THE FIRST ATTEMPT OF THE LABOR PARTY

TO GOVERN GREAT BRITAIN

In December, 1922, the Coalition ministry under Lloyd George came abruptly to an end; a year later the Conservative government which replaced it suffered defeat at the polls; then the Labor ministry took up the reins of government, only to be forced out of office last November by the same Conservatives they had helped to oust ten months before. In January, 1923, the Liberals combined with the Laborites to overthrow the Baldwin ministry; they then co-operated with the Conservatives to overcome the MacDonald government in October. In other words, Great Britain has held three elections in less than two years, for as soon as his party was defeated in the House of Commons, the Labor premier dissolved Parliament, because he felt that this was a great opportunity to crush the Liberal party and return to the House of Commons stronger than before. What had his government been able to accomplish in its nine months of power that he should have been so optimistic of the outcome?

For more than a dozen years British politics has been in a state of flux, as no single party has remained exclusively in power long enough to make its influence felt as a party. It has been preeminently an era of coalitions in a country notoriously hostile to coalitions. In 1911, the Liberal party found itself, after its fight for the Lloyd George budget and for the emasculation of the House of Lords, dependent on the Irish Nationalists and the Laborites, for whose support they paid by social legislation and a Home Rule Bill. The grinding necessity of the war produced a coalition ministry, first under Mr. Asquith and then under Mr. Lloyd George. Labor soon became dissatisfied with this arrangement and completely overhauled their party organization during the later months of the war. Mr. Asquith and his followers also withdrew, leaving the coalition very Conservative in tone. At the famous Carlton Club meeting the Conservatives deposed Mr. Lloyd George, and

brought on an election in which they won a decisive victory. The record of the new Conservative ministry, whether under Mr. Bonar Law or Mr. Baldwin, was far from impressive, and unemployment and business depression compelled the latter to seek in protection and imperial preference a remedy for the prevailing economic distress. With these as his leading issues, he brought on an election, the result of which surprised everybody. It left the Commons rather equally divided among the three parties, no one of them being possessed of a majority, with the result that the Liberals helped bring about the resignation of Mr. Baldwin and the accession to power of Labor under Mr. MacDonald, the first Socialist premier in British history.

The Labor government met Parliament early in February last. Soon after the beginning of August, Parliament adjourned for the summer. During the sessions, they had been outvoted ten times, at least once upon what might be termed a "vital issue"; and during the summer recess, the opposition predicted that the ministry would, on the reassembling of Parliament, receive a veritable baptism of fire; and some important newspapers prophesied that they would be forced to resign.

The jeremiads of staid old Tory gentlemen a year ago were almost convincing, as they pleaded with Mr. Asquith and Mr. Baldwin to forget their differences and effect some working agreement to keep out the hated socialists with their schemes for subverting cherished institutions. At the same moment, the more visionary and idealistic Laborites welcomed the MacDonald ministry as the beginning of an entirely new order of things, which would bring measurably closer a sort of twentieth-century utopia. The fears of the one and the hopes of the other have alike failed of realization. The first Labor government at Westminster did nothing revolutionary.

In the strictest sense, of course, Labor was never in power at all, since it depended at every stage on the support of either Liberals or Conservatives-a Labor ministry with a safety device. Hence it is unfair to judge Labor entirely on its record, because its hourly existence rested with its political rivals. Labor cannot deny, however, that it was allowed considerable freedom of action; for

Liberals and Conservatives alike dealt fairly, in the main, with His Majesty's government of the day. The Liberals, in particular, were long-suffering and kind, but whether this forbearance was due to benevolence or to their own disorganized condition will soon be evident. Making somewhat of allowance for their inexperience and tenuous hold upon power, what did the Laborites actually accomplish in their nine months of office?

Labor assumed control at a very trying time, when AngloFrench relations were greatly strained and industrial conditions critical in the extreme. Immediately on taking over the government, Mr. MacDonald faced a strike of serious proportions. Having settled this only after great difficulty, he found himself confronting another and another, until England seemed cursed with an epidemic of strikes. These industrial disturbances were probably consequent upon the Labor party's coming of age, and are indicative of the rapidly increasing self-consciousness of the laboring classes which has come in the train of the world-war, whether it be in Great Britain, France, or Russia, in all of which Labor has been in power. In Great Britain, at least, the strikes were occasioned by the ignorance of the worker and the rapacity of the profiteer, neither of whom was willing to forget the Golden Age during the war. The new ministry found these strikes unusually embarrassing, but they showed rare tact and praiseworthy firmness toward people of their own class, even when they ran the risk of losing the support of the left wing of their own party. Fortunately, they showed themselves more patriotic than class conscious, and won the confidence and respect of the country.

The election of 1923 repudiated protection, and the new cabinet boldly abolished the McKenna duties in the face of the bitterest opposition from the protected industries. In the light of the hard fight put up by these "vested" interests, one can only surmise what might have happened had they been given sufficient time to intrench themselves as they have in our own country.

In preparing the budget, Labor surprised all parties by its magnanimity. The Snowden budget contained nothing radical, and little that was objectionable even to the stiffest Tory. The duties upon the breakfast table were materially reduced, but it

now appears that middlemen have absorbed most of the reduction, leaving tea, coffee, and chocolate nearly as expensive as ever. Much was made, at the moment, of the repeal of the tax upon cheap amusements, but seats in the gallery or the pit at the theater cost the same as before. Only the cheaper seats at the "movies" (cinema) were reduced. Nothing was said of the capital levy, although it was intimated that land-tax values must come in for a readjustment soon.

British agriculture was found in a parlous condition. Various expedients were suggested, but the only remedy afforded by the Labor ministry was a minimum wage for the agricultural laborers, which was poor solace to those farmers already unable to pay the current scale of wages. The truly desperate plight of the farmers is one for which they are only slightly responsible. In many instances only a small portion of the retail price of agricultural produce goes to the farmer, and the present system of distributing food products is wasteful in the extreme. The strike of the porters at Covent Garden market made it clear that the importance of the middlemen in distributing fruits and garden products to the metropolitan area of London has been greatly exaggerated. The lessons of this strike were so instructive that public opinion may lead to a more efficient (and less expensive) system of food distribution for the English metropolis, which cannot but redound to the advantage of the agriculturist.

The housing problem was another vexatious legacy from the Baldwin ministry. Mr. MacDonald grappled with it, and with more success, perhaps, than Conservative critics will concede. Nowhere was the embarrassment of the Labor government more evident, as they encountered the profiteering tendencies of rings of building contractors on the one hand, and the monopolistic tendencies of the trade unions in the same industry on the other. The ministry wrested some concessions from both of these warring groups, with a promise of co-operation from each. The Wheatley Bill had many virulent critics. It had the merit, however, of being an extensive scheme for supplying inexpensive houses over a period of fifteen years, by providing a state subsidy for forty years. Furthermore, if two-thirds of the houses projected were not built,

the government might abandon the scheme. The work of the minister of health was rendered the more difficult by the bitter strife over evictions, by the rent strike, and by an involved strike in the building trades. One serious defeat of the Labor ministry came over the eviction bill. The rent strike was bad enough, but the stoppage of work in the building trades seemed a gratuitous insult to the government. To the uninitiated, the points at issue seem insignificant, and when the strike ended neither side gained anything commensurate with its losses, particularly in the alienation of public sympathy from contractor and workingman alike. The ministry alone gained some slight prestige by bringing this unnecessary strike to an end.

Unemployment was a thorn in the side of the ministers, all the more serious to them because it concerned so large a number of their own party. Strive as it would, the MacDonald ministry was manifestly able to reduce the number of unemployed but slightly, and once more the figures increased with the approach of the fourth winter of unemployment and discontent. Meanwhile the treasury continued to grant the "dole" to many who had no moral right to it, thus permanently increasing the number unable (or unwilling) to perform any useful work. The cost of living, moreover, persisted in going up, food and clothing being approximately twice what they had been in the early months of the war. A study of prices in shop windows makes one wonder how the British workers contrive to live on their wages. Persons ignorant of economic lore find it difficult to understand how such high prices can exist side by side with so much unemployment. To a greater degree, perhaps, than is yet generally understood, it is due to the too rapid deflation of the currency in Great Britain, while at the same time inflation was going on all around them in Europe. The exceedingly heavy income tax is also a factor in the situation. Unfortunately, steadily increasing numbers of the Labor party are charging that the bankers by deflation have impoverished their country in order to line their own pockets. Many of the poverty-stricken middle classes are also being converted to the same idea, and even some intelligent Conservative leaders have demanded some degree of inflation as a remedy for