Kmflett's Blog

The result of the last December Election the Tories called in 1923 is good news for Labour

The last December Election called by a Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, was in December 1923.

Baldwin didn’t need to call the Election, he had a Parliamentary majority, but as the early Communist Party noted at the time, he sensed an imperial crisis coming and wanted to shore up his Parliamentary position.

It didn’t work and the result led to the first ever minority Labour Government led by Ramsay MacDonald.

The Tories dropped from 358 seats to 244 while Labour rose to 191 and the Liberals to 158. The Liberals on this occasion decided to support a minority Labour Government led by Ramsay MacDonald.

Neither MacDonald or that first brief period of Labour Government have been viewed in a good light by the left in recent times but as often history suggests a more complex situation.

While I doubt many if any Star readers look at the right-wing magazine the Spectator or pay attention to the thoughts of BBC journalist Andrew Marr, interestingly he has written an interesting piece on the 1923 Election in the magazine.

Marr notes the parallels between the December 1923 Election and the December 2019 one. He suggests that the Tories were dismissive of MacDonald as being too extreme to be a real threat at the polls.

This seems odd to socialists who know MacDonald primarily for his disgraceful role in the 1931 National Government.

However in 1923 the Tory media saw MacDonald as a pacifist (he had not backed World War One) someone who was opposed to the Empire and indeed someone who might even be something of a Bolshevik. The link with media portrayals of Jeremy Corbyn almost a century on could not be clearer.

Then as now the Election was dominated by media and Tory promoted hysteria around Bolshevik plots which led the following year to the notoriously forged Zinoviev letter.

Marr’s concluding paragraph is an interesting one. He writes:

But the bigger picture was that MacDonald’s Labour showed it could govern. In many ways, that winter election of 1923 was an essential precursor to 1945. As more and more younger voters registered in the last weeks, it would be foolish of Tories to dismiss a Jeremy Corbyn premiership as impossible. The polling is against him, but he’s surprised us before.

Be that as it may that first minority Labour Government was hardly a beacon of socialist practice.

Another Election was called for October 1924 and on this occasion Baldwin won a clear majority. Labour lost 40 seats but gained a million more votes.

It was not a surprise for the left however that MacDonald’s Government didn’t last.

J T Murphy writing in the December 1923 Edition of the Communist argued that the Election was really about promoting a new drive to imperialist war and that Labour needed to harness the power of the international working class to address this.

Rather however he noted that The utter failure to do anything in this latter direction, owing to Parliamentary and bourgeois obsessions, lands the Labour Party’s proposals into the same category as those of Baldwin, Smuts and Wilson. What is the use of Labour holding aloft the banner of Socialism if its deeds are the deeds of imperialism?

Even so the article called for support for Labour as a class vote.

The politics of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour are rather different to those promoted by MacDonald in 1924 but the historical parallel remains. Tory Governments which call Elections in December to boost their position run a serious risk of losing them.