Next year’s general election will be the 22nd in Britain’s postwar history. Only a handful of these can be described as pivotal. Three stand out: Clement Attlee’s Labour victory in 1945, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative win in 1979 and, more debatably, Tony Blair’s Labour landslide in 1997. Boris Johnson’s 2019 win might have been a fourth, but it has proved a lurch into a cul-de-sac. Today we may possibly be on the threshold of another of these rare change-making elections. Scepticism about that prospect is sensible.
As time passes, individual elections cease to echo with shared meaning as they once did. There is, though, one more pivotal general election that ought to resonate today. It took place exactly a hundred years ago this month. And it still makes three relevant calls on today’s politics.
In ascending order of importance, these calls are: as a catastrophically mistaken piece of general election timing; as the election that produced the most hung of all the hung parliaments in the UK’s democratic era; and, by far the most important of all, as the election that produced Britain’s first ever Labour government.
Britain has never experienced an election like the one that took place on 6 December 1923. It was wholly unnecessary. The Conservatives had won a large majority only 12 months previously under Andrew Bonar Law. He then retired because of terminal cancer. His successor, Stanley Baldwin, wanted a policy U-turn in favour of protectionist tariffs on imports, so called another election to win a mandate.
The result was disastrous for the Tories. They were reduced to 258 MPs, with Labour now on 191 and the divided Liberals 158. Only a coalition or a minority government was now viable. The opposition parties would not support the Tories, but would not form a coalition themselves. A minority government beckoned in a hung parliament.
But a minority government of which party? The Tories were the largest party but had just been voted out. The next alternative was no longer the Liberals, but Labour. For six weeks over Christmas, Baldwin hung on, only to be defeated by 72 votes when parliament finally met. On 22 January 1924, Ramsay MacDonald became prime minister in Britain’s first Labour government.
The Britain of 1924 was in so many ways another country compared with the Britain of 2024. The new prime minister was the illegitimate son of a Moray ploughman. The Russian revolution was seven years old. “Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama [Queen Victoria] died,” wrote George V in his diary. “I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour government.”
There had never been a government made up of industrial workers either. Nor one containing a woman, the Somerset shop worker Margaret Bondfield. The new colonial secretary was a Welsh engine driver. The home secretary a Glaswegian iron moulder. Three ministers had worked in the coalmines. Many of Britain’s traditional rulers were genuinely terrified. Some of them were determined to ensure that it failed.
If Keir Starmer becomes prime minister, his move into Downing Street will be smoother than MacDonald’s. In particular, he will hope to govern with the majority that MacDonald lacked. Starmer will look to govern for years, not the mere months that the first Labour government inevitably and rightly expected before it was brought down in October 1924.
Starmer would also inherit a British state that is more comfortable with the rule of law and with checks and balances than the UK of a century ago. His patriotism would not be questioned, as MacDonald’s was in the wake of his opposition to the first world war. He would expect the full loyalty of the military, the police and the security services. MacDonald could not do the same.
But there would be many parallels with 1924, too. Labour in 2024 would take power amid government austerity and in the wake of a pandemic. It would be determined to win the trust of the financial markets and to make an ethical mark in foreign policy. It would be under internal pressure to make a material difference for the poor. The unions would want a shift in workplace power. Housing reform would be a priority. And there would be battles between those who believe governing and re-election to power is the priority, and those who are more comfortable in opposition, condemning Labour leaders as betrayers of the socialist faith.
Unlike MacDonald the pioneer, however, Starmer would lead a party that now knows it is not Britain’s natural party of government. He would know, as MacDonald could not, that the breakthrough of 1924 did not usher in a century of Labour rule. It was to be a Tory century, and it still is. Labour has governed for 33 of those years, and produced six prime ministers, only three of whom have won general election overall majorities. The Conservatives’ figures are 67 years, 14 prime ministers and 10 overall majority winners.
Labour’s centenary as a governing party is nevertheless an anniversary to be taken seriously by all who will follow the fortunes of a possible Starmer government. Expect a clutch of books, including Peter Clark’s The Men of 1924, Jon Cruddas’s A Century of Labour and David Torrance’s The Wild Men, all written with wit and commendable succinctness and most featuring photos of the now all but forgotten Labour figures who first trod the corridors of power: Arthur Henderson, JR Clynes, Jimmy Thomas, Philip Snowden and MacDonald himself.
If nothing else, the centenary is an opportunity to resume the work begun by David Marquand’s 1977 biography, and restore MacDonald to the position he deserves as a major Labour leader. He was a fundamental part of Labour’s still unfolding and often contradictory story. He should no longer be dismissed merely as a traitor to the cause who, in 1931, formed a government with the Tories and whose name can barely even be mentioned in the party’s long journey from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer.
But the centenary is worth more than that. It is a chance to understand the deeper reasons that underpin Labour’s defeats and difficult decades. It is an occasion to ask, again, whether the strands that Cruddas sees as crucial to the Labour experience – the ethical, the welfarist and the liberal – can be reconciled more creatively in the future than they have been in the past. It is a moment to try again to clarify what Labour’s governing objectives actually are and should be.
And it is a very timely opportunity to reiterate the advice of Henry Drucker when he wrote in his book Doctrine and Ethos in the Labour Party that Labour’s doctrinaires of both left and right “would be better employed rethinking their doctrines than trying to win the party to what are, by now, rather threadbare ideas”. Hopefully, it may also not be too late.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
