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.
When MacDonald, still head of the incoming national government, did go off the gold standard and asked Ernest Harvey, the governor of the Bank of England, what the consequences of the “upset” would be, he was told that the only people who would really “feel it heavily” would be “wealthy financiers”. Please let any incoming Labour government today think long and hard before being lured into neglecting the adequate funding of vital public services and benefits by pursuing an economic orthodoxy, the main beneficiaries of which are a similar small and disproportionately wealthy group.
Dr Lynda Mountford
St Albans
It was good to see Ramsay MacDonald’s much underrated contribution to UK politics recognised by Martin Kettle. But as well as being “the illegitimate son of a Morayshire ploughman” (who, I recall from David Marquand’s excellent biography, played no part in his upbringing or care), he was also the son of Annie Ramsay, a farm servant, and was brought up by her and her formidable mother Isabella in a female-dominated household.
Let’s also acknowledge the influence of a teacher at Drainie parish school, responsible for the education of “about 70 pupils of both sexes and diverse ages” with the support of only one pupil-teacher and a sewing mistress. In addition to ensuring that all his pupils achieved high standards in reading, writing, arithmetic, history and geography, he managed to inculcate quite sophisticated understanding of the sciences and a basic understanding of Latin and Greek to those interested to study them – and Ramsay MacDonald was.
Let us hope that Keir Starmer can form a government with a priority of inspiring gifted teachers to work in a well-funded, adequately paid education sector, so that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have better chances of succeeding and making an impact on our increasingly unequal society.
Kate Purcell
Coventry
There is something missing from this history of the first Labour government. The main economic policy of the early Labour party was land value tax (LVT). It featured in every manifesto until 1945. The Liberals also supported LVT, but Lloyd George’s earlier attempt to introduce it was thwarted by the (land) Lords. The Parliament Acts thereafter stopped them interfering with finance bills. LVT was actually signed into law by Ramsay MacDonald’s 1931 government, but it was never implemented and the Tories eventually repealed the act.
It is a tragedy that Labour rejected LVT in 1945 in favour of a one-off tax designed to capture the uplift in land value when a higher use is granted, rather than taxing the unearned income from land annually. The result has been a growing housing crisis as more and more of the price of a home is land value.
The last time LVT was in a Labour manifesto was 2017, when the week before the election all the Tory papers scared homeowners with Labour’s “garden tax”. It was one of the reason’s why Labour narrowly lost. The Tories will not mention it, but in the unlikely event that they win the next election, the plan, buried in a Northern Powerhouse Partnership report, is to introduce LVT and devolve to local authorities to solve the funding problem.
Carol Wilcox
Secretary, Labour Land Campaign
I enjoyed reading Martin Kettle’s thoughtful article. I have often felt Ramsay MacDonald’s administration of that period should be celebrated more by those of us on the centre left. Labour came into power in the face of extreme hostility from the established order and its cheerleaders in the press. While they had no majority in the House of Commons and lasted less than a year, there was the will to introduce several measures to ease the plight of the working classes, not least the Wheatley Housing Act that went some way towards tackling the housing shortage. This kind of vision would serve us all well today.
Matthew Ryder
Buckden, Cambridgeshire
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