Can Labour win again? History might hold the answer

As Ramsay MacDonald, the first ever Labour prime minister, looked around the Downing Street cabinet table in January 1924, he knew he was making history. Less than 20 years after its first MPs were elected, Labour had formed a government and had permanently supplanted the Liberal party in the UK’s two-party system.

MacDonald left a personal legacy in No 10 by establishing a prime ministerial library in the cabinet room — a collection of books donated by prime ministers and ministers to this day. He also left a permanent mark on his party’s politics when the second Labour government of 1929 split over austerity measures and — with Tory and Liberal support — he formed the coalition National Government in 1931. MacDonald was automatically expelled from the party and became the emblem of “betrayal” in the Labour movement.

It is one of the paradoxes of Labour party history that while it holds power rarely — there have been only six prime ministers in its entire history, just one more than the current Conservative government has had in the past seven years — it is obsessed with its own history. The party has a favourite villain in MacDonald — during the bitter miners’ strike of the 1980s, Neil Kinnock, then party leader, was labelled “Ramsay MacKinnock” by the far left. And it has its heroic government: Clement Attlee’s 1945 administration, which defeated Winston Churchill’s Tories and created the modern welfare state.

A century on from that first Labour government, the party now enters a year in which a general election is likely to be called with a double-digit poll lead, a string of by-election victories and high hopes of being back in government. Leader Keir Starmer has achieved a dramatic turnaround from 2019, when Labour suffered its worst defeat since the 1930s.

This has not escaped the notice of publishers. Three new books address Labour’s history, finding lessons in its past for its future path. Two focus on specific governments — 1924 and 1945 — while the other ambitiously attempts a history of a century of Labour.

David Torrance’s new book The Wild Men takes its title from the fear-mongering phrase used by opponents in the press to describe Labour’s leadership in the 1920s. Torrance, a distinguished biographer of leading Scottish politicians, takes a people-based approach. The administration lasted just over nine turbulent months and he sets out its short life through chapters focusing on each of its main political figures.

These included chancellor Philip Snowden and colonial secretary Jimmy Thomas, a former general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, who both later followed MacDonald into the National Government. The government also included former Liberals such as Viscount Haldane, the military reformer who established the national and imperial general staff on the German model, and who brought 10 years’ cabinet experience to Labour when he served as Lord Chancellor as one of the party’s four members of the House of Lords.

The result is a highly readable, enjoyable and informative book — with fascinating details gleaned from private papers. Previous prime ministers had brought their own furniture into Downing Street, but Ramsay MacDonald was more humbly born so his daughter Ishbel trawled round the auction rooms to purchase the furniture and furnishings they needed to live in No 10. The family spent most evenings in the public rooms in Downing Street, with coal and electricity paid for by the Treasury.

In office, MacDonald combined the post of prime minister with that of foreign secretary and proved critical in getting the Dawes Plan of 1924 for reducing German war reparations in place. Despite the discomfort of King George V — whose cousin the Tsar had been executed by the Bolsheviks — Labour formally recognised the Soviet Union. There were also advances in public services, including a target for reducing primary school class sizes from 60 to 40. The Housing Act of 1924 delivered over half a million council houses in the following nine years and laid the foundations for the local authority housing that still shapes our towns and cities. Not bad for a government, and a minority one at that, that lasted less than a year.

In the end, despite its swift collapse, the most important legacy of the first Labour government was the proof that the party could be trusted to rule. That experience was foundational for Attlee, then a very junior member of MacDonald’s front-bench team as an under-secretary in the war office.

In 1945, of course, Attlee led Labour to its first majority in a landslide victory. The promise of that government was transformative change — “this time the peace must be won.” The 393 newly elected Labour MPs showed their passion and their intention when, on August 1, the first day of the new parliament, they enthusiastically sang “The Red Flag”. (The only time it has been sung in the Commons since was by Tony Blair’s MPs in 2006, commemorating the centenary of the first Labour MPs.)

Labour history is never just a contest between rival academic accounts, however. It’s also fuel for internal party disputes. The past — especially its scars and feuds — is forever present. Just as MacDonald became a symbol of betrayal, so Attlee’s administration has come to be the symbol of what “real” Labour governments should do. From establishing the modern welfare state to nationalisation — including the Bank of England — to starting to decolonise, the Attlee government defined the postwar settlement.

In the brilliantly written Age of Hope, Richard Toye calls this the birth of modern Britain. He gives a rich account of the strengths and weaknesses of Attlee’s administration, its internal conflicts and the external constraints — such as the abrupt end of Lend-Lease finance from the US in 1945 and the need to devalue the pound.

Even now, the greatest achievements shine bright. In 1948, 248,300 new houses, including temporary “prefabs”, were completed. Meanwhile, Aneurin Bevan had just wrestled a National Health Service into existence based on a one-sentence commitment: “In the new National Health Service there should be health centres where the people may get the best that modern science can offer, more and better hospitals, and proper conditions for our doctors and nurses.”

Much flows, Toye points out, from foundational decisions. Despite Tory opposition, coal and rail remained in public hands for almost five decades after nationalisation. And the lasting distinctiveness of the NHS being fully funded from taxation derives from Bevan obeying the Socialist Medical Association injunction that the health service should be separate from the National Insurance system.

In Toye’s account, Attlee’s foreign policy record is more mixed. The policy force of foreign secretary Ernest Bevin — despite his increasing ill health — is shown in his backing of anti-communism, his promotion of the cold war and the creation of Nato, and the commissioning of the British nuclear deterrent. In Bevin’s words, “We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.” That decision still drives UK defence spending so much that successive defence chiefs have joked nuclear weapons should be paid from the cabinet office budget.

Toye also brings a critical eye to Labour’s record on decolonisation. Abrupt independence in 1947 for India, and Pakistan, leading as it did to the displacement of at least 14mn people and a million deaths in the succeeding intercommunal violence, is shown to be as much a rapid and ill-thought-through exit from a difficult situation as a principled anti-imperialist action.

The 1945 government was composed of towering figures: as well as Bevin and Bevan, it included Herbert Morrison, Hugh Dalton, Stafford Cripps, Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson. Ellen Wilkinson, who tragically died of an accidental overdose, was the sole female cabinet member as minister of education. The men jostled and plotted and circled the prime minister constantly, yet Attlee remained in charge, his tight-lipped political management outmanoeuvring them.

Alongside these two excellent studies of individual Labour governments, the current Labour MP Jon Cruddas has produced A Century of Labour, a survey of the party’s history from that crucial year of 1924 and a look into its future. Cruddas helped found the influential “Blue Labour” faction, which created the framework of “progressive patriotism” that is fundamental to Starmer’s leadership of the party.

Cruddas has a reputation as an original thinker, but unfortunately his book reads like a series of chapters written by generative AI. The dull repetition of published facts is interrupted only by the odd schoolboy error — TUC Congress is wrongly called TUC Conference — and some wordings in one section seem to have been lifted straight from Wikipedia.

This is a shame, as buried deep inside the book is a sparky pamphlet arguing that the greatest Labour governments have been made up of politicians who draw on, and combine, all of the party’s traditions — labourist, welfarist and technocratic. Cruddas identifies Blair’s first term and the 1945 government as exemplars.

This year not only marks a century since Labour’s first government: 2024 may well also be a year that sees that rarest of events — a Labour leader becoming prime minister from opposition. Only four of Labour’s 19 leaders — Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair — have achieved that in more than 100 years.

Labour’s history doesn’t determine its future, but it does help illuminate the demands Starmer would face as a prime minister, with limited room for fiscal manoeuvre, substantial rebuilding needed at home and threats to be fended off overseas. The lessons for the leader are blunt: have a clear direction; manage your political talent well, and ruthlessly; give the voters hope; and act quickly and decisively. Great governments need character and leadership as well as values and a mission. To adapt a slogan of Neil Kinnock: these books show it can be done, and the state of the nation demands it must be done.

The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government by David Torrance Bloomsbury £20, 336 pages

Age of Hope: Labour, 1945 and the Birth of Modern Britain by Richard Toye Bloomsbury Continuum £25, 336 pages

A Century of Labour by Jon Cruddas Polity £25, 288 pages

John McTernan is a former political secretary for Labour prime minister Tony Blair and political strategist for BCW Global

This article has been amended to correct a reference to Section 28

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