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Famous Historical Elections: The Red Scare Election of 1924
26 Plays23 days ago
In this episode, Ethan Reuter speaks with historian Taym Saleh about the 1924 general election—the autumn showdown that cemented Britain's two-party system and buried the Liberal Party as a national force. After three elections in just 23 months, Stanley Baldwin's Conservatives swept to a crushing 200-seat majority while Herbert Asquith lost his seat and the Liberals collapsed from 155 MPs to a mere 40.
The conversation explores how Britain's first Labour government, formed almost by accident after Baldwin's disastrous 1923 tariff gamble, became trapped between proving its respectability and surviving without a majority. Saleh explains how Ramsay MacDonald's attempts to normalize relations with Soviet Russia and his handling of the Campbell Case—when prosecution was dropped against a communist journalist who urged soldiers not to fire on striking workers—fueled Conservative warnings about socialist subversion and constitutional threats.
Then came the Zinoviev Letter: a forged document, supposedly from a senior Soviet official instructing British communists to infiltrate Labour, published by the Daily Mail days before the election. Though historians now know it was fabricated, likely by Russian émigrés in Berlin, it crystallized the campaign's fundamental question: was socialism un-British?
But the real story isn't about dirty tricks—it's about how Baldwin's mastery of radio broadcasting, his soothing constitutional rhetoric, and his genius for understanding what voters wanted transformed Conservative politics. While the Liberals produced innovative proto-Keynesian economics, they fielded only 300 candidates. Labour lost power but won clarity: they were now the sole progressive force. This is the election that killed three-party politics and established the socialism versus anti-socialism dividing line that would define British politics for generations.
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Transcript
Introduction to the 1924 Election Discussion
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Observations podcast brought to you by Democracy Volunteers. I'm Ethan Reuter and in today's episode we'll be talking about the 1924 general election. I'm delighted to be joined today by Tame Salah, who is a teacher and published historian in electoral politics.
00:00:25
Speaker
Tame, welcome to the show and thank you for being here. Thanks for having me.
Post-WWI Economic and Social Conditions
00:00:30
Speaker
I first want to get into the economic context of the country and the national mood going into the election.
00:00:37
Speaker
How does the economics and the country feel about itself into 1924? um Well, everything about, ah economically and socially, almost everything about Britain in the early 1920s is some kind of echo of the consequences of the First World War, either directly in the sense that the strain and the horror of fighting the war wrought to all kinds of effects that were still being felt directly into the early and mid-1920s, in a slightly less direct way, where many people, especially um ah politicians and and policymakers, were...
Political Landscape and Social Tensions
00:01:20
Speaker
to to a more or less explicit extent, more or less explicitly trying to um ah put to banish the shadow of of of the Great War by self-consciously recreating aspects of the Edwardian pre-war world.
00:01:37
Speaker
um the the sort of latter point of doing that we see that as the as the nineteen twenty s go on with this um with hindsight quite irrational fidelity to returning to the gold standard which had been the main way in which the pre-war world had um regulated ah currencies and and and exchanges between currencies um in a way that regulated prices.
00:02:04
Speaker
um In terms of the actual direct kind of bread and butter economic situation, the one of the direct effects, economically speaking, of the First World War was inflation.
00:02:16
Speaker
That obviously um government spending to fight the war went up ah Tax revenues went down. The government was forced to borrow, by the standards of the time, astonishing amounts of money.
00:02:29
Speaker
um And this naturally had an inflationary effect. The politics, therefore, of the early 20s, of sort of the late teens, early 20s, is the politics of anti-inflation, especially on the on the conservative side, um or the sort of the right-wing half of the political spectrum, is to try to banish the deleterious consequences um of inflation, especially on what we would probably call today the the lower middle class, especially the people who are reliant on savings, the sorts of people who in any inflationary situation are the most exposed to the the consequences of um of inflation.
00:03:09
Speaker
um ah and What inflation high inflation tends to do to um a society is it really sharpens mutual antagonisms.
00:03:20
Speaker
It sharpens the sense of certain people, certain groups of people, that they are losers, that they are being, they, as opposed to certain others, are being particularly hammered by price rises. So you have this, you know, with, as I said, people reliant on savings,
00:03:35
Speaker
business owners, people on fixed incomes, um and ah people in such situations are very, very sensitive to the perception that others, other groups, are profiting at their expense.
Evolving Party Dynamics and Frequent Elections
00:03:48
Speaker
um So in the early 1920s, the sort of social economic villains on the part of this sort of petty bourgeois ah people are, um on the one hand, the sort of the fabled profiteers,
00:04:02
Speaker
those unscrupulous captains of industry who did very well after the Great War. um and And the other group, like like politically speaking, the most more significant group is um the ununionized, unskilled working class who saw, by working in the war industries, an enormous real appreciation real terms appreciation in their wages. um And so there's tremendous cauldron of social and economic anxieties at play in British society in the early nineteen twenty s
00:04:36
Speaker
And if we've touched on the economics, I want to also get into the politics that we see in the time period. What was the nature of three-party politics going into the election and the preceding elections that we see that were pretty close in in time measure?
00:04:54
Speaker
Yeah, so um although we're talking obviously today about the 1924 general election, it's hard to really ah do that topic justice without a referring to the fact that there had been, by the time of the 1924 election, two other general elections in the preceding 23 months, in the preceding two years.
00:05:17
Speaker
So um in the autumn of 1922, um ah politics in a sense really like electoral politics bursts into life um um I won't go over the details of the 1918 election because understand it's already been covered on this series but the the main thing to bear in mind is that a big difference between the politics at the end of the first world war and politics at end second world war is at the end of the First World War, the wartime coalition goes on and seeks to maintain and sustain itself indefinitely, which incidentally is what um is is what you know Winston Churchill wanted to have happen in 1945.
00:05:59
Speaker
um And if he'd had his way, perhaps we would see something similar play out in the late But in the early but in the early nineteen twenty s You have what on one level looks like a relic of ah wartime conditions with one half of the Liberal Party yoked seemingly permanently to um the Conservative Party.
00:06:19
Speaker
What David Lloyd George wants from this is to have this be the nucleus for a new center party, for the distinction between conservatives and liberals, which, of course, was um what politics was all about up until the First World War.
00:06:34
Speaker
That distinction, ah Lloyd George wants it to be evaporated, to be dissolved. um and the two parties effectively to come together um in order to better oppose ah socialism, and specifically the threat of the Labour Party. um So one way of characterising politics in the early is that is that people one way or another recognize that this period of free party, conservative versus liberal versus Labour politics is not sustainable.
00:07:08
Speaker
There has to be some kind of new two-party order, which will, people assume, be the Labour Party versus something else. And the big unknown is what exact what exact form the other thing is going to take.
00:07:22
Speaker
David Lloyd George... has a vision, which is shared by some conservatives. So Austin Chamberlain, um the older son of Joseph Chamberlain and the older brother of Neville Chamberlain, um Winston Churchill. um Conservatives and liberals like this are very keen on the idea of having a fusion between the the two um older established parties. um In 1922, however, in the autumn of 22, this falls apart.
00:07:52
Speaker
And the Tory bigwigs are sympathetic to fusion, but the backbenchers are not. The backbenchers meet in the Carlton Club in the autumn of 1922 and hold a vote.
00:08:03
Speaker
And a majority of votes in that ballot are cast in favour of pulling out, withdrawing their support from the Lloyd George Coalition. um So the coalition falls apart.
00:08:15
Speaker
There has to be a general election since the government no longer has any kind of ah majority in the Commons. um It looks like full-blooded party politics is back on the agenda with a Conservative Party standing on its own.
00:08:31
Speaker
alongside the Lloyd George Liberals, who still call themselves the National Liberals, the anti-Lloyd George Liberals, signing as just Liberals under the leadership of Herbert Asquith, and the Labour Party under Andrew McDonald. So actually, we temporarily have four-party politics.
00:08:48
Speaker
um The Conservatives win handsomely. um They win a majority of about 70 seats over all other parties. This looks like, in going into the beginning of 23, this looks like a new order has been re-established. We're going to have a Tory party that is the leading anti-socialist vehicle getting ready to face off against the Labour Party.
00:09:10
Speaker
However, something very unexpected happens. The man who had led the Conservatives at this stage, ah called a man called Andrew Boner Law, um is diagnosed with cancer, and he has to resign.
00:09:23
Speaker
he is replaced by a relatively junior figure called Stanley Baldwin. um who is not given an enormous amount um of of optimism in the sort of prognostications that other people are making, the predictions other people are making. It's not clear how, um at the time in 23, just how arguable a leader he's going to prove.
00:09:47
Speaker
um um And because of the mounting crisis in the British economy, and because of the fear that the war had permanently hobbled Britain's industrial supremacy, an old idea that we discussed um in the previous episode comes back ah to people's minds, which is the idea of protectionism.
00:10:08
Speaker
um The Conservatives, before the First World War, having learned the lesson of 1906, had adopted a consistent policy of saying at each successive general election that in this election, whichever election it is at the time, we are not seeking a mandate for protective tariffs.
00:10:26
Speaker
If we change our mind on that, we will seek a fresh mandate from the electorate in order to have this. So Baldwin decides that now is the time to go for protective tariffs. He feels he has no choice but to abide by the pledge that his predecessor, Bono Lourdes, had made in the 1922 election, which are no new tariffs until a fresh mandate is sought.
00:10:50
Speaker
So despite having a completely workable majority of 70, and despite Parliament not even being a year old, um he dissolves and calls a snap election. explicitly on the platform of tariffs.
00:11:04
Speaker
This has um some pretty bad consequences for the Tory party. The first thing it does is that it, just like in the early nineteen hundreds the looming specter of protectionism snaps back together the two halves of the Liberal Party, which previously seemed to be irreconcilable.
00:11:22
Speaker
ah Lloyd George and Asquith reunite among ah for a final last-ditch defense um of free trade. The Labour Party, although questions of free trade are not exactly core to its raison d'etre, still is enough of a kind of classic late 19th century radical party to feel this instinctive attachment to free trade.
00:11:43
Speaker
So both of the progressive parties are ah you know campaigning on full-blooded opposition. to protective tariffs. um And so we have, in some ways, the only genuinely completely even, completely and uncomplicated three-way election, three-party election we ever had.
00:12:03
Speaker
It's the only election, or at least the most recent election, in which all three parties win over 100 seats. um And the Conservatives remain the largest party, but a long way short of an overall majority.
00:12:15
Speaker
They get about 260 seats.
Labour's First Government under Ramsay MacDonald
00:12:18
Speaker
um a long way, so about 55 or so seats short of an overall majority. um ah This means that given the election was about protection and free trade parties combined comfortably outnumber the Conservatives, it's clear that there's going to have to be a changing party.
00:12:37
Speaker
The Labour Party come ahead of the Liberals. The Labour Party gets 191 seats and the Liberals get about 155.
00:12:45
Speaker
So it's clear of the two um ah progressive parties, Labour or the larger, they will form the government. The Liberal Party are certainly not going form a coalition with Labour, but they feel they have no choice um but to not stand in the way of a new Labour government.
00:13:03
Speaker
So for this reason, kind of basically by accident, we have Britain's first ever Labour government. And that was formed in January 1924.
00:13:14
Speaker
twenty four under the leadership of Ramsey MacDonald. This does not go particularly smoothly... As it turns out, this government does not last in the House of Commons for more than nine or 10 months before it is defeated a serious enough issue that it becomes clear to everyone that there will have to be yet another disillusion and yet another election the autumn of 1924. we have the autumn of 22, sort of snap election, autumn of 23, and now autumn of 24.
00:13:48
Speaker
o twenty three and now the an of twenty four Well, i want I want to get into a couple of the troubles that they faced. First, not on the the case that brought them down, but on the question of Russian treaties and the sort of starting that we see of the right-wing attack over this.
00:14:09
Speaker
What exactly was the contested issue over Russian treaties? Well, a little bit like the Soviet Union, um the Labour Party has just come into its ascendance on the political scene.
00:14:21
Speaker
um The Labour Party is by no means a Marxist party, much or less a Leninist party, but it is, of course, a socialist party. And this label is enough to make it deeply threatening ah to the Conservative Party and the social classes which the Conservative Party um represents.
00:14:41
Speaker
So there is still, in the early to mid-1920s, this profound unease on the part of the middle classes and on the part of um ah established Westminster establishment, as to how exactly the Labour Party is going to fit in fit in, if it is going to be one of the two main parties, fit into the Westminster scene.
00:15:04
Speaker
So what we have with um the Russian treaties is an exploration by the new Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald,
00:15:14
Speaker
to begin the process of normalizing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. So you have, you know, with this diplomatic level of things and the domestic political level of things, these two collide in such a way as in the hands particularly of conservative polemicists to seemingly confirm all of the most um ah grave misgivings that people on the right have about the Labour Party and whether Labour Party's sympathies really lie.
00:15:46
Speaker
Do they really lie, in other words, with a brutal Bolshevik regime which has expropriated the property's classes, slaughtered the Russian royal family, started suppressing quite brutally the established church in Russia,
00:16:03
Speaker
um and ah rhetorically committed itself to an agenda of um perpetual worldwide communist revolution. um what What exactly does it mean for British politics to have a a socialist party that is willing sit down and do deals with a regime like that?
00:16:22
Speaker
That is why the Russian treaty's issue becomes so kind of combustive in British politics. And our way from treaties into the thing that finally brings down McDonald's government in this vote of no confidence, what was the Campbell case?
00:16:44
Speaker
Okay. um John Campbell was a journalist and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. um He edited Communist Party-affiliated newspaper called The Weekly Worker.
00:16:58
Speaker
That newspaper published an article, an editorial rather, which said that if soldiers, British soldiers, were ever to be deployed against striking workers, um they should refuse to fire on those striking workers and should instead embrace their fellow workers and take up arms against a common enemy, namely the oppressing classes.
00:17:28
Speaker
um From the point of view of the law at the time, this seems to be a pretty textbook case um of the of the existing standing offence of incitement to mutiny.
00:17:39
Speaker
And so there are moves to launch a prosecution against John Campbell and against the the weekly working newspaper. um The prosecution, however, in the late summer, early autumn of 24 dropped is dropped And the question immediately arises, um what role did the Attorney General have, of the the Attorney General of um the Macdonald government, what role did he have in ah halting the prosecution?
00:18:10
Speaker
And how far, if at all, was he leaned on by his Cabinet colleagues in um in making the decision not to proceed with the prosecution. So again, in in kind of combination with the Russian treaties um ah issue that we've just discussed, we have a case where it looks off to a conservative audience it looks an awful lot like a Labour government going soft on communist subversion and communist traitors. um So again, an issue calculated almost perfectly to appeal to the darkest visions um that people in the Conservative and to a lesser extent the Liberal Party have um about what it means to have a socialist party at the very top of British politics.
Key Political Figures and Media Influence
00:19:01
Speaker
And this ultimately leads to Campbell or McDonald's vote of no confidence in the downfall of his government. I want to get into ah figures that we see that then take over during this election campaign.
00:19:14
Speaker
um McDonald's, Baldwin, Asquith, who are they, what backgrounds they come from and what do they represent to the public? um Let's start with the the recently um ah defeated prime minister at the opening the selection campaign, um ah James Ramsey MacDonald.
00:19:36
Speaker
He had been ah the leader of the Labour Party in in sort of combination with figures like J.R. Clines and Arthur Henderson um since the time of the First World War.
00:19:47
Speaker
um ah He was one of the leading figures in the Labour Party who was consistently anti-war. So in the febrile, jingoistic atmosphere of 1914, and again in 1918, he comes to quite some grief on this point.
00:20:03
Speaker
um But nonetheless, he is determined to steer the Labour Party into the to the very top of British politics, which in the sense that he became Prime Minister...
00:20:15
Speaker
um he achieved, he's determined to cement the Labour Party so that it will be in a position where it would never again have to do what it had to do way back at the beginning of the 20th century, where um ah where he, on behalf of the Labour Party, established the Macdonald-Gladstone pact that we but we discussed earlier.
00:20:39
Speaker
regarding the 1906 election. So an election pact with the Liberal Party, where Labour would be very much the junior partners. He's determined after the First World War that it's never going to happen again, that there's no further need for the Labour Party to belittle itself by...
00:20:56
Speaker
accepting liberal dictation. And so when um the election results in 1923 becomes clear, and it becomes clear that Labour has come on ahead of the Liberal Party, not only does this does this mean that he and not the Liberal Party will be forming a minority government,
00:21:14
Speaker
but that when the time comes to kind of navigate the House of Commons without a parliamentary majority, Mb. Macdonald is quite reluctant to go cap in hand to the Liberal Party to establish a kind of a permanent a basis on which it can govern for four or five years.
00:21:32
Speaker
um And so this is determination to establish, to to prove the durability and the suitability of the Labour Party. um is a real hallmark of his leadership.
00:21:42
Speaker
I said, your ability vis-a-vis the liberals, of which I've just talked about, there's also um something to be said about suitability. MacDonald is determined to demonstrate the respectability and the suitability of the Labour Party as a party of government, and as a party of Westminster, to um to the rest of the political world and to the rest of British society.
00:22:06
Speaker
um The kind of apotheosis of this um ah sort of ah dynamic of this sort of aspect of his psychology is not yet apparent in 1924. It will become apparent ah as ah six, seven, eight years later, when the start of the 1930s, when he is again prime minister,
00:22:26
Speaker
He chooses respectability and economic orthodoxy and the advice of the Treasury and the Bank of England over the political preferences of his own party and cabinet colleagues, and therefore precipitate a split in the Labour Party where he and his supporters are ousted and expelled from the Labour Party.
00:22:46
Speaker
So this is a man, in other words, um although that is at this point somewhere in the future, who is determined to prove that the Labour Party is a good fit for Westminster. So that's the first thing.
00:22:57
Speaker
That's Ramsay MacDonald. Herbert Asquith is, of course, of another generation entirely. He had already been prime minister um long before these events. He had been prime minister between 1908 1916. So he's in some ways the last um the last Edwardian, the last pre-war prime minister.
00:23:16
Speaker
That's obviously true as ah as a matter of chronology. But many observers of many and many historians sort of looking back on the period, feel it to be true in a more, shall we say, sentimental way, that um there was a certain kind of innocence about pre-war, pre-First World War politics.
00:23:36
Speaker
ah ah People were innocent of what horrors Elaine Storr, Passchendaele, and the Somme, and that therefore there was something particularly civilized about Herbert Asquith that is not so civilized about his great rival, David Lloyd George,
00:23:52
Speaker
um um And one imagines that um although Asquith's career extends some way into um the interwar period, well into the nineteen twenty s He never particularly gives the impression of being comfortable in this new post-World War I world.
00:24:14
Speaker
um um He and his supporters feel this tremendous apprehension about the social and political changes wrought on Britain by the events and the fallout from the First World War.
00:24:29
Speaker
There's never a particular impression that he imagines that he will be prime minister again, a sense that he can really recapture the initiative. What dynamism and kind of political adventurousness there is in the Liberal Party seems to be monopolized by the David Lloyd George camp.
00:24:47
Speaker
Asquith, however, by 1924, increasingly feels like a relic of another age. And this leaves us with the most emblematic figure of interwar British politics, and that is Stanley Baldwin.
00:24:59
Speaker
We mentioned him in the context of him succeeding Andrew Boner Law, where said that he did not have a particularly stellar lead-up career-wise, in the sense that He was not really seen as anyone's heir apparent until very shortly before he becomes prime minister. um Yet in the years that follow through the 20s and through most of the 30s, he is the undisputed master of British politics in the interwar period.
00:25:31
Speaker
Why is this? Partly it's because he seems more than anyone else to have a really... um unerring instinctive grasp of what it is um that the bulk, the critical mass of the British electorate want from their politics and from their politicians. What kind of rhetoric they want, what kind of politics they want.
00:25:55
Speaker
Baldwin, especially with hindsight, prides himself as being the political figure um on the Conservative side who understands the need, the the understands well the inevitability of Labour's succession to the progressive mantle in British politics, and therefore the need to have Labour be bedded in as smoothly and as unacrimoniously as possible.
00:26:22
Speaker
So he is very anti doing any deals with the Liberal Party. He is particularly anti the person of David Lloyd George, whom he finds to be straightforwardly repulsive.
00:26:35
Speaker
He abhors the demagoguery of Lloyd George and also of the media balance of people like Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere. um um And he believes that if the British people are to be kept to the faith of parliamentary constitutional government in this age of alluring totalitarian ideologies, it is incumbent on the political class to present as homely and as unthreatening and as welcoming a political arena as they possibly can.
00:27:08
Speaker
This is, I think, particularly apparent in the way that Baldwin takes quite... was that instinctive ingenuity takes to the world of radio campaigning and radio politics.
00:27:21
Speaker
Before the advent of the radio at this time in sort of the early 1920s as like a genuine a mass medium, ah political rhetoric is transmitted in the meeting hall, transmitted in person, face to face.
00:27:39
Speaker
When, if you were a politician on a platform, addressing crowds of several hundred, maybe even in the thousands, um people who have chosen to come often on a miserable week ah weekday evening to to hear a politician speak, people are doing that because they want to be entertained.
00:27:59
Speaker
And so people like Ramsay MacDonald and David Lloyd George and even people like Asquith, their rhetoric, their public-facing rhetoric, is trained towards the speaking platform, which involves a degree of showmanship, of razzmatazz, of projected voice, of loudness.
00:28:20
Speaker
Baldwin, however, not's never particularly good at that kind of politics, that kind of rhetoric. But he takes conductor of water to to the radio because people sitting at home listening to the radio don't necessarily want to hear the kind of high-stakes rhetorical projection that you really need to lay on in ah in a meeting hall in order to get the crowd going.
00:28:44
Speaker
People want to hear in the comfort of their homes something altogether more more homely. And that is precisely the manner that Baldwin um is almost born to to transmit, is almost born to give off when he addresses the microphone.
00:29:00
Speaker
um And so the radio, I think, is really almost inextricable from the manner of Baldwin of hi the virtuosity with which he really kind of at a basic level seems to get what it is that people are looking for from their politicians and therefore is at the heart of why he was such a successful political operator.
00:29:19
Speaker
And from
Conservatives' Victory and Political Transition
00:29:20
Speaker
the bombast of meeting hall speeches to now the radio, what impact does the radio and how does the radio sort of first make its appearance on politics during this election campaign?
00:29:37
Speaker
Well, the the central the central point is that and that this homeliness, this domesticity of Baldwin that I've described, pairs up very nicely with the vision of conservatism and the vision...
00:29:49
Speaker
and ultimately of Englishness, of national identity, that he is keen to project. The Conservative Party, on Baldwin's watch, fundamentally, its fundamental stance, not just particularly in this election, but really throughout the 1920s, settles on conservatism as being about the protection of what are all often usually called in this period constitutionalism.
00:30:13
Speaker
Now, what it means by constitutionalism is, on a surface level, obedience to the law, acceptance um that the only legitimate channel through which to seek political change is through the House of Commons, through Parliament and the elections which create Parliament.
00:30:32
Speaker
And that seems a very innocuous and and straightforward and pretty uncontroversial proposition. But the real subtext here is against the threat of the specter of trade union muscle.
00:30:44
Speaker
Two years after this election, in the 1926 general strike, this is really the kind of the aio the apotheosis of ah constitutionalism kind of facing off against its enemy, namely trade unionists who, from their point of view, are just trying to protect their wages.
00:31:02
Speaker
um against inflation, against attempts by captains of industry to turn the clock back to pre-1914 terms of wage levels.
00:31:13
Speaker
um But from the conservative point of view, what the trade unions are doing... quite similar to what they were accused of doing in the 70s and 80s, is to use their muscle and use their leverage to affect fundamental political change in the social order and in the political order.
00:31:32
Speaker
That is... from a Baldwin point of view, so the the definition of unconstitutional or anti-constitutional politics. And therefore, it's everything that he, in his sort gentleness and his soothing moderation, is determined rhetorically to stand against. So he's not trying to cast conservatism as being about the defense of property rights or an opposition to ah progressive taxation or to social spending, or even to some kind of accommodation with the trade unions as such, what he's trying to do is to channel all of that through the sort of the placid, quiet theater of electioneering and of the House of Commons itself.
00:32:18
Speaker
And the other main point that we see um out of the campaign is perhaps Britain's first ever October surprise, um the Zinevieve letter.
00:32:32
Speaker
What was Zinevieve letter? um So, um that um rather um infamous ah document is um attached to the name of someone called Grigory Zinoviev, who is ah a senior figure in the Communist Party in the Soviet Union.
00:32:53
Speaker
He is the head of the Comintern. which is short for the Communist International. So that is the association or the the organization that seeks under Soviet leadership to rally and coordinate communist parties around the world for ah coordinated political action.
00:33:12
Speaker
A letter in 1924 comes to the attention of the Foreign Office, which is a purportedly written by Zinoviev, addressed to the British Communist Party, telling them, in effect, don't worry about anything else. Just get yourself nicely infiltrated inside the Labour Party.
00:33:34
Speaker
The Labour a Party you' will make a very nice vehicle for the British wing of the international revolution. um This letter quite quickly finds its way into ah the hands of the editors of the Daily Mail who go on to publish it.
00:33:52
Speaker
quite ah credulously, because um it becomes quite clear subsequently, um ah particularly to historians in the decades since, that this letter was a complete fabrication.
00:34:07
Speaker
Zinoviev never wrote or said or thought any such thing. um There were some speculations to who actually made the fabrication. um It's thought, um one particular theory holds that this was forged by a group of um ah Russian emigres in Berlin who sought to influence the British government in a more anti-Soviet direction to head off any moves towards normalization.
00:34:37
Speaker
um But suffice it to say um that there was no Zinoviev letter. um and that therefore this counts a pretty pretty low trick.
00:34:50
Speaker
Although one should say that in terms of affecting the outcome, there is not that much reason to suppose that what actually happened was materially affected the Zinoviev letter. There's not that much reason to suppose that if the Zinoviev letter had never been published or had never been forged, um the outcome of the election would have been any different.
00:35:13
Speaker
But nonetheless, that has not stopped um has not stopped the Sonovia Veta from assuming a place of um a great infamy in the kind of collective martyrology of the Labour Party as one of the dirty tricks which the establishment has employed against the Labour Party in order to diddle the Labour Party and the workers out of their just desserts in the political system.
00:35:41
Speaker
Certainly the mythology still surrounds it. What was shifting, what was the breakdown of the actual results that we see post-election campaign and into actual polling?
00:35:56
Speaker
Right, so um the headline... um of the election is that this is a decisive, not far short of overwhelming Conservative victory.
00:36:07
Speaker
The Conservatives win something over 400 seats, giving them a majority of around about 200 seats over all other parties. So this is not just a repeat of the 1922 election, where the Tories also won a pretty comfortable victory.
00:36:23
Speaker
This is obviously, firstly, a much bigger majority. They've won more seats than they did 1922. But more than that, they've been able to demonstrate a complete mastery of the electoral and political scene.
00:36:37
Speaker
Unlike in 1922, where the Liberal Party was sort of still split in half and there was some ambivalence as to whether one of those halves was still kind of an outride of the Conservatives and that gave that part of the Liberal Party some kind of continued kind of lingering life.
00:36:54
Speaker
um The Liberal Party left to stand on its own two feet, unsupported, unallied with by the Conservatives, is absolutely blown away.
00:37:07
Speaker
Asquith loses his own seat in Paisley, just outside Glasgow. and The Liberal Party as a whole is reduced to a rump of about 40 seats, um down from the or so they had just a year before um The Labour Party has obviously sustained a big defeat in the context of a Tory landslide, but the silver lining for them is that there's now no longer any room for uncertainty.
00:37:35
Speaker
They are the main opposition party. They are the main progressive party. They're the main anti-conservative force. And anyone in British society who is unhappy with the conservative government and wants an alternative would now have precious little choice but to throw in their lot with the Labour Party.
00:37:54
Speaker
So in in a sense, um this is ah big defeat for the Labour Party, obviously. They are ejected from government quite brutally. But in terms of the long-term trajectory of British politics, this is all pretty unmistakable.
00:38:10
Speaker
um that There is no remaining ambiguity as to whether Labour and Liberals will split the anti-Tory vote or anything like that. ah its Politics is now Conservative versus Labour.
00:38:22
Speaker
And from the three-party system to the two-party system, what was the reaction of each of the three parties post-election? So the Conservatives are obviously basking in this euphoria.
00:38:37
Speaker
They feel that they have now found new race on death, namely anti-socialism. um So they are now kind of quite uncomplicatedly the party of anti-Labour.
00:38:49
Speaker
The party the what that tells people that they will stop the trade unions from getting too powerful. The party that, in line with this Baldwinian vision of constitutionalism, is not going to use its power to fight class war um unremittingly, but it is going to it is going to justify itself as being a roadblock for to continued radical social change powered by a Labour movement that is sort of split in its methods and its kind of arms between a parliamentary wing, the Labour Party, and an extra parliamentary wing, the the trade union movement writ large. um That sort of duality or ambiguity about how you do politics is sort of, if there's anything that the Conservative Party kind of rejects as a way of doing politics,
00:39:38
Speaker
It's that. um And so the Conservatives um ah have a sense of what they're against. and There's now a clearer sense of what politics is about. It is about this thing of Labour slash trade unions against everyone else in British society.
Baldwin's Leadership and Conservative Ideology
00:39:54
Speaker
um ah But that doesn't necessarily make for particularly fully fleshed out ah legislative program. And by the time the parliament elected in 1924 expires in 1929, it's not particularly clear what the Conservative government, having been in office with an enormous majority for five years, can really say for itself. And that partly explains why it comes to grief in 1929.
00:40:19
Speaker
um excuse me in i in twenty nine um As for the Labour Party, um i as I said, they've been ejected from government, but um a lot of the big questions about the future of the party, the future of progressive politics, what kind of relationship is going to have to continue to have the Liberal Party, all of those things are kicked into touch. um that is They too, in their own way, benefit from this clarity of how British politics can now be characterised.
00:40:51
Speaker
And finally, we have the Liberal Party, which is in much the worst state of the three. As I said, Asquith has lost his seat. He will not enter the Commons again.
00:41:03
Speaker
He's now effectively retired from politics. um So this leaves the field clear for David Lloyd George, who still has this kind of entrepreneurial zeal in politics of trying to make things happen.
00:41:18
Speaker
Liberalism is now... um his patrimony and no one else's for as long as he's still alive. um So for the remainder of the nineteen twenty s the Liberal Party tries to rebuild partly organisationally because the Liberal Party fielded very few candidates for a national party in this election.
00:41:38
Speaker
This is one aspect of the results that Bear's mentioning, that I said, you know, Conservatives are 410 or so Labour are on just under 200, the Liberals are on 40.
00:41:51
Speaker
Part of the reason, arguably, why the Liberals are where they are in in that seat tally is because they only field 300-odd candidates. And so the created organizational ability and the ambitions of the Liberal Party have enormously shrunk.
00:42:08
Speaker
um And part of the work of rebuilding the Labour Party of the Liberal Party is is ah to rebuild that that aspect of the Liberal Party's existence. In the remainder of the 1920s, the Liberal Party still shows, largely thanks to Lloyd George himself,
00:42:24
Speaker
a certain kind of inventiveness. So ironically, although obviously they're now unmistakably the third third force in British politics, they enter the 1929 election with in some ways a much more um intellectually intellectually kind of heterodox and progressive agenda than even the Labour Party.
00:42:47
Speaker
They are advocating a kind of proto-Keynesianism. in their 1929 manifesto, which is called We Can Conquer Unemployment, um which advocates something that looks like job creation schemes and counter-cyclical spending and economic stimulus and all these things that would not be systematically propounded by J.M. Keynes and until the following decade. um so um So, yeah, so there's now, after all the hurly-burly of 22, 23, 24, there is now,
00:43:19
Speaker
there iss now a quiet stability, at least the ah the sort of the top level of Westminster politics, reflects the new kind of clarity and order and purpose that the political system now seems to have as a result of this election.
00:43:37
Speaker
And what was the most consequential factor of those that we have covered in actually deciding the scale of this conservative majority and the outcome of the elections?
00:43:50
Speaker
um I think it's fundamentally that this new rationale of operating basis of British politics, which is socialism versus anti-socialism, is a compelling one, not only in terms of political narratives, but in reflecting the actual divisions in British society. This is, in short, a dividing logic that the British electorate more or less buy into.
00:44:18
Speaker
um And when that's the case, there's just a brutal kind of arithmetic reality that when invited to kind of participate in this sort of headcount, um ah there are far more electors who are um ah likely to sign up to the anti-socialist banner than there are those likely to sign up to the socialist banner.
00:44:43
Speaker
This isn't really about issues as such. Apart from all the stuff brought up by the Zanowiec letter and the Campbell case and all the rest of it, there aren't any day really tangible... like proposed by policy proposal issues to form kind of firm um ah kind of core um points of discussion around which everything else can be organized.
00:45:07
Speaker
This really is about what does socialism mean? Is there something kind of un-British or anti-British? about um ah this particular kind of radical ideology.
00:45:19
Speaker
Are the trade unions and their assertiveness a threat to other parts of British society? These are the sorts of questions which really kind of animate things um in the 1924 election. And so I think it really is simply the playing out of that fundamental bit of logic.
00:45:36
Speaker
And we've touched on the idea that this brought about a two-party system pretty clearly. what was What were the other legacies and long-term impacts of the 1924 election?
00:45:52
Speaker
um Well, I think this um basically ah cements ah ah the ideological position of the Conservative Party. It cements the sense of what they're really all about.
00:46:05
Speaker
It ensures that Baldwin stays as Conservative leader all the way until 1937. um And with him at the helm, all sorts of paths are not taken.
00:46:15
Speaker
if you think later in the decade, even though there is the Vancouver and the general strike, the aftermath of the general strike, legislatively, there is some kind of punishment the Treaty Union movement in the form of the Trade Disputes Act 1927, which...
00:46:30
Speaker
which um um which serves to limit the kinds of funding that the consent that the the trade union movement can provide for the Labour Party.
00:46:46
Speaker
But even then, in some ways, legislatively speaking, the Conservative government and the Baldwin are pulling their punches. They're not... doing what some people on the right of the toy party would have pushed for which is really go after the terms on which workers have a right to strike similarly going into the nineteen thirty s um something that divides sort of in the tent baldwinian conservatives from out and uh figures like churchill is the question of home rule for india and dominion status for india
00:47:19
Speaker
and whether there can be any kind of implicit recognition that India is on some kind of path to something that might end up looking like independence. um On those sorts of imperial questions, and the diehards, so-called, um are more or less shunted out into the cold. um And so the the kind of political capital and the political position that Baldwin has to make these sorts of calls really derive um from the 1924 election, i think.
00:47:50
Speaker
And
Further Reading and Closing Remarks
00:47:51
Speaker
for those that are interested particularly in this election or have heard anything that they like, would you have any further recommendations or anything that you could point them to and which they could learn more?
00:48:04
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. So um in terms of just getting to grips with the interwar period in Britain, for me, um the first port of call, so far as historians are concerned, is Ross McKibben.
00:48:16
Speaker
He contributed the interwar volume to the the new series of the Oxford History of England. yeah That came out in two volumes, both of which he authored. The first sort of slenderer one, which is which covers party politics squarely, is called Parties and People, England from 1918 to 1951.
00:48:35
Speaker
And the thicker, altogether kind of more ambitious work, which covers English ah english social history, is called Classes and Cultures. Both of those I heartily recommend.
00:48:46
Speaker
If you want to sink sink your teeth into the sophology and the electoral politics of um and the 1920s, the go-to text is by someone called Chris Cook called The Age of Alignment.
00:49:02
Speaker
In the field of electoral politics, I would be remiss if I did not mention my own co-authored article with someone else who I believe has been a guest of this podcast, Dr. Luke Blacksell, about the electoral politics of the 1920s that can be found in the historical journal.
00:49:21
Speaker
um If one wants to get to grips with the history of um the Conservative Party, the reference text is by Chris ramden Ramsden, Conservatives under Balfour and Baldwin, which covers both Edwardian and interwar Conservative parties.
00:49:36
Speaker
um So I think hopefully those those recommendations would um would be a good starting point for our listeners. Thank you for joining me. It has been a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
00:49:49
Speaker
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00:50:02
Speaker
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00:50:17
Speaker
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00:50:31
Speaker
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