Ramsay MacDonald

Ramsay MacDonald (around 1900)

James Ramsay MacDonald (born October 12, 1866 in Lossiemouth , Scotland , † November 9, 1937 at sea) was a British politician and twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom . Coming from a humble background, he became the first Labor Prime Minister in 1924 . During his second reign he entered into a coalition with the Conservatives in view of the Great Depression and was therefore expelled from the Labor Party .

Early years

MacDonald was born in Lossiemouth, Morayshire , Scotland, to farm worker John MacDonald and house maid Anne Ramsey, out of wedlock. Initially he was called James Ramsay, later he took his father's surname and used Ramsay as his preferred nickname. Illegality was a grave disadvantage in 19th century Presbyterian Scotland , and the stigma attached to it influenced MacDonald throughout his life.

He attended primary school in nearby Drainie and worked there as a student teacher until he went to London at the age of 18 . For the rest of his life he didn’t care much for Scotland or the Scottish ethos.

In London, MacDonald worked as a clerk and completed his education with evening classes and constant reading on scientific, economic and social subjects. In 1894 he joined the Independent Workers' Party (ILP), one of the first socialist parties in Great Britain, and began writing socialist texts. He met Keir Hardie , the first Labor MP, and was heavily influenced by him. In 1895 and 1900 MacDonald ran for a seat in Parliament. In 1900 he became secretary of the Labor Representation Committee, a forerunner of the Labor Party. At the same time he kept his membership in the ILP. While the ILP was not Marxist , it took a more rigorous stand than the Labor Party.

As Party Secretary MacDonald acted with the leading liberal politician Herbert Gladstone (a son of the late Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone ) an election agreement from that allowed Labor to apply to some parliamentary seats of the working class without the Liberals were opposed it. This enabled the party to enter the lower house for the first time . MacDonald's relationship with Gladstone was deepened by his marriage to his sprawling cousin Margaret Gladstone. During this time MacDonald made many trips: 1897 to Canada and the USA , 1902 to South Africa , 1906 to Australia and New Zealand and several times to India .

In 1906 MacDonald was elected to the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament from Leicester . He became one of the leaders of the Parliamentary Labor Party, which supported the liberal governments of Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Herbert Henry Asquith . Despite his links with the Gladstone Liberals, MacDonald became the leader of the left wing of his party. He advocated Labor ousting the Liberals as the main progressive party.

Party leader

Portrait of Ramsay MacDonald (1911)

In 1911 MacDonald became chairman of the Parliamentary Labor Party. In 1914 he turned against Britain's participation in the First World War . The majority of the party, led by Arthur Henderson , opposed this position. When the House of Commons refused to read a statement by the party executive on the war question in August 1914, MacDonald resigned from his position as party chairman. In the early stages of the war, he was extremely unpopular and was accused of treason and cowardice by the majority of the still-war-affirming Labor members. However, as the war dragged on and claimed more and more victims, its reputation improved again. In the War Emergency Workers National Committee , the coordinating body of the British labor movement to cope with the war economy, the positions of the war opponents gained ground. Nevertheless, he lost his parliamentary seat in the "khaki election" of December 1918, which brought the coalition government of David Lloyd George an overwhelming majority.

1922 returned MacDonald as a member of Aberavon ( Wales ) back to the House. The party was now reunited and MacDonald was re-elected chairman. The Liberals lost ground and with the 1922 election Labor, led by MacDonald, became the main opposition party to the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin . By this time he had moved away from the extreme left and abandoned the rigorous socialism of youth. He was very much against the wave of radicalism that swept through the labor movement in the wake of the Russian Revolution , and he became a staunch opponent of communism . Unlike the French Socialist Party and the German SPD , the Labor Party did not split . The British Communist Party remained small and isolated.

Although he was a gifted public speaker, MacDonald was known for vague statements and it was not clear what his policies were. There was some unease in the party about what he would do if Labor came to power. In the 1923 election, the Conservatives lost a majority. When they lost the vote of confidence in January 1924 and the leaders of the Liberals rejected the formation of a possible minority government, King George V commissioned MacDonald to form a Labor minority government with the support of the Liberals under Asquith. MacDonald thus became the first Labor Prime Minister, the first to come from the working class, and one of the few without a college education.

First reign (January to November 1924)

MacDonald assumed both prime ministerial and foreign ministerial duties, making it clear that his priority was to repair the damage he believed had been wrought by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles . He wanted to solve the question of German reparations and come to terms with Germany. He left home affairs to his ministers, including JR Clynes as Lord Seal Keeper , Philip Snowden as Treasury Secretary and Arthur Henderson as Home Secretary. Since the government did not have a majority in either the upper or lower house, there were no opportunities to pass radical laws.

In June MacDonald convened a conference of the war allies in London and reached agreement on a new plan to settle the question of reparations, the Dawes Plan . In London, the new French Prime Minister, the radical socialist Édouard Herriot , with whom MacDonald was able to build a relationship of trust, agreed to end the occupation of the Ruhr area by French and Belgian troops. German delegates then joined the conference and the London Agreement was signed. It was followed by a British-German economic agreement. These were great accomplishments for an unsanitary prime minister, and MacDonald received widespread praise. In September, together with Herriot, he again presented a plan to the League of Nations in Geneva with which wars should be prevented in the long term: the so-called Geneva Protocol , which the League of Nations Assembly adopted on October 2, 1924, provided that wars of aggression were outlawed and all League members were obligated would, in turn, declare war on the country that waged such a war of aggression.

MacDonald's government failed when he proposed diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union , which had been largely isolated internationally since it was founded . The Conservatives and their press allies launched an anti-communist campaign, and the Liberals withdrew their support in the House of Commons. The Conservatives then tabled a motion of censure, which Labor lost. MacDonald requested and then obtained the dissolution of Parliament. He knew Labor would not win the next election. His goal, however, was to knock out the liberals and establish a two-party system in which voters would only have a choice between Labor and Conservatives. He achieved this goal in the October 1924 election: Labor fell from 191 to 151 seats, but the Liberals shrank from 158 to 40 seats.

Second reign (1929 to 1931)

Ramsay MacDonald in the late 1920s

MacDonald's successor as Prime Minister was the Conservative Stanley Baldwin . His government had a strong majority and refused to approve MacDonald's most important foreign policy project, the Geneva Protocol. MacDonald's bold project to establish a functioning system of international security had thus failed. The Baldwin administration has been shaken by crises throughout its tenure: the general strike of 1926, the rapidly deteriorating economic situation, a sharp rise in unemployment. In the general election in May 1929 Labor won 287 seats, the Conservatives 260 and the Liberals under Lloyd George 59 seats. Baldwin resigned and MacDonald formed a minority government for the second time, initially with the warm support of Lloyd George. MacDonald knew he had to focus on domestic politics this time. Henderson became Secretary of State and Snowden became Secretary of the Treasury. JH Thomas became Lord Seal Keeper with the task of fighting unemployment, supported by the young radical Oswald Mosley .

MacDonald's second administration had a stronger parliamentary position than his first. In 1930 he succeeded in passing a number of laws, including pension reform, more generous provisions for the unemployed, and a law to improve wages and working conditions in the mining industry, which had caused the general strike. He also convened a conference in London with the leaders of the Indian National Congress , at which he offered India a responsible government but not independence. In April, he negotiated a treaty to limit armaments at sea with Japan and the United States.

Like all governments of the time, MacDonald's government had no effective response to the Great Depression that followed the October 24, 1929 stock market crash . Snowden was an inflexible Orthodox financial politician who did not run any budget deficit to revive the economy - despite calls from Mosley, Lloyd George, and economist John Maynard Keynes . Even if the government had decided on such measures, neither the conservatives nor the more conservative liberals would have approved them.

MacDonald (center) and Arthur Henderson (left) in Berlin (1931)

In the course of 1931 the economic situation deteriorated. In order to at least minimize the political stress factors on the world economy, MacDonald increasingly campaigned against the continued existence of the trust-destroying and anti-market reparations system. A meeting with leading German, American and French politicians in July 1931 was unsuccessful, but at least a conference of experts was set up, which in autumn 1931 came to the conclusion that a solution to the reparations question was a prerequisite for overcoming the global economic crisis.

Despite these attempts to restore the lost international trust through diplomatic channels, the situation of the British economy and thus of the national budget continued to deteriorate. There was increased pressure from Orthodox economists and the press to drastically cut government spending, including pensions and unemployment benefits. MacDonald, Snowden, and Thomas supported such measures as they deemed necessary to redress the deficit budget and avoid a run on the pound . The rest of the cabinet, almost the entire Labor Party and the trade unions, however, were strongly against it. Without consultation with his party friends, MacDonald then gave back his government mandate on August 23, 1931 and received a new one to form a "National Government" ( National Government ) including the Conservatives and the Liberals (without Lloyd George). MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas were then expelled from the Labor Party. They founded a new, "national" Labor Party, the National Labor Organization , which, however, found little support in the country and from the unions. There were a number of strikes, which even spread to the Royal Navy , causing the financial markets, which had been nervous since July 1931, to panic. The run on the pound that MacDonald had tried to prevent was now really taking off, forcing the Bank of England to abandon the gold standard on September 20, 1931 . From now on the exchange rate of the pound was only dependent on supply and demand on the foreign exchange markets .

National Government (1931-1935)

MacDonald wanted an immediate election, but the Conservatives forced him to agree to an October 1931 date. The National Government won 554 seats, consisting of 470 Conservatives, 35 National Labor, 32 Liberals, and various others. Labor won only 52 seats and Lloyd George's Liberals 4 seats. This was the largest mandate ever won by a British Prime Minister in a democratic election. However, it made MacDonald a prisoner of the Conservatives. That was evident after the election, when Arthur Neville Chamberlain became Secretary of the Treasury and Baldwin, as Lord President, had real power in government. MacDonald was deeply struck by the anger and bitterness caused by the fall of the Labor government. He continued to consider himself a socialist and a true Labor man, but breaking literally all of his old friendships made him an isolated person.

He had another great success on the international stage. At the Lausanne Conference (mid-1932), which had to decide on the future of the German reparation obligations, he met Edouard Herriot again. The trust between the two was still there, and MacDonald was able to convince the French of his thesis that only an extensive cancellation of reparations would restore the confidence of the financial markets and overcome the global economic crisis . In return, he promised him regular consultations at government level, but these should not be of great importance.

MacDonald's grave in Lossiemouth

In 1933 and 1934, MacDonald's health deteriorated. His leadership qualities continued to decline as the international situation became more threatening. His pacifism, widely admired in the 1920s, led Winston Churchill to accuse him of failing in the face of the Hitler threat. MacDonald was later seen as the father of the appeasement policy , which some researchers believe began at the Lausanne Conference before Hitler came to power. In May 1935, MacDonald was forced to resign. He took on the more representative role of Lord President of Baldwin, who returned to 10 Downing Street . In the election that took place on November 14, 1935 , he lost his parliamentary seat to Emanuel Shinwell . In January 1936 he ran in a by-election for the university constituency Combined Scottish Universities and was thus a member of a constituency for the abolition of which he had campaigned only a few years earlier. In 1937 he collapsed physically and mentally. He was recommended to take a sea voyage for recreation, on which he died in November 1937.

His resignation from the Labor Party, his alliance with the Conservatives and the decline of his power as Prime Minister after 1931 had destroyed his reputation when he died in 1937, which is also expressed in the judgment of Labor historians of him. It was not until 1977 that Professor David Marquand wrote a benevolent biography with the stated intention to pay tribute to MacDonald for his work in founding and building the Labor Party and for his efforts to keep the peace in the years between the world wars .

Private life

Ramsay MacDonald was married to Margaret Gladstone (daughter of a chemistry professor and distantly related to William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin ). They had six children, u. a. Malcolm MacDonald (1901–1981), who made a career as a politician, colonial governor and diplomat, and Ishbel MacDonald (1903–1982), who was very close to her father. MacDonald was distraught over the death of his wife, who died of blood poisoning in 1911. He had few significant personal relationships thereafter, except with Ishbel, who looked after him until the end of his life. He was often with Lady Londonderry in the 1920s and 30s , which was very much disapproved of in the Labor Party as her husband was a Conservative minister and it was said that MacDonald was influenced by her.

Web links

Commons : Ramsay MacDonald  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Ramsay MacDonald in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Ramsay MacDonald in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• The English Wikipedia for the split-off of the party founded in 1931:
  • National Labor Organization , and the National Labor Committee called
  • their MPs: List of National Labor MPs

Individual evidence

1. ^ André Keil: Between Cooperation and Opposition - The British Labor Movement and the "War Emergency Workers' National Committee" during the First World War. In: Yearbook for research on the history of the labor movement . Vol. 13, No. 3, 2014, ISSN  1610-093X , pp. 7-26.

predecessor	Office	successor
Stanley Baldwin	British Prime Ministers 1924-1924, 1929-1935	Stanley Baldwin