Martin Kettle refers to Ramsay MacDonald’s 1924 government being the first to contain a woman, Margaret Bondfield, and suggests that the lesson to be learned by the current Labour leadership from that administration is not to be doctrinaire (How should Keir Starmer take on 2024? By looking back a century to Labour’s first government, 28 December).
It would seem that Keir Starmer has already taken this very much to heart. But what lessons might be learned from the 1929 Labour government, in which Bondfield served in cabinet, as minister of labour? It was a government that, in thrall to the prevailing economic orthodoxy of upholding the gold standard at all costs, was broken by its proposal to cut unemployment benefit by 10%. Arguably one of the most important lessons from this government is the importance of being prepared to challenge such prevailing orthodoxy.
