Harry Snell, 1st Baron Snell

Harry Snell (around 1905)

Henry "Harry" Snell, 1st Baron Snell (born April 1, 1865 in Sutton-on-Trent , Nottinghamshire , † April 21, 1944 in Highgate , London ) was a British politician.

Life and activity

Early years

Snell was the son of a farm worker. He attended the village school in his home country and began to work as a farm laborer when he was eight, and full-time since he was ten. At the age of twelve, Snell became a house servant in the manor on the farm where he had previously worked as a farm laborer, but soon decided, out of dissatisfaction with his situation, to try his luck as a migrant worker. In the following years he got by - interrupted by longer periods of unemployment - with various activities, such as B. as a servant and ferryman at a floating inn on the River Trent and as a politeur in Nottingham .

During his wandering years, Snell read a lot, especially the writings of Henry George had a great influence on him. George's book Charles Bradlaugh and the Cause of Secularism in Nottingham in 1881 prompted him to join the National Secular Society. At the same time he broke away from the strict religiosity of his parents' home (where literal Anglicanism was practiced) and joined the Unitarian Church, whose approach to approach Christian doctrine using scientific methods made a great impression on him.

With the help of friends in the Unitarian movement, Snell found a job as an office worker at the Midland Institute for the Blind in London. During this time he deepened his education through self-taught studies at the University College library . He was particularly influenced by the writings of Thomas Paine , William Morris , John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill . Since he rejected the ever more radicalizing development that Unitarianism was going through at that time, Snell finally turned to agnosticism .

Political career

In the early 1890s, Snell began working for the Woolchwich Charity Organization Society. At the same time he joined the Independent Labor Party . In 1894 he also became a member of the Fabian Society . In the years that followed, Snell made a name for himself by lecturing across the country on the subject of socialism. Around 1900 he received a position as secretary to the director of the London School of Economics .

In 1910, Snell first ran for a seat in the House of Commons , the lower house of the British Parliament. He entered the Huddersfield constituency, but was defeated by the conservative mandate holder. In 1919 he was elected to the London City Council (London County Council), of which he was a member until 1925. In the election of 1918 he ran again unsuccessfully in this constituency. In the British general election of 1922, Snell finally succeeded in being elected as a candidate in the Woolwich East constituency in the House of Commons, to which he then belonged for almost nine years, until the election in 1931. During his tenure in the House of Commons, Snell served in the government of Ramsay MacDonald as Undersecretary of State for India from 1929 to 1931 . In addition, he was a member of the Shaw Commission of the British Parliament, established in 1929 , which was tasked with investigating the intensifying conflicts between Arabs and Jewish immigrants in British-administered Palestine at the time. However, he rejected the recommendations of this commission published in 1931 - limitation of Jewish immigration to Palestine and the acquisition of land by Jews there - and did so in a report of his own in which he presented his opinion, which was contrary to the recommendations of the majority of the commission ( minority report ), clearly. In his counter-report, Snell argued that Palestine was an underpopulated and agriculturally insufficiently developed country, so that further immigration was desirable. He considered the recommendations of the official commission to be dangerous, as they would allow the conclusion that the Arab population of Palestine had been damaged by Jewish immigration - and that this should therefore be scaled back according to the will of the commission - even though this in reality led to an expansion of agriculture in Palestine, from which the Arab population in particular - for whom new job opportunities have been created - have benefited. From then on, Snell continued to emerge as one of the strongest advocates of the Zionist movement in British politics.

In the 1931 general election, Snell did not run again, but left his parliamentary seat to George Hicks , a leading trade unionist. Instead, he was raised to hereditary nobility on March 23, 1931 as Baron Snell , of Plumstead in the County of Kent , and was given his nobility seat in the House of Lords , to which he for thirteen years, until his death in 1944. In 1935, Snell took over the leadership of the Labor Party faction in the House of Lords as the successor to Arthur Ponsonby , which he retained until 1940. In 1937 he also became a member of the Privy Council , the British Privy Council . He was also a member of the British Institute of Parliamentary Affairs and the Empire Parliamentary Association.

In the second half of the 1930s Snell was a prominent opponent of the appeasement policy of the British governments of Stanley Baldwin and Arthur Neville Chamberlain towards the fascist states of the European continent, in particular National Socialist Germany, which at that time were increasingly aggressive in foreign policy. Snell also sharply criticized the failure of the British government to intervene in the Spanish Civil War .

Due to his position as a leading left-wing politician in Great Britain and a well-known anti-fascist, Snell came into the sights of the police forces of National Socialist Germany in the late 1930s, who classified him as an important target. In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they would be removed from the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

In 1941 Snell was named Captain of the Honorable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms by Winston Churchill , d. H. appointed Vice President of the House of Lords.

When he died unmarried and childless on April 21, 1944, his title of nobility expired.

Fonts

• Men, Movements and Myself , 1936. (autobiography).

literature

• David Howell: Snell, Henry, Baron Snell (1865-1944). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2014.