Labour’s first government and the Zinoviev Letter
The government was groundbreaking and eager to make swift changes- but it fell apart almost as quickly as it arrived
January 2024 marks a historic occasion for British politics. A century ago, The Labour Party moved into government for the first time and attempted to break the cycle of underwhelming terms in office from The Liberal and Conservative Parties.
The man to hold the honour of being the first Labour PM of the UK was James Ramsey MacDonald. Born in North East Scotland in 1866, he joined the Labour Party in 1895- being elected as an MP in Leicester in 1906.
MacDonald’s path to number 10 wasn’t all smooth, however, and in 1918 he lost his seat. One of the main reasons that has been cited for this is his opposition to the First World War, which ended in the same year. In 1922, four years after the Leicester defeat, MacDonald was elected as MP for Aberafan in South Wales.
By the end of 1923, The Conservatives lost their majority, and PM Stanley Baldwin resigned when his party lost a key vote concerning The King’s Speech. Liberal leader Herbert Asquith didn’t want to form a coalition, and as a result, power was handed to then-Labour leader MacDonald and his party.
The 1920s were a time of social change across Britain. The nation was making a steady recovery into a new world in the aftermath of the First World War. The ‘roaring twenties’ turned the UK into a place of jazz bars, nightclubs, and prosperity. Women had the vote by the start of the decade, and even more, did by the end of it. The first-ever Labour government may have seemed fitting for this new, exciting world.
After being handed the reigns of power, MacDonald was keen to secure a mandate and called an election in 1924. It would be events leading to this polling day that would bring his short stint in number 10 to a drastic end.
The election campaign was in full swing and the election itself was just days away. The newspapers of the country were doing their part to back the man they wanted to take over, and many of the nationals had little interest in supporting the fresh new ideas of the Labour Party. One publication, the Daily Mail, went a step further.
Four days before the election, it published a sensationalised letter said to have been written by Grigory Zinoviev, the Head of the Communist International in Moscow at the time. The letter was addressed to the Communist Party of Great Britain, suggesting that there would be stronger links between the Soviets and the UK under a Labour government.
The paper was concerned that the British working class would become radicalised under Soviet influence, and the right-wing press across the country used the letter to suggest foreign subversion was rife within British politics.
The letter had its intended impact from the perspective of the Mail and those to the right of the political spectrum, as Labour suffered a heavy defeat and the Conservatives saw off both MacDonald and the waning Liberal Party. The letter is said to have had at least a substantial impact on Labour’s poor performance- despite the fact, that historians tend to agree now that it was a fake, a falsification that helped get Stanley Baldwin back in number 10 for a second term.
The first Labour government was in power for less than 300 days, yet even in this short time, he was able to implement policy that improved the lives of working-class people across the UK. The 1924 Wheatley Housing Act was perhaps the most successful of the MacDonald tenure, during which over 500,000 rent-controlled homes were signed off for construction to help with the living conditions of people across the country.
More protection against landlords being able to take a house from renters for their own use was brought in through the Protection from Eviction Act of 1924, and the government also granted local authorities the ability to raise the school leaving age to 15, enabling children to gain education for longer.
Labour’s first spell in government was also its shortest. Yet the policies put in place by MacDonald and his cabinet stuck to the party’s origins or helping working-class people. They saw the chance to improve the lives of the working population and they went to work straight away to do so.
A century on, the Labour Party of today is a world away from what it was under MacDonald in the 1920s and 1930s. The party formed to stand up for the working class did, in 1924, exactly that.
