100 years ago this year the Labour Party entered government for the first time as the main governing party. It would be a short-lived administration, but it represented a landmark change in British political history, the culmination of years of work and a dream dreamt by Keir Hardie.
100 years on and this time another Keir leads the first Labour government in 14 years. Like the 1924 government, today’s Labour government faces enormous social, economic and political challenges. Whilst much has changed in some ways, in other things are very much the same. Take the challenge facing Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves – an economy, both globally and nationally, far from booming. Reeves’ response so far has been to go ahead with spending cuts. This has naturally caused considerable consternation both from within her party and from those outside it. Perhaps Reeves could learn a thing or two – some may suggest what not to do – from Labour’s first Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden. Thankfully for the new Chancellor she is in luck – Pen and Sword have recently republished a new edition of Snowden’s autobiography entitled Britain’s Iron Chancellor, edited by Alex Clifford.
Clifford’s introduction provides appropriate context and historical rebuttal to those who may be familiar with Snowden simply as a figure of hate, the great traitor of the Labour movement alongside MacDonald. As Clifford qualifies, it is appropriate to view Snowden as a product of his time, “born in the 1860s and 1870s [they] could never have anticipated that their little party would gain power in their lifetime.” As Clifford succinctly argues, to attack Snowden for not achieving as much as he might have liked fails to account for Labour being “a minority government, with their hands tied behind their backs in Parliament and reliant on Liberal backing”.
Similar rebukes towards the effectiveness of the ethical socialism Snowden believed in are deftly dealt with by Clifford who suggests that it is hard “to think of a Labour leader who has offered anything more substantive” in the century since that has shown a clear plan towards the implementation of socialism. For Clifford, the recent financial crash caused by Liz Truss’ mini budget is a stark warning – “the opinion of international markets about a government’s solvency does have a real world impact” and Clifford suggests that it is this light we should view Snowden and the decisions he made as Chancellor from 1931 onwards. Clifford’s editing of the book and his introduction must be applauded as a fine example of the historian’s craft – not simply explaining or contextualizing Snowden’s words but offering a refreshing insight into why we should take note of them.
The meat of the book of course is Snowden’s autobiography, republished for the first time since 1934 and lacking none of the vividness that must have struck readers 90 years ago. Snowden as a writer combines an inclination towards clipped precision and flights of more vivid recollections. As Clifford makes clear in the introduction, Snowden was a man born out of the Victorian era and unlike Harold Wilson’s full-throated embrace of the white heat of technology like many of the founders of the Labour Party, Snowden’s rural background comes to the forefront. He describes in detail both the poverty of his upbringing, the economic hardship that he faced during the Crimean War which disrupted trade and the transition away from independent cotton weavers to those working in large factories. Snowden’s depiction of the horrors that were brought by industrialisation are a reminder of how much of the drive to form the Labour Party came from rural poverty as it did from the rise of the trade union movement.
Snowden’s insight into his contemporaries is at times blunt in its observations. Keir Hardie, Snowden declares did not derive his socialism from Marx and “he suffered in his lifetime, especially in the early of his public work, from misunderstandings, misrepresentation and persecution.” Snowden frankly suggests that Hardie was not suited to the leadership of the Labour Party, suggesting that the humdrum work of the House of Commons did not suit his oratorical, rabble-rousing temperament.
For Ramsay MacDonald, Snowden sees his colleague as an organiser with incredible rhetorical skills, yet one who faced a collapse in support from the Liberals could not save his 1924 administration. Snowden recorded John Wheatley, the great Red Clydeside MP, remarking to him that “I never knew a man who could succeed so well, even if he was telling the truth, in giving the impression that he is not doing so.” J . R Clynes, the man who was nearly Labour’s first Prime Minister, is a “diminutive man” and Fred Jowett, Bradford’s famed socialist pioneer had the appearance of “some German Professor who had wandered into the House of Commons.”.
These personal incites are related by Snowden in an almost detached way. Snowden was known as a man who could both be utterly emotionally engaged, as the sections of the book that mention his wife Ethel clearly show, and yet also detached. This is core to what makes the book a fascinating read – it captures the quixotic nature of Snowden’s character. He was a man who often was both at the heart of events but somewhat aloof from them; a man who had spent his life building the Labour Party up only to deliver a devastating speech mercilessly attacking it during the 1931 election. Snowden’s relationships were not simply limited to Labour MPs either – his relationship with Hardie is as fascinating as the one he had with Winston Churchill, who called Snowden “one of the true worthies of our age.”
Snowden was not a man who could easily be swayed but nor was he a man to give up on his principles, as he argues throughout his biography. For some it may be a difficult argument to swallow given his desertion of Labour in 1931, but Snowden’s defence of his action is based on, as he saw it, putting country before party – that the TUC and members of the Labour Party failed to understand how serious the economic situation that faced the government was. Snowden’s depiction of the events leading up to the split sees the TUC in Snowden’s eyes acting unreasonably whilst the banking institutions are depicted as being more supportive – the flashes of emotion come through most when Snowden attacks those who opposed the cuts to public expenditure, he and MacDonald believed were necessary to the economy.
Britain’s Iron Chancellor is a book that provides a greater insight into what made Philip Snowden tick than any more recent works, of which there have been few. It also offers an insight into the Labour Party’s history that is far more complex and nuanced than is often presented in other work. Snowden’s contribution to the economic orthodoxy of the early Labour Party and his relationship with MacDonald, Hardie and the Trade Union movement give a clear understanding of both how Labour succeeded in the early years of the twentieth century and how it also failed. Echoes of those failures can be seen in subsequent decades, especially in the at times deep antagonism felt between the Parliamentary Party and the Trade Union movement, an antagonism laid bare in Snowden’s autobiography.
Philip Snowden was certainly a product of his time and his autobiography, complex in the tight rope it walks between a personal memoir and an attempt to create an authoritative history of the period in which he lived, is a fine example of that. Snowden and his life’s work – to help create a Labour Party that could be a force for change in British politics- helped create the times that we live in. The past can often act as an imperfect guide to the present and whether you read this book because you want to understand Philip Snowden better or because it may provide some insight into how a Labour government can attempt to handle an economic crisis, I would highly recommend that you do.