‘The Devil’s Decade’: Party Politics in the Era of the National Governments 1931–1940

Abstract

The MacDonald ‘plot’ and the political crisis of 1931 ‘It is not possible to know at what stage in the period of office of the Labour Government [of 1929–1931] Mr MacDonald determined to betray those who had given him their trust,’ Clement Attlee, when Leader of the Labour Party later in the 1930s, wrote, adding: ‘I think that he had had the idea for some time at the back of his mind, and that his plans were laid several months before the actual breach with the Party.’¹ MacDonald’s former Parliamentary Private Secretary, MacNeill Weir, while finding it ‘difficult … to fix the exact date for the first move’ because ‘an intrigue of this kind must be conducted with the utmost secrecy,’ believed that ‘from February 1931 onwards, events moved quickly.’ For, MacDonald had already recognized ‘the radiant possibilities’ of ‘the scheme of a National Government with himself at the head.’ MacDonald’s ‘betrayal’ of the Labour Party six months later was not only ‘an act of political apostasy unparalleled in British history,’ but worse even than this because the establishment of the National Government was ‘the greatest disaster that [had] befallen that country, and indeed the world, since the [First World] War,’ being ‘comparable in its course and consequences with the setting up of the Nazi regime in Germany.’²