Ramsay MacDonald

And they were successful on both counts and they took German colonies and they took Turkish colonies, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement comes out of World War I.

The Labour Party were there directly with its first administration of Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, but they were administering Palestine.

They assumed the mandate in a very grand, oh, we're doing it, you know, heavy responsibility for the colonial people, childlike people who one day may be capable of self-rule, but for the time being, we have to look after them, govern their destiny.

And because we've signed the Balfour Declaration, you know by the liberal democrat um you know george uh sorry lloyd george in in 1917 of course We have guaranteed the Jews the right to settle in Palestine.

In 1893, we find in Seed Time an annual report recording 12 public meetings four social gatherings, a membership of 95, and receipts of 73 pounds.

During this year, 1892 to 1893, J. Ramsey MacDonald, subsequently MP and Secretary and Chairman of the Labour Party, was Honorary Secretary, and for some years he was on the Executive.

In 1896, the membership was 115 and the income was 48 pounds.

The most persistent of the organizers of the new fellowship was J.F. Oakeshott, who was also for many years a member of the Fabian Executive.

intended to be

educational rather than directly propagandist.

The first lecturers engaged were J. Ramsey MacDonald and Miss Enid Stacey, whose premature death a few years after her marriage to the Reverend Percy Whittington was a great loss to the movement.

This lecturing was maintained for many years.

The politics of this are critical because this is a moment in the history of the empire when the conservatives, the Tories, will step aside for the Labour Party.

Ramsay MacDonald takes office in January of 24.

Ramsay MacDonald has a friend whom he puts forward as part of a committee to review the concept of the Bernie Plan, the imperial airships.

His name is...

Christopher Birdwood Thompson called Kit.

Ramsey McDonald and Kit are friends at this point.

How did that happen, Sam?

The meeting between Ramsey MacDonald, the first socialist prime minister of England, and Christopher Birdwood Thompson, who would become his secretary of state for air, was a sort of a fortuitous kind of alignment of minds between people with very, very different backgrounds.

Uh, but-

Well, do you want to talk about Ramsay MacDonald-

[laughs]

... and Stanley Baldwin and Andrew Bonar Law as well? You know, all of those.

Part of the History's archive lives in the British Library.

He would ask MPs like Keir Hardie or Ramsay MacDonald what their childhood was like and what were their favorite books and their formative memories.

So it's an incredibly rich resource if you are interested in frames of politicians' hinterland and experience.

We've taken inspiration for that, and we use a very similar model now for our oral history project in which we interview former MPs.

He's often described as the first Labour leader.

I really think you can't speak of a Labour leader until Ramsay MacDonald in 1922, but we can go into that another time.

But basically this is now Labour is a parliamentary force.

And yes, the Liberals have won a landslide.

And in 1918, really following on from the sacrifice of people of all classes in Britain in the First World War, Parliament passes the Representation of the People Act 1918, which fully enfranchises the working class, male population, and a significant proportion of women as well.

And...

The following year in 1919, Ramsay Macdonald, who of course would go on to be the first Labour Prime Minister, sees this now, this new franchise, as the great opportunity for Labour.

And one of my favourite quotes ever really, but from Ramsay Macdonald, who in spite of his later work, was a wonderful writer and rhetorician.

We agree that the world is a small place.

Talk about the Riviera, the new waistline, choir practice, the servant question, and Ramsay MacDonald.

November twenty-second.

Cissie Crabbe leaves.

White impressively, "just clever." I refer to coalition government and insurance act, but Mr.

White repeats firmly that both were brought about by mere cleverness.

He adds that Baldwin is a thoroughly honest man and that Ramsay MacDonald is weak.

Mrs.

But if you look at what's happening here in Britain with the anti-Semitism that's been unleashed by Islamicist forces in this country, it's I think the worst that we've seen it since the 1930s.

We also don't have a leadership that is, as you've pointed out so well in your substack, we don't have a leadership in the West that is in any way seemingly capable of knowing how to deal with any of this in the same way that Ramsay McDonald and Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin just had no idea what was going on essentially in international affairs at least.

And so we do seem to be in that dangerous position where we aren't learning lessons of history.

By my desk in my study, I have a framed letter from Aldous Huxley from 1959.

And, uh, this is this, but this is all the context within which, much to everybody's surprise, it's n- we didn't really have kind of modern opinion polling in, in Britain in the 1940s.

And much to the surprise, including the surprise of the Labour Le- Party leadership itself, Labour wins the 1945, uh, general election after the end of World War II by a huge landslide, the public rejecting Winston Churchill as a peacetime civilian prime minister and instead electing the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, whose cabinet invol- includes quite a wide spectrum of Labour politicians from the trade union bureaucracy right wing of the party through to the relatively radical left represented by Figures like Nye Bevan, Aneurin Bevan, uh, the Welsh, the Welsh miners leader who would become the founder of the National Health Service and also the person responsible for the largest, uh, council house building program to history, in history up to that point.

I think ev-eventually the Tory government, the Macmillan government in the '50s, I think would, would build even more council houses or build them even more rapidly.

So but what is happening after World War II that makes it possible for the government to, to carry out that program? Like, where are we at i-in terms of the broader social, economic, technological context that makes it possible actually to do all this stuff, which they do actually manage to do? Well, quite a few of the things I've already talked about, I think are necessary preconditions for it being possible.

Absolutely key demographic who pulled away from Corbyn between 2017 and 2019 wasn't just the kind of leave voters, which is the people who got all the attention.

There was als- you know, the Green vote and the Liberal Democrat vote went, went, went up really significantly between 2017 and twen- 2019 as a large cohort of centrist mums and dads pulled away from Corbyn, thinking that he wasn't sufficiently committed to their cause of remain, and because a lot of them believed the line that he was some kind of anti-Semite, even though, as I'm always saying, I don't think most of them even really knew what that meant.

Um, and I think, as I've said before, we've seen a lot of those people have been very kind of disabused and, and quite radicalized by the experience of the Starmer le- leadership of Labour and the premiership, but also just by the changing material conditions, by being faced with the fact that it's increasingly obvious that even if you do all the stuff you were supposed to do as a middle-class Gen X parent, uh, with the singular objective of ev-eventually getting your child into a Russell Group university, there's still, there's a very high chance they're gonna come out of that university, have to come live at home, not have a job, not have any chance of becoming a property owner.

Under those conditions, people start to become radicalized and the, and the opportunities for a sort of cross-class coalition, even between relatively affluent propertied people and people who are renting, people who are young, people who work in the public sector, uh, those opportunities significantly increase.