by Andrew Marr
Now that Baldwin was secure, he could play his part in the final collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government and the creation of the National Government that ruled Britain until 1940 and is remembered now without affection. MacDonald had already become notorious for his hobnobbing with duchesses and his increasingly grand, self-regarding, self-pitying air. He was hardly alone in having no answers to the economic crisis. The cabinet split over cutting unemployment benefits had seemed to be the end for a Labour government. The obvious step would have been to call a general election and see, presumably, the return of a Tory government under Baldwin. That is certainly what Baldwin wanted. But he was away that summer, as usual, on holiday in the South of France, leaving the negotiations to Neville Chamberlain, the Liberal leader John Simon and the King. The sense of crisis was acute. Chamberlain’s role was important, since he rammed home to MacDonald, Snowden and their few supporters that economies would have to mean harsh cuts for the unemployed. A large part of the case for a MacDonald-led coalition was the understanding that its medicine would be bitter, particularly in the poorer parts of the country. MacDonald was to be the Labour fig leaf for Tory measures. Telling Chamberlain privately and rightly that he would be signing his political death warrant, and that if he joined the new government he would be ‘a ridiculous figure unable to command support and bring odium on us as well as himself’, MacDonald nevertheless agreed.
In the election that followed, the National Government candidates won a victory so overwhelming that it effectively liquidated parliamentary politics until the fall of France in 1940. It had 556 MPs, of whom 472 were Conservatives, the largest Tory contingent the Commons has ever seen. Just thirteen pro-MacDonald ‘National Labour’ candidates were returned. Labour itself was shattered, winning only fifty-two seats. MacDonald was therefore in something of the same position as Lloyd George had once been, a non-Tory prime minister entirely dependent on the votes and support of Tory MPs. But in reality his position was far weaker. Lloyd George had a plan, a good reputation, fire and fight. MacDonald was a broken figure, really, who, once he conceded Tory demands for some imperial tariffs, was merely a limpet and knew it. He had Chequers and his increasingly colossal vanity, but not much more. The iron economic measures run from the Treasury, first by Snowden and then soon by Neville Chamberlain, helped impose the ‘hungry thirties’ on much of industrial Britain. They helped breed the extra-parliamentary extremism the decade is known for too. And, most notoriously, they left Churchill and a few allies in the wilderness to warn with increasing vehemence about the Nazi threat, while doing too little, too late to prepare Britain’s defences for what was surely to come. The reader, however, may have noticed something slightly odd about this familiar litany of failure. We can’t quite get away from those figures. In 1931 and then again in 1935, the National Government was tremendously popular with the voters. It might have been stodgy, unimaginative, timid and even cowardly, but it seemed to be what the British, now armed with a full male and female suffrage, actually wanted.
Truth and Hype: Orwell’s Englands
Throughout the thirties, there was a vast slab of the country left in despair, whose industries were declining and whose levels of unemployment were, with the low-welfare standards of the time, hideous. The northern industrial cities, which had depended on textiles, pottery, coal mining and heavy engineering, would never recover the self-confidence they had enjoyed in Edwardian times. Undercapitalized industries, including shipbuilding, their old markets devastated by protectionism and slump, were employing labour patterns, equipment and open-air working that had been left behind decades earlier in Japan, Germany and America. From south Wales to industrial Scotland major migrations began as men got on their bicycles, often literally, and looked for work. The Welsh moved towards London and the new light-industrial areas near the capital; Scots moved south too, or emigrated. Left behind in Victorian slums, surrounded by half-built ocean liners or smokeless chimneys, were millions of despairing people. Life was eked out with means-tested and meagre benefits, dreary food, outbreaks of domestic violence and a few cigarettes. Writers such as J. B. Priestley and George Orwell made journeys to the dead lands of failing industry and brought back angry epistles to the comfortable and employed. Yet the truth is that the unemployed and hungry of the north were remarkably ineffective in politics. In France, Germany and Italy the plight of industrial workers had caused turmoil, but in Britain it caused only unease. It was as if the north of England, never mind the Celtic nations, was considered not wholly British. The Labour Party might have shaved and mitigated some of the harshest financial penalties suffered by the unemployed, though after the split of 1931 it was entirely ineffective; meanwhile no other radical force emerged. The communists, as we have seen, were a publicity-conscious fringe group, not a major force. They did achieve recognition through their sponsorship of the National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM), founded in 1921 by Wal Hannington in England and Harry McShane in Scotland. The NUWM organized a series of hunger marches in 1932, 1934 and 1936 on London, with thousands of men taking part, and at one point a million-strong petition. The image of proud, gaunt men in heavy boots and ragged jackets marching south, living on handouts from churches and supporters on the way, sleeping in halls and asking for nothing more than work, etched its way into the national mind. Yet again and again, after ritual meetings with politicians, they returned empty-handed. There is no doubt that the NUWM had a revolutionary tinge to its thinking. A fair example of its rhetoric comes from a 1932 pamphlet against the ‘National Hunger Government’, which complains that the austerity measures are
directly responsible for the appalling poverty conditions which millions of our class find themselves in today. The Government no longer even pretends to be considerate to the needs of the workers and their families. In the interests of capitalism it drives forward with its murderous policy, ruthlessly grinding down the workers and their families to depths of misery and poverty beyond description. Despair creeps ever deeper into the homes of our class. Mothers are reduced to nervous wrecks through anxiety and worry. Children are being broken in health and robbed of the chance of growing up healthy men and women. Crime, disease and suicides increase through the increasing poverty and destitution of our class.
Yet there was no political revolt to go alongside the message, which left it plaintive rather than threatening. When Orwell conducted his tour of Lancashire and Yorkshire early in 1936, he did not find it hard to produce shocking journalistic prose about the stink, the vile food, the despairing people and the squalid streets. He meticulously noted the living conditions in makeshift caravans and slums that had barely changed since Rowntree’s investigations of 1900 and the abominable working conditions of coal miners. He rubbed the reader’s nose in the stench of poverty. But he did not find a trace of politically organized resistance. Indeed, he contrasted the atmosphere with the briefly revolutionary mood of the immediate post-war country, when even at Eton the name of Lenin was admired. Now, he felt, the spread of gambling on horses, dogs and football – the pools had become popular, starting in Liverpool, from the early twenties – and the growth of consumerism, had somehow quietened the anger. In his 1937 book of the journey, The Road to Wigan Pier, he noted far more anger over an attempt to scupper the football pools than over Hitler. Gambling and cheap luxuries had been very fortunate for Britain’s bone-headed rulers: ‘It is quite likely that fish and chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate . . . the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution.’ Despite years of mass unemployment and industrial decline, ‘the working class are submissive where they used to be openly hostile’. Orwell’s book was loathed by many orthodox socialists and communists, who preferred to idealize the workers, and Orwell gave plenty of ammunition to those who thought he had anyway turned against socialist cranks: ‘If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller
and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!’ No wonder they hated him.
Orwell was a strange fish, but he was right about the big things, and his assertion that the workers of Britain were more likely to carry on dreaming of horses coming in at twenty to one, and moan over their tea, than revolt was proved spot on. He had lived with tramps, understood his own prejudices, and would soon be off to fight for Republican Spain. There he joined the anarchist POUM militia, getting a bullet in the throat and seeing at first hand the brutal tactics of the Stalinist communists as they turned on their fellow leftists at Stalin’s behest. Yet again, even as he told the tragic story of what was happening in Spain in his Homage to Catalonia, he was trashing some of the favourite myths of left-wing propaganda. It is quite true that more than 2,000 young British and Irish men left to fight against fascism in Spain; more than 500 of them were killed. Yet this was hardly a flood. Some 80 per cent of those who went to fight were communists, signing up for a force organized and directed by Moscow. Potential recruits were interrogated on their political views and general suitability by leading communist officials at a Party-owned house, once they had made their way to London; only then were they allowed to leave, on tourist visas, for Paris and the trains south to Spain. Those who, like Orwell, were going to fight without being CP members were in a small and much-mistrusted minority. Labour politicians backed the International Brigade, of course, and Clement Attlee even had a unit named after him following his visit to Spain. But this was not a spontaneous rising up of idealistic young poets and workers. Once again, Orwell drilled through to the truth behind the propaganda.
The left lost every significant battle in the Britain of the thirties, with the sole exception of the Battle of Cable Street, which denied Mosley’s Blackshirts the right to march through the East End of London. Yet the left has won the battle for public memory. It is still the heroic young poets and workers dying to defend Madrid who are remembered when the Spanish Civil War is talked about in Britain. It is still the hunger marches which stamp their imprint on how we recall the thirties. None is more often referred to than the Jarrow Crusade of 1936. Jarrow was a shipbuilding town, and the closure of its yard in 1935 had caused unemployment to soar. Some 11,000 people signed a petition demanding the opening of a steelworks to bring jobs, and 200 carefully chosen men carried it, in an oak box, south to London. They marched with blue and white banners, and a mouth-organ band, led for at least some of the way by their MP, the pint-sized, red-headed left-wing orator Ellen Wilkinson, and by a stray dog called Paddy. No drinking was allowed and there were no communists either; indeed, the crusade had begun with a church service. Everything that could be done to ensure the march was respectable and not threatening, appealing to the conscience of the nation, was done. And at the end of the nearly 300 miles of tramping and singing, the nation pretty much ignored the marchers. They were met with sympathy but only small crowds and in London achieved nothing at all. A small steel company opened later on, employing just a couple of hundred men; but even that was the result of a private initiative, not a government one.
Broken History: Scotland
History has many apparent dead ends. People and movements who seemed interesting at the time vanish from view because they fail to connect with historians and readers in later years. Then something changes, and we remember them again. The political history of Scotland between the wars is a classic case. It has been almost entirely wiped out of the story of modern Britain. Yet if this period gave us the beginnings of the great car society, and suburban spread, downhill skiing and nightclubs, the grip of Hollywood and the origins of the organic food movement, it also provides clues to the shape of today’s Disunited Kingdom, in which Scotland and England are drifting apart. To understand today, we have to go back to some broken history, arguments which flared up in the twenties and thirties, when poets in kilts and newspaper barons thought Scotland would soon become independent.
In many ways Scotland mimicked the quirks and folly of what was happening at the same time in England and many other European countries – the marchers, the secret societies, the fascination with Mussolini and race. What was different was that after the great blade of the Second World War came down and sliced through it all, so that post-war people decided to forget embarrassing parts of their recent past, Scotland kept some connections. The Scottish National Party, which at the time of writing runs a Scottish government in Edinburgh, emerged from the same angry but optimistic political ferment described earlier. Unlike the fascists or the Communist Party, Kibbo Kift or the ILP, it survived and came to wield real power. The post-war British decided that the early years of the Scottish Nationalists and their enemies were irrelevant; this was meaningless history, to be more or less consciously forgotten. Now it seems that this forgetting was itself a mistake.
There were reasons for the Scottish story to be different. Scotland had lost a higher proportion of her men in the Great War than had any other part of the British Empire – around a fifth of all British losses, and a tenth of all men of serving age. After the immediate post-war boom, Scotland’s economic decline was sharper than anywhere else in Britain. In the last full year before the war, 1913, the Clyde alone produced more new shipping than the tonnage of either the United States or the Kaiser’s Germany. In the twenties the Clyde began to decline fast, as did the heavy-engineering combines, the coal mines and the textile industries on which smoky, crammed central Scotland depended. By 1933 seven in ten Clyde shipyard workers were unemployed and great ocean liners such as the Queen Mary lay silent and unfinished in dry docks. Stagnation and decline meant many Scots fled abroad, looking for a better life. During the twenties Scotland’s population began to fall. For every thousand Scots, eighty emigrated. (For comparison, the figure for England was five in a thousand.) Overall, between the wars, some 600,000 people left a country of only 5 million. The Scottish middle classes lost their confidence and their leadership role. Scotland did not develop the new industries that began to revive the English south and Midlands. From 1932 to 1937, 3,200 new factories were built in Britain, turning out everything from aircraft to radios and light bulbs. Scotland, however, had fewer factories. Scotland’s old dominant party, the Liberals, which had become an easy berth for English politicians such as Asquith and Churchill, was split and fast declining. Something was obviously badly wrong, and in the politics-drunk atmosphere of the age, it was hardly surprising that radical answers were proposed.
As we have seen, this was a time when writing mattered. In the aftermath of the war, when the claims of smaller nations, both across central Europe and in Asia, were being urgently debated by diplomats, young Scots turned their attention to their country’s plight; many concluded she too needed independence to deal with her poverty and backwardness. Their writings and answers have stuck in the memory as the work of full-time politicians has not. Edwin Muir, the poet and translator of Kafka, who had been born in Orkney and spent part of the inter-war period travelling in central Europe, became a socialist with nationalist tinges. So did Neil Gunn from Caithness, a fine and subtle novelist who worked as an excise man and became an early Scottish Nationalist supporter. So too did Lewis Grassic Gibbon, who died horribly young just as his genius was flowering. Not all the writers who began to change the atmosphere of Scottish life were on the left, of course. Compton Mackenzie, English born but a hugely influential satirical novelist in Scotland, had served with British intelligence during the Great War, and was a friend of both John Buchan and D. H. Lawrence. He was a romantic Jacobite more than a socialist, and he too helped found the Scottish Nationalist movement.
There were many more. No man, however, had a bigger impact on Scotland’s sense of herself at the time than a postman’s son from the Borders called Christopher Murray Grieve. After serving in the ambulance corps in the war and working as a journalist after it, he reinvented himself as the poet and polemicist Hugh MacDiarmid. For him, nothing less than a revolution in the Scottish
soul, including a return to earlier Scots language, would begin to deal with the depths to which Scotland had fallen. He divides people even today. Many Scots are embarrassed by MacDiarmid. Some of his poetry is terrible. He lurched and weaved across the political spectrum, calling at one point for a species of Scottish fascism, then going on to express adulation for Lenin and even Stalin. He was kicked out of the Nationalists for his communism, and the Communist Party for his nationalism. Much of his prose is now virtually unreadable and he had a nasty line in literary feuds. Some wonder whether he almost literally lost his head one night in London when, drunk, he fell out of the top deck of a bus and was saved from being brained only by his huge shock of hair. His poetry, it is said, was never quite the same afterwards.
Yet much of MacDiarmid’s earlier poetry and stretches of his later work are among the finest things written in Britain in this period. Like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ezra Pound, he was struggling with how to reinvent a language that seemed to have become stale and incapable of expressing the ideas and complexities of modern life. While Pound reached out for snatches of Italian or Chinese ideograms, Eliot went for quotation, collage and incantation, and Joyce broke the very words apart, MacDiarmid used obsolete Scots, abstruse scientific phrases and political ranting. Amazingly, it quite often worked. He could be an infuriating man and moderate politicians regarded him as a menace, yet he was also electrifyingly energetic and optimistic, and the dominant publicist for Scottish independence. His extremism was a reflection of the mood of the age. He defended political murder by Leninists – but so too did Auden. He saw things to admire in the early Mussolini – but so too did Churchill. He wanted a nationalist revolution, and he talked about the Scottish ‘race’, which seems downright weird now – but before Hitler had come and gone, so too did many writers and politicians. He is picked out here because sooner or later modern Scotland is going to have to come to terms with him, as much as the English need to remember the full Kipling, or the Russians Solzhenitsyn.