One hundred years ago the first Labour government took office. And polls suggest Labour looks set to mark this centenary by returning to government later this year.
Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister on 22 January 1924 leading just 191 MPs in a minority government. In the time since, the party has only held office for a total of 33 years and only had six prime ministers (compared the Conservatives’ 14). Yet, in many ways it is the Labour governments that have shaped our lives the most. And it is a signal to Keir Starmer of the impact he could have in No 10.
Despite the state they are in today, the fact we have a National Health Service, a social security system, and some remnants of legal aid are all because of the Labour government of 1945. That homosexuality is legal, the death penalty abolished and women are entitled to equal pay is because of the governments of Harold Wilson in the 60s and 70s. And the most recent Labour governments of Blair and Brown gave us the minimum wage, devolved administrations in Wales, Scotland and London, as well as the Good Friday Peace Agreement.
While Labour governments were often too brief, many of their policies have endured and become institutions. We take their existence for granted because they appear uncontroversial today – but many were virulently opposed at the time by the Conservatives, much of the press and parts of industry too.
So what can today’s Labour learn from its predecessor governments? As Gordon Brown said in his speech to party conference over 20 years ago, Labour is “best when we are boldest”.
Given the inheritance of the likely next Labour government – a stagnant economy, rising poverty and unemployment, record NHS waiting lists, and the climate crisis – the need to be bold has rarely been greater.
A Starmer government looks set to inherit the worst economic situation of any incoming government – of either party – since Clement Attlee in 1945.
It should therefore worry today’s Labour supporters, given the dire economic inheritance, that the current policy offering looks dwarfed by the scale of the task.
Gone are the heady days of 2020 when Starmer was pledging that Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto was “our foundational document”, or indeed the days of 2021 when Starmer was invoking Attlee as his blueprint, “There’s a mood in the air which we don’t detect often in Britain. It was there in 1945, after the sacrifice of war, and it’s there again now. It’s the determination that our collective sacrifice must lead to a better future”.
The cliché “It’s the economy, stupid” has never been more apt for considering why Labour governments have generally been so short-lived. To differing extents, the governments of MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, James Callaghan and Brown were all brought down by economic crises and their response to them. Starmer should heed this warning from history if he wants to be more than a one term PM.
The contradiction at the heart of Labour governments over the last 100 years is this: they wish to minimise economic change, maintain an Atlanticist foreign policy, and create a fairer and more equal society. When an inevitable conflict emerges between economic, foreign and social policy, it is more often than not the social objectives are jettisoned.
“The greatest betrayal in the political history of this country” was how Attlee described the actions of Labour’s second government under Ramsay MacDonald in 1931. Faced with an economic depression and rising unemployment, MacDonald proposed to cut benefits to those out of work. Most Labour MPs rejected it, and MacDonald and his Chancellor Philip Snowden were expelled from Labour and formed a National Government dominated by Tories to implement austerity. Other parties were more than willing to allow a nominally Labour Prime Minister to lead a coalition cutting social security and public spending.
Attlee is a semi-outlier though among Labour leaders in that it wasn’t a poor economy that brought him down, but a poor economic choice between social policy and foreign policy. He went into government with an overtly socialist manifesto (“The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it”), faced incredibly tough economic conditions, and still implemented much of it. Despite inheriting a country with a national debt more than double what it is today, Attlee built the NHS, the welfare state, introduced legal aid, started a mass council-housebuilding programme and nationalised water, telecoms, energy, and rail – among other sectors.
But in the early 1950s, Attlee faced a different conundrum. The economy was growing strongly, but demands for rearmament came from the US embroiling itself in the Korean War. Faced with the choice between rearmament and social gains, Attlee reintroduced prescription charges and fees for dental and optical treatment. US interests in Korea trumped public health. NHS founder Nye Bevan resigned from the Cabinet in response. Despite his enduring achievements Attlee lost office in the 1951 election.
Harold Wilson was is possibly unique in resisting US foreign policy. Despite pressure from the White House, the UK refused to send troops to Vietnam as Attlee had done in Korea. However, like his predecessors Wilson also trimmed his social ambitions as economic crisis hit.
With the White House up for grabs in 2024 too, the outcome of the US Presidential election will be significant for Starmer, who has so far closely aligned himself with Biden on backing Israel’s bombardment in Gaza, air strikes on Yemen and backing Ukraine.
More starkly when Callaghan took over in 1976, after the second Wilson government, he mistakenly decided to suppress public sector wages and sell off public assets – resulting in large-scale public sector strikes and the election of Margaret Thatcher.
The New Labour government of Blair and Brown eschewed significant economic change from the outset. Thatcherism had privatised public assets, slashed trade union and employment rights, and had no industrial strategy beyond the square mile in the City of London.
As Tony Blair himself proclaimed, “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them”. New Labour, for all its positives (minimum wage, Human Rights Act, Sure Start, Freedom of Information Act, peace in Northern Ireland among them), it did not unpick those fundamentals of its Thatcherite inheritance. In some ways it went further.
When the global financial crash sent the economy into reverse in 2007/08, social progress also went backwards. Child poverty started to rise again, wages started to stagnate. No structural change meant Labour’s gains were temporary and reversible – a process accelerated by the Coalition government, and what for Labour would become 14 years out of office.
As seems likely to be the case in 2024, in 1924 Labour inherited a weak economy and rising unemployment. That minority Labour government boosted unemployment benefit directly benefiting working class people. Its finest legacy though was in housing; the brainchild of John Wheatley who was appointed Health Secretary, with responsibility for housing policy.
During the First World War, Wheatley had campaigned against conscription and helped organise the Glasgow rent strikes (acts that would probably get him expelled from today’s Labour Party). Under Wheatley a housing bill was passed that subsidised public housing: “let at rents within the means of the wage earners”, as The Times described it.
Though Labour only lasted in office for nine months, the Act passed and the policy was implemented, also creating employment in a depressed construction industry. By 1933, over half a million council homes had been built in the UK.
Fast forward 100 years and Labour has no plans to boost benefits, though it has pledged to build 1.5 million homes. But while building more homes is welcome, it is not enough. Tenure matters too and Starmer’s Labour has so far refused to say how many of those homes will be council homes for working class people. With a record number of families homeless, with more children than ever spending last Christmas in temporary accommodation, the need has never been more urgent for a mass programme of council housebuilding.
Another Labour figure with a fine record on council housing was Labour’s post-war Health Secretary Nye Bevan. More famous for establishing the NHS, Bevan was – like Wheatley – also responsible for housing policy. By 1951 the Attlee government had built over 800,000 council homes and by 1955, 1.5 million council homes had been completed. Like Wheatley, Bevan’s legacy outlasted his term of office – the greatest politicians set the terms under which their successors have to operate.
I started this piece by quoting Gordon Brown on boldness. I want to end by citing Bevan’s words on this matter: “Boldness in words must be matched by boldness in deeds or the result will be universal malaise.”
One hundred years on from the first Labour government, Starmer risks “universal malaise” (or worse) until he delivers “boldness in deeds”. The situation deserves no less.
Andrew Fisher is the former executive director of policy at the Labour Party
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