Keir Starmer’s Labour government continues to demonstrate its determination to act in the interests of Britain’s capitalist bosses, attempting to appease the international ‘markets’ with yet more austerity attacks, including brutal cuts to disabled people’s benefits.
Economic crisis, a Labour government unwilling to challenge the capitalist class, benefit cuts, struggles of unemployed workers, ‘bread riots’ and a naval mutiny – all were features of the events surrounding the second Labour government which took office in 1929.
No two historical periods are exactly the same. Not least, for example, the fact that today the Labour Party has been transformed into an out-and-out capitalist party, in which the working class can no longer exercise its pressure through the party’s democratic structures. But the events nearly a century ago are rich with lessons for the workers’ movement today.
We publish extracts from an article written by Hannah Sell, now Socialist Party general secretary, first published in our sister publication Socialism Today in 2011.
In May 1929, the second Labour government in history came to power as a minority government, backed by the Liberals, with ‘moderate’ Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister.
At that stage, the Labour Party was a capitalist workers’ party. While the leadership acted in the interests of the capitalists, the mass, working-class base of the party was able (unlike today) to influence it through the party’s democratic structures. This was to be graphically demonstrated by the events of 1931. Leon Trotsky anticipated what would develop in Where is Britain Going? “The masses will liberate themselves from the yoke of national conservatism, working out their own discipline of revolutionary action. Under this pressure from below the top layers of the Labour Party will quickly shed their skins. We do not in the least mean by this that MacDonald will change his spots into those of a revolutionary. No, he will be cast out”.
The Labour Party had come to power in a period in which capitalism could not afford to carry out reforms: “Without reforms there is no reformism, without prosperous capitalism no reforms”, Trotsky explained. “The right reformist wing becomes anti-reformist in the sense that it helps the bourgeoisie, directly or indirectly, to smash the old conquests of the working class”. (Once More on Centrism, 23 March 1934, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1933-34)
From the start, the MacDonald government disappointed the millions of workers who had voted for it, not least on the central issue of the day, unemployment. Even Hugh Gordon, a right-wing Labour MP, later admitted: “The government ran away from its programme [on unemployment] from the first day”. (Nick Smart, The National Government 1931–40) A bill introduced by the Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, Britain’s first woman cabinet minister, did not deal with any of the central issues facing the unemployed. Some of the most brutal aspects of the benefit system were left in place, such as the waiting period before benefits could be claimed and the onerous proofs of ‘genuinely seeking work’. Anger was such that, at the Labour Party conference in October 1929, an attempt to stage a protest against the Bondfield bill was only narrowly defeated.
In July 1931, as unemployment soared, the Labour government commissioned the May report into the public finances. This called for huge public sector cuts, including a 10% cut in unemployment benefits. As Henry Pelling puts it in his Short History of the Labour Party: “In August [1931] the government faced the alternatives of abandoning the gold standard or securing fresh loans in Paris or New York; but the New York bankers would only help if they were sure that the government was taking sufficient measures of retrenchment to restore confidence on orthodox lines. This meant, in fact, cuts in civil service pay and in the pay of the forces, and also in unemployment benefits”.
A narrow majority of the cabinet was in favour of implementing the May report, but senior figures who opposed it made it clear that they would resign if it was implemented. More to the point, the power of the organised working class, the trade unions, within the party made it impossible for the Labour government to go ahead and implement the report. Ernest Bevin, general secretary of the largest trade union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union and very far from being on the left, was among those who met the chancellor to report on behalf of the TUC that they could not accept the cuts.
In Britain, the so-called ‘cradle of capitalist democracy’, the capitalist class, when it could not use the Labour government as a reliable servant of its interests, did not hesitate to find another, more reliable, instrument in the form of a national government headed by MacDonald. On 23 August, MacDonald resigned. Early the next morning, he accepted the invitation of the king to form a new government with the Liberals and the Conservatives. MacDonald and those Labour MPs who went with him were expelled from the Labour Party and gave themselves the name National Labour. This betrayal was burned into the consciousness of broad sections of the working class for decades.
At the end of August 1931, a national government was formed ‘to defend the gold standard’. Its slogan was ‘equality of sacrifice’. It immediately introduced an emergency budget which demanded no sacrifice by the rich and meant starvation for the poor. Unemployment benefits were cut by 10% and the dreaded means test led to 193,542 men and 77,995 women immediately having all their benefits stopped. The means test meant that benefits were denied to the unemployed if anyone in the family – parents, grandparents, siblings – were judged able to keep them or if they had any goods, including basic furniture, which could be sold to buy food. At the same time, public sector workers were told their pay would also be cut by 10%.
Invergordon mutiny
Mass opposition to these measures was given form, not by the trade union leaders, but in a dramatic naval mutiny. Sailors were facing pay cuts of between 10% and 25%. On 11 September, when ten warships of the Atlantic fleet arrived in Invergordon in Scotland, the sailors read about their pay cut in the newspapers. The next night, a group met on shore at a football field, voted to organise a strike, and left singing The Red Flag. On 15 September, four warships refused to leave on manoeuvres and the mutiny had begun. It ended in the evening of 16 September when the navy conceded that sailors’ pay would be cut by no more than 10%, along with some other concessions.
The end of the mutiny was not the end of the story. The world financial markets panicked, and exerted huge pressure on the pound. On 21 September, the three-week-old national government was forced to abandon the gold standard and the value of sterling fell by 25%.
Even those capitalist academics who try to deny that the Invergordon mutiny was responsible for Britain coming off the gold standard actually accept that it was the sailors’ determination which was the trigger for what followed. Nick Smart, for example, says: “The political impact of the Invergordon ‘mutiny’ was considerable. It is doubtful, however, whether the event, in itself, caused… the suspension of the gold standard on the Monday. What is more likely is that foreign holders of sterling… interpreted ‘disobedience in the fleet’ as a symptom of government unpopularity”. Exactly! Compare the sailors’ spontaneous determination not to accept the misery being heaped on them with the pathetic servility of the right-wing Labour leaders, summed up by their Fabian guru, Sidney Webb, who when he heard Britain was off the gold standard whined: “No-one ever told us we could do that”. In 1931, the British ruling class came up against the inner resistivity of the working class in the form of the naval mutiny and was forced to abandon its long-held goal of sticking to the gold standard. Workers’ refusal to accept the scale of misery being demanded of them was bound to find an outlet, if not through the naval mutiny, by other means. The same will be true of the working class in Britain today, who will not be able to swallow the scale of cuts being demanded by the capitalist class.
The gold standard was a disastrous deflationary straitjacket for British capitalism. Coming off it, however, did not mean an end to the crisis or to deflationary policies. The capitalist class continued with its assault on workers’ living conditions. It was met with ferocious resistance. The left Labour MP, Nye Bevan, demanded in parliament to know if the unemployed would receive the same concessions as the sailors if they showed the same “rebellious tendencies”. Over the coming years they did.
Communist Party
In the 1930s, the Communist Party (CP), despite its political failings, played a crucial role in organising the unemployed in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM). Two of its leading activists, Fred Copeman and Len Wincott, were first brought into activity and then membership of the CP after they helped to lead the Invergordon mutiny and were thrown out of the navy as a result. Today, it is the march of the unemployed from Jarrow to London in 1936 which is most remembered but, prior to this, the NUWM organised a whole series of marches of the unemployed. The first, in 1932, was greeted when it arrived in London by a brutal police assault, snatching the petition to parliament from the marchers, and subjecting them to a vicious beating.
In Birkenhead, in 1932, the labour movement, led by the CP, organised a magnificent struggle around clear demands: abolition of the means test; extension of work schemes, including building houses, schools and road repairs; a 25% rent reduction for corporation (council) houses and no evictions. They marched with clear slogans: ‘fight the means test’; ‘unemployed workers – struggle or starve’. The so-called ‘bread riots’, in fact a mass uprising of the Birkenhead working class, forced the council to make significant concessions, including an increase in unemployment benefits by two shillings a week (‘Struggle or Starve’ at socialistparty.org.uk). In the aftermath of the Birkenhead victory, unemployed workers in many other towns and cities followed suit, including in Salford, Birmingham, Belfast and Glasgow. The 1934 reversal of the 10% cut in unemployment benefit, limited as it was, would not have taken place without these heroic struggles.
The workers’ political response to the experience of 1931 was multi-faceted. Superficial historians report that Labour suffered a massive defeat in the general election of October 1931. In terms of MPs this was true, but Labour’s vote only fell from 8.3 million in 1929 to 6.6 million. This showed the loyalty of the majority of the working class to the Labour Party, seeing it as a party that, unlike the betrayers MacDonald and Philip Snowden, stood in their interests. In that election, all the capitalist parties stood as a bloc, including National Labour, and an avalanche of vitriol poured forth from the capitalist class against the Labour Party. Its former leader, MacDonald, gave an election broadcast describing the Labour Party’s programme as “Bolshevism run mad”.
Trotsky had predicted in 1925 that, in the first instance, MacDonald would be replaced as leader of the Labour Party by “people of the ilk of [George] Lansbury…[who] will inevitably reveal that they are but a left variant of the same basic Fabian type”. This was exactly what happened. However, under the impact of the crisis of capitalism and the experience of the 1929-31 Labour government, the Independent Labour Party moved rapidly to the left. In 1931, it disaffiliated from the Labour Party taking with it over 16,000 members. Although its failure to adopt a clear Marxist position meant that its membership dwindled over subsequent years, its rapid development in the immediate wake of the MacDonald betrayal gave an indication of the potential for a sizeable Marxist party to develop in Britain in the 1930s. The number of brave militants who were attracted to the CP despite its leadership also shows the revolutionary conclusions that were being drawn by the most advanced sections of the working class.
The weakness of the capitalist parties was shown by the fact that variations on a national government remained in power until the end of the second world war. The next government by a single party was the 1945 Labour government which, under the mass pressure of the working class – determined not to return to the misery of the 1930s – carried out a ‘quarter of a revolution’ by nationalising 20% of industry and creating the NHS. Successive governments, Tory and Labour, have systematically undermined the gains of 1945-50. However, Starmer’s Labour government will face mass opposition from the working class. All kinds of heroic struggles will develop against the cuts, just as they did in the 1930s. The potential for many tens of thousands of workers to be won to Marxism, and for a mass party of the working class to develop again, will arise from the mighty battles that are coming.
