M. Philips Price

Morgan Philips Price (born January 29, 1885 in Gloucester, † September 23, 1973 ) was a British politician ( Labor Party ).

Life and activity

Price was a son of MP William Edwin Price , who died early and from whom he inherited extensive land holdings on his 21st birthday. He attended Harrow School and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge University , where he earned a degree in agriculture. In the following years he traveled several times to Tsarist Russia , including as a participant in an agricultural expedition that traveled to remote corners of the country.

Price began his career with the Liberal Party . In the last years before the First World War he was considered as a candidate for that party for parliament in Gloucester constituency, but then politically marginalized in the Liberal Party due to the public antiwar stance he took after the start of the war: he closed in 1914 join the anti-bellicist Union of Democratic Control , the main anti- war organization in Great Britain. In the same year he published the work The Diplomatic History of the War , in which he assigned all major European powers part of the blame for the outbreak of war, in particular for the escalation of the July crisis of summer 1914.

Around 1915 Price became a journalist for the Manchester Guardian newspaper , which, because of his knowledge of Russian, had him report from the Eastern European theater of war as a war correspondent. In this position he experienced the Russian Revolution up close in 1917 . In the following years he was an enthusiastic admirer of the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin and Bolshevism , but in the second half of the 1920s he gradually moved away from the Soviet state and its ideology established by the revolution. Price caused a sensation with a series of articles published from late 1917 to early 1918 in which he published a series of secret treaties of the Allied powers, the texts of which had been given to him by Leon Trotsky . Price described his experiences during the Revolution in a book in 1921 in which he also republished some of his newspaper articles for the Guardian from this period. From 1919 to 1923 Price then reported from Germany as a correspondent for the Daily Herald , to which he had traveled in December 1918 as one of the first British reporters since the end of the war.

Politically, Price turned away from the then collapsing Liberal Party at the beginning of the 1920s and joined the Labor Party : For this he ran in the parliamentary elections of 1922, 1923 and 1924 for the parliamentary seat of the Gloucester constituency, but was defeated every time. In the general election of 1929 he finally managed to win a seat and move into the House of Commons , the British Parliament, as a representative of the Whitehaven constituency . After losing his seat in the 1931 election to a conservative opponent, he was able to return to parliament in 1935 for the constituency of Forest of Dean , to which he now belonged without interruption until 1959 (from 1935 to 1950 as a representative for the constituency of Forest of Dean, then, after that constituency was abolished in 1950, from 1950 to 1959 for the newly created constituency of West Gloucestershire). He was a member of the House of Commons for a period of thirty years for twenty-six years and was elected five times (1929, 1935, 1945, 1950 and 1954).

In addition to his membership in the government of Ramsey MacDonald from 1929 , Price was the private secretary of the Minister of Education Charles Trevelyan .

Fonts

• The Diplomatic History of the War , 1914.
• The Truth about Allied Intervention in Russia , 1918.
• My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution , London 1921.
• The Economic Problems of Europe: Pre-war and After , 1928.
• Hitler's War and Eastern Europe , 1940.
• A History of Turkey: From Empire to Republic , 1968. (Reprinted 2013, 2015)
• My Three Revolutions , London 1969.
• Dispatches from the Revolution. Russia 1916-18 , 1997. (Reprint of newspaper articles)

Web links

• Entry on Price at Spartacus Educational