Every period of history, and indeed every event, is both entirely unique and simultaneously a carbon copy of some earlier model. At the moment, the British party system is in disarray; a new insurgent populist movement is capturing the energy of a great body of citizens who feel that the United Kingdom as now constituted doesn’t work for them and doesn’t represent their interests. Almost every commentator with a smattering of British political history under their belt is drawing parallels to the last great party shift in British history: the collapse of the Liberals and the rise of Labour, which occurred from about 1910-1930.

As one of the aforementioned commentators with the aforementioned smattering, Peter Clark’s The Men of 1924 seemed like a decent place to start, covering the first Labour government which lasted nine months from January to November 1924. Unfortunately, this is not the right book to read if you need an introduction to interwar British politics. Clark is committed to not taking the story beyond 1924, which makes sense given that many of the men who formed the First MacDonald Ministry are remembered as traitors to the Labour Party for their part in the National Government, which they formed along with the Conservatives during the Great Depression. Clark wants to present them as they would have been seen in 1924, but this decision weakens the book since Clark is unable to comment on the long-term significance of Labour’s initial stint in government or to describe how the British political system coped with the changed party system. One understands the desire to avoid “spoilers,” but it seems a bit unnecessary in a history book.

The book is structured as a series of concentric “biographies,” first of the major Labour organizations—the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and the Trades Union Congress—which came together to produce the party, then going into the backgrounds of the Big Five: Ramsay MacDonald (Prime Minister), Phillip Snowden (Chancellor of the Exchequer), Arthur Henderson (Home Secretary), J. H. Thomas (Colonies), and J.R. Clynes (Lord Privy Seal), followed by other members of the government. Then finally, a short chronology of the nine months of that government. This structure both makes the book feel more like a reference work than a historical narrative, and has the effect of making Clark’s writing style seem less fluid than I think it actually is. He has a good eye for a clever anecdote and is able to make his subjects come to life, but his chosen structure seems to repeatedly break his stride.

The “reference book” structure and the commitment to avoid going beyond the nine months of the Labour government also prevents Clark from putting forward a compelling thesis, or even having much of a discernable argument. It’s clear that Clark knows his material, but he’s chosen to present it as a Gradgrindian recitation of facts rather than as an argumentative whole. This review, then, is an attempt to thresh some argumentative wheat out of the pile of grain that Clark puts in front of his readers.

Labour formed its first government in 1924 reluctantly; they were a minority party and would depend on the support of the Liberals (who they were in the process of supplanting), but Ramsay MacDonald ultimately came to the conclusion that it would be better to prove that Labour could govern than to dodge this responsibility and force the Conservatives to form another minority administration. MacDonald was in many ways a man admirably suited to be the first Labour prime minister; the 57-year old illegitimate son of a Scottish housemaid, he was a staunch opponent of the First World War. That position cost him a heavy political and personal price, even being blackballed from his beloved golf club in his hometown of Lossiemouth.

MacDonald was what might be called an evolutionary socialist. For MacDonald, socialism was “the method of evolution applied to society…Socialism alone is worthy now-a-days of scientific politics.” His was, as Clark says, almost a Burkean socialism; rejecting Marx, he still saw society as organically evolving towards socialism through the actions of all the main forces in politics, and Labour as one of the mechanisms through which this evolution would come about. Ultimately, MacDonald was a conservative socialist; not in the same way as many of the trade unionists who made up much of the Labour Party’s base, but by instinct and temperament. MacDonald, and nearly the entirety of the Labour Party, had none of the bloodthirsty, annihilationist radicalism of the Russian socialists and communists. In fact, MacDonald actually got along rather well with King George V, who was in looks a dead ringer for his cousin Nicholas II—a monarch who had a somewhat less happy relationship with the first socialist government of his country.

MacDonald’s vision of the peaceful, conservative evolution of society towards socialism was in many ways the exact vision which the Road to Serfdom was written to counter, and yet despite the arguable triumph of MacDonald’s vision—can anyone seriously argue that we are less socialist than 1924?—the idea of society reaching socialism without violent repression or confiscation has been abandoned by most of the self-proclaimed socialists currently in evidence. (It must be said, by way of mitigation, that the appetite of these soi-disant socialists for direct action is far more limited than the socialists of the prewar era.) But these evolutionary, working-class or lower middle class socialists did not have the bomb-throwing genes in their ideological heredity, hewing more to the ideals of Christian perfectionism than to dialectical materialism.

Much of the Labour Party owed far more, as Morgan Phillips said, “to Methodism than to Marx.” One of the shocks, actually, for someone who has hung around the corners of the Internet that I have for as long as I have, was the degree to which Non-Conformism was the heart and soul of the growing Labour Party. I don’t want to divert too far from Labour, but an understanding of Non-Conformism—the Christian denominations which refused to subscribe to the rites, rituals, and discipline of the Church of England—is very useful for understanding the left in an American and especially British context. The quick-and-dirty summary is that these sects tended to be more focused on spiritual purity as opposed to the temporal practice of proper rites, have a greater interest in the individual conscience, and be less invested in hierarchical structures both in Church and in society more broadly; the connection between these beliefs and leftwing politics is pretty plain.   

For as much as many New Rightists (Curtis Yarvin, eg.) want to pin the New Deal and the Great Society on Quakerism, the best example of Non-Conformist Protestantism evolving into a leftist party is the growth of Labour, which grew almost directly out of the Methodist movement. Methodism, especially in the British context, emphasized the ability of all individuals to achieve salvation, and with that belief came a strong investment in self-improvement and autodidactism. Both early Labour and working-class Methodism emphasized the ability of individuals to improve themselves and better their conditions through learning, and both also emphasized the importance of mutual aid among believers. Many of the founding lights of the Labour Party were lay preachers as well as activists. Per Clark:

“The newer denominations, and especially the Methodists, had a mass appeal to the working classes, among whom [was] developing a culture of non-conformity (or dissent). Characterized by hymn-singing, social work, self-help, mutual assistance and a sense of being special that could come over as smug self-righteousness nonconformists were outside the Establishment.”

This working-class religiosity combined with increasingly assertive unionism, particularly of the skilled workers, and with the increasing sense of political empowerment brought by voting reform and subsequent legislative enactments under both Conservative and Liberal governments to strengthen the working class (and win their votes), and to create the conditions which encouraged the development of the Independent Labour Party, one of the ancestors of the modern party. (This deep religiosity and focus on the individual conscience was one of the reasons why the kind of strident atheism seen in continental socialist movements never quite translated to Britain.)

Initially, the labor movement found political expression through the Liberal Party, particularly in the form of William Gladstone, who stood like a moral colossus and whose explicit religiosity and moralism struck a deep chord with the lower classes. In spite of attempts by Randolph Churchill and others to promote the idea of an organic, collaborative relationship between the upper and working classes, The People’s William swept most of the early Labourites into the Liberal Party. This also brought them into close contact with earlier generations of radicals, especially those liberal non-conformists in the more established denominations such as the Quakers (for example the Wedgewoods, of pottery fame, a family later to produce Tony Benn).

This strand of northern, Methodist, proletarian identity would combine with the much less explicitly moral/political force of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to form the nucleus of the Labour Party. The tension between the moralism of the lay activists and the hard-headed economic pragmatism of the unions would be at the heart of many disputes over the years in the Labour Party, especially once the final strand of early Labour was injected: the upper middle class radicalism of the Fabian Society. The Fabians were also evolutionary socialists, who believed that reform along the lines they were advocating was inevitable as a consequence of industrialism. Indeed, the goal was to make socialism acceptable, perhaps even fashionable. So successful was it, in fact, that the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer was able to remark “we are all socialists now” (“we’re all Keynesians now” was a paraphrase/parody/reference to this line) when introducing inheritance taxes in 1894. Although the Fabians read Marx, the actual degree of Marx’s influence on the Fabians is somewhat hard to divine. Some were rather militant—Beatrice Webb being one—but others were of a more herbivorous temperament, and it’s certainly hard to see the Fabians as anything close to the kind of intelligentsia that existed in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Indeed, one thing that The Men of 1924 makes clear is just how different Britain and Russia were in the pre-war years. As Clark says of the first Labour MPs, “[t]hey were not the harbingers of a new socialist commonwealth. They saw themselves specifically in Parliament to promote Labour interests. Just as there were conservative trade unionists, so one of the 1906 new Labour MPs ended up as a Conservative member of parliament.” This was no fluke, either. The Conservative Party made the pivot to the mass franchise with relative ease, and managed to capture a large portion of the working class vote in almost every election of the twentieth century, appealing to patriotism and a genuine sense that the Conservative Party represented and would advance the interests of the working class (something which it frequently endeavored to do).

Regardless, the point is that Britain, unlike Russia, was a society used to different sectors of the population peacefully advancing their own interests, and a society with mature political organs which were used to incorporating new sources of political energy and transforming them into adjuncts of the existing system. Nothing like this existed in Russia; especially under the later Tsars, who saw themselves as personally responsible for ruling over the entire vast apparatus of state, nothing like this could exist. Moreover, Britain was culturally used to a semi-impersonal body of law and a bureaucratized state which one could interact with transactionally. Pretty much every intellectual strain on both the right and the left in Russia found the entire idea of something like this abhorrent and insulting to individual dignity and to the soul. While it is perhaps less romantic, the idea of the personalist state precludes the development of compensatory mechanisms for new social forces and forms, and the lack of compensatory mechanisms and forums for bargaining helped drive the Russian Revolution towards the blood-drenched nightmare it became.

These compensatory mechanisms also helped ensure that the Labour Government that took over in 1924 did not pursue a Leninist agenda of expropriation and dispossession, but rather an agenda which looks bizarrely right-wing to modern eyes. The two highest priorities of the Labour Government were balancing the budget and reducing tariff barriers to foreign goods; the first Labour Chancellor Phillip Snowden was reputed to be the tightest-fisted chancellor of the twentieth century (his successor as chancellor was Winston Churchill, of course). The fiscal discipline of the early Labourites, who saw a balanced budget as part of the evolutionary road to socialism, is as fascinating to American eyes as the eye-watering fiscal indiscipline of successive Labour and Conservative governments in the post-war years, each of which pursued expansionary, Keynesian policies which would (eventually) lead to the deficits and balance of payments crisis which helped define the seventies in Britain. But perhaps it oughtn’t be. After all, both main American parties are currently in the grip of big spending cliques, try as the GOP might to insist it still has some kind of fiscal hawkishness governing its actions.

But what does it all mean in the context of Britain? Can 1924 tell us anything about the modern British political system and what might become of it? I’m skeptical. While the forces that made Labour and the forces that have made Reform both have antecedents going back decades, the fact of the matter is that Labour developed as a collegial, highly pluralist party with several distinct organizational strands coming together. Even into the seventies, Labour always had to contend with the unions, who were independent power bases within the Labour Party which didn’t need to follow the party line and didn’t necessarily share its interests (as in Arthur Scargill). Nothing like that is the case with Reform; MacDonald was never to Labour what Nigel Farage is to Reform. Indeed, it’s hard to think of a British political party in recent memory which has been so closely identified with its leader as Farage is with Reform (except for Farage with UKIP…and Farage with the Brexit Party). This is not to say that Reform does not represent real constituencies or real voters; it certainly does, but in a Westminster system this doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful government. Of course, that’s perhaps the closest thing to the situation the Labour Party found itself in in 1924.

This review has been rather spare on detailed descriptions of Labour’s achievements in office during its first stint, and that’s because it had so few. As MacDonald said, Labour was “in office but not in power,” and in many ways it was handed the keys without having an idea of where it wanted to drive the car. On many issues, from defense to the colonies, it had nothing to guide itself but vague attitudes, and its officials found themselves carried along in the general current of existing policy because they lacked any alternative plan. That more than anything strikes me as the most relevant analogy to Reform; being a party of attitude and outlook rather than policy and plans.

It seems quite likely that the 2020s may see a strange echo of the past, and we may be able to look back from midcentury on the first Farage Ministry which was, like MacDonald’s team, “in office, but not in power.”