, he said “Lansbury has been going about dressed in saint’s clothes for years waiting for martyrdom: I set fire to the faggots.”32
The resolution was only able to collect 102,000 votes against 2,168,000. Stafford Cripps had been brought into government as Solicitor General by MacDonald at the end of 1930 with the traditional knighthood, but only became an MP in a by-election in Bristol East in January 1931, yet he managed to hold the seat nine months later. Dalton, who had eased his path into Parliament, called Cripps’s spiral to the left as “an adolescent Marxist miasma”33. Attlee never really felt threatened by Cripps; he was content for him to be brought into the War Cabinet and made him Chancellor of the Exchequer when Dalton was forced to resign over the leak of Budget secrets in London’s Evening Standard. Though irritated by some of his political stances, he was grateful for his financial support when he most needed it and regarded him as a “most warm-hearted and generous friend and a delightful companion.”34
On 8 October the House of Commons returned and Labour’s parliamentary party met to hear Lansbury say that the divisions over foreign policy were so great that he had to tender his resignation. The question of who would replace him primarily oscillated in the press between Greenwood and Attlee. Roy Jenkins, who wrote an early biography of Attlee, summed up the differences between the two men: “Some sections of the press had put forward the claims of Arthur Greenwood to the leadership. Greenwood had been Minister of Health and a member of the second Labour Cabinet; as such he had been a more prominent member of the party than Attlee... He would have been a more colourful leader than Attlee, and at the time a figure better known to the ordinary elector. But at the meeting of the parliamentary party, the desire for some degree of continuity in the leadership combined with an appreciation of Attlee’s proven ability in the House, were more weighty factors.”35 So Attlee became leader for the election campaign which within three weeks was well under way. He addressed 49 meetings, gave a broadcast address and appeared in news film. On 14 November Labour gained 102 seats, with 154 MPs up from the previous 52. It was a solid achievement in rebuilding the party after the disaster of 1931.
On 26 November the parliamentary party met at 11.30 in the Commons with Attlee in the chair. Greenwood was nominated first as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party [PLP], then Attlee, and finally Morrison who was widely judged the favourite. Then an MP asked, “Would the candidates, if elected, give their full time to the job?”36 This was a planted question, agreed surprisingly with Dalton, who was Morrison’s campaign manager. Yet the question backfired and it was Morrison who was damaged by his own reply, as described by his biographers: the “gist was he put himself in the hands of the party. If they thought he should give up the leadership at County Hall, he would. If they thought some accommodation could be found, at least till the next LCC elections, he would fall in with that.”37 One MP shouted back at Morrison “It’s not fair”; another “very slick”. A mood was thereby established, not for the first or last time, that Morrison’s methods were that of a machine politician and his fellow parliamentarians demanded more than this. Time and time again in discussing or analysing great historical events, the role of independent MPs and how they are assessed by their colleagues is underplayed. There has never been a successful Prime Minister, for example, who has not been able to ‘take’ the mood of the House of Commons. The House is a hard taskmaster; it does not like the too-clever-by-half member, nor the unfeeling and insensitive member, but it dislikes above all the contemptuous. This sophisticated electorate of MPs were well able to weigh each candidate up. The first ballot gave Attlee 58 votes, Morrison 44, Greenwood 33. The second ballot had Attlee with 88 and Morrison only 48. Greenwood then was elected deputy leader with Morrison declining to stand. In Dalton’s language, the “non-entity” had won, and his verdict, recorded in his diary, was “A wretched, disheartening result! And a little mouse shall lead them.”38 History was to show the facile nature of this comment. Attlee was never a mouse; careful with his opinions, weighing his options, very frequently underrated, but decisive and tough when it came to the point of decision-making.
There were many reasons for Morrison’s defeat, but it is likely that Greenwood
had the bulk of the votes from the provincial MPs who had not been in the 1931–5 Parliament and which simply transferred to Attlee, having been put off by the Londoner Morrison’s style and campaign. A fellow Labour MP, James Walker, captured Morrison’s vulnerability in this satirical verse:
The man on whom the party leans,
Who never says just what he means,
Nor ever means just what he says,
As skilfully with words he plays.
In a letter of advice to incoming MPs, Morrison indirectly and unwisely attacked Greenwood by inference. “Parliament is almost the easiest place in which to become a chronic drinker … A speech in the House becomes ‘impossible’ without a stimulant.” There is little doubt that Greenwood’s known liking for alcohol had affected his vote. Without much evidence to support it, the signs are that thereafter Greenwood accepted that he would never stand again against Attlee. Some believed that Greenwood showed some interest in the summer of 1939, but Dalton’s biographer only describes it as “The Greenwood campaign – if such there had been – was not mentioned.”39 Greenwood’s “regular drunkenness had now become firmly established” according to his Oxford Dictionary National Biography [ODNB] “and many of his afternoons must have been unproductive.” An NEC inquiry into the research department of the Labour Party, which he continued to run, found in a report dated June 1938 that it was “not, either administratively or psychologically, in a happy condition”.40 It was arranged Greenwood would no longer supervise detailed work and he was left with liaison function in the PLP. This might have been the shock he needed, or perhaps it was the gravity of the growing threat from Germany, as Greenwood seemed, from the little evidence around, to have been able to constrain his drinking from 1938–40. Drink was what led to Asquith’s downfall,41 George Brown’s failure to beat Harold Wilson for the Labour leadership in 1963 owed something to drink,42 and President Nixon’s ousting over Watergate was, by the end, a resignation of a man too drunk too often to control the nuclear button.43 Politicians appear to be particularly vulnerable.
Greenwood was loyal to Attlee, but he was no placeman. He was a real deputy not just a title, and in combination they provided effective leadership. There were many international challenges to the Labour Party as the official opposition in the run up to World War II. Attlee formed a Defence Committee in the 1935 Parliament with the purpose of building up a group of Labour MPs with real knowledge of defence and even began to write in the Army, Navy and Air Force Gazette. Attlee said in the Commons in February 1936, “Whatever arms are required, they must be for the League Policy and the first condition for any assent to more arms is that the Government shall be following a League Policy.”44
In March 1936 German troops marched into the demilitarised Rhineland zone. Then, in June, sanctions were lifted that had been applied against Italy. Attlee asserted that the Government had killed the League of Nations and by July the Spanish Civil War was under way and the Government’s equivocation over General Franco had begun, though Labour’s policy of non-intervention was not much better, though somewhat inhibited by the stance of the French Socialist Prime Minister Léon Blum, whom Attlee admired, first in office 1931–1932, then for the second time June 1935–1936. At the end of 1937 Attlee travelled to Spain and visited the front line, inspecting the British Battalion of the International Brigade. He later accused the British Government of being “an accessory to the attempts to murder democracy in Spain”.45
Rearmament became a huge issue and Labour’s position in the summer of 1937 was defined by Attlee. “The Labour Party, therefore, has steadily opposed the rearmament policy of the Government, not on the grounds that the level of armaments of two years ago is adequate, or even that the present level is excessive, but because it is impossible to tell what the scale of armaments should be in the absence of any sound foreign policy.”46 Attlee and Greenwood were slowly, and at a pace the party as a whole could accept, but determinedly shedding from Labour any association with pacifism. Both men knew that a fight was coming with Germany. Hugh Dalton, who spoke for the party on foreign policy, was much firmer in public on defence issues. In July 1936 he had failed by a wide margin to persuade the Labour MPs to abstain on the Service Estimates and the PLP voted, as usual, against. In 1937 Dalton “canvassed hard amongst MPs urging that an abstention would greatly strengthen his hand in debate”.47 However he was met with resistance from a group led by Greenwood, yet Dalton had the support of Transport House, the party HQ, and the unions. Greenwood was supported by Attlee and Morrison. Dalton won the PLP vote 45–39 and it was a crucial step in Labour becoming fit to govern in a coalition.
Attlee had made a mistake in a broadcast on the Government’s 1937 Budget that they had put “guns before butter”. His mistakes, however, were rare. He was the quintessential political ‘safe pair of hands’ and on rearmament he was quick to readjust his position. In March 1937 Bevin had told the executive council of the TGWU, “I cannot see any way of stopping Hitler and the other dictators except by force.”48
The new, adjusted Labour position was reinforced by the National Council of Labour, which under Bevin and Dalton’s chairmanship produced a restatement of Labour views as supported at the 1937 Labour Party conference by a solid vote. The paper entitled ‘International Policy and Defence’ said bluntly, “In consequence of these events the League of Nations, for the time being, has been rendered ineffective … and commands little confidence, largely owing to lack of British leadership … A Labour Government will unhesitatingly maintain such armed forces as are necessary to defend our country and to fulfil our obligations as a member of the British Commonwealth and of the League of Nations...”49 The conference statement, however, only said “must be strongly equipped to defend this country … and would therefore be unable to revise the present programme of rearmament.”50
In March 1938, when Hitler ordered his forces into Austria, Attlee and Greenwood were with Churchill and Eden in criticising the Government and strongly against appeasement. The wartime coalition could be said to have been formed at this time. Attlee and Greenwood saw Chamberlain to warn him about Hitler’s aims in Eastern Europe.
Greenwood and Attlee had to be sensitive to the danger of the party splitting in Parliament and in the country over defence. But after Munich, over Czechoslovakia the Labour Party proved themselves to be a governing force. When Attlee spoke in the House of Commons on defence, dissent was now minimal and the whole Labour movement could be truly said to be behind him. “It is a tremendous victory for Herr Hitler,” Attlee said, “without firing a shot, by the mere display of military force, he has achieved a dominating position in Europe which Germany failed to win after four years of war … He has destroyed the last fortress of democracy in Eastern Europe which stood in the way of his ambitions.”51
Yet that transformation was challenged when on 13 January 1939 Stafford Cripps proposed to the Labour Executive Committee a campaign for Popular Front to include individuals from other parties, including Communist Harry Pollitt. The campaign differed significantly from the Unity campaigns and Attlee never doubted Cripps’s behaviour was a serious threat to all he had done to build a credible party up since 1931 – the party as a whole agreed with him. On being rejected by the Executive Committee, Cripps proceeded to circulate his memorandum to local parties. Summoned to the Executive on 18 January, Cripps failed to appear. On 25 January Cripps was asked to reaffirm his allegiance to the Labour Party and its constitution; he refused and was expelled. Despite Attlee’s friendship, exasperated though he was at times with Cripps, he fully supported the National Executive’s decision to expel him, along with Aneurin Bevan and five others from the party. Writing in the Daily Herald in February, Attlee was unequivocal: “It is assumed that a majority can be obtained by Labour allying itself with Liberals, Communists … I believe that any alliance with the Communists would be electorally disastrous … In 1939 as in 1931 I reply to those who ask me to change my faith because times are difficult that socialism
is not a fancy fairweather creed but a faith.”
Attlee, since Labour’s special conference in Southport at the end of May 1939, had been in severe pain from his bladder due to an enlarged prostate. He used to refer to it as his ‘hydraulics’ problem and in June he needed to have a prostatectomy operation in the London Clinic. While convalescing with his family, criticism of his absence and of him personally was triggered by Ellen Wilkinson espousing the case for Herbert Morrison replacing Attlee as leader. She wrote about Attlee on 4 June in, of all places, the Sunday Referee – a paper full of gossip about film stars. “I wonder what Mr Chamberlain would think if he were informed that in future he would have to face daily a Herbert Morrison, that superb political organiser.” But then the potential challenge became more serious with the Daily Herald, a newspaper funded by the trade unions, hinting at the case for a change of leaders: “Can the Labour Movement bring to the political scene during the next few months before the general election the vigorous urge which will rouse the nation”. Dalton recorded in his diary at the time that, according to Sidney Webb, “Greenwood’s state of mind was (a) that he is tempted by the leadership, particularly if the international situation got bad, but that (b) he could not bear to serve under anyone else, except to continue under Attlee”. Dalton however was becoming increasingly convinced of a scandal relating to the Masonic Lodge in the House of Commons, of which a number of Labour MPs were members, including the deputy leader, Greenwood, alleging that members of the group were backing the deputy for leadership. Greenwood stepped into the row, believing that this challenge should not be left to hang in the air and on 14 June at the Parliamentary Party meeting, Greenwood, sensing that war was imminent, judged correctly that it was necessary to force a vote of confidence in Attlee and raised “with regret” Ellen Wilkinson’s criticisms of Attlee. This was done, and with only Ellen Wilkinson abstaining, Manny Shinwell’s motion expressing confidence in Attlee was given full support.