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The Fall of the First MacDonald Government, 1924

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How Labour Governments Fall
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Abstract

On leaving his Whitehall office on a cold January evening in 1924, Thomas Jones, assistant cabinet secretary, saw the newspaper placards announcing ‘Lenin Dead (official), Ramsay MacDonald Premier’ (Jones, 1960: 266). This juxtaposition of two monumentally important headlines was unfortunate, but remarkably apposite in the short history of the first Labour government, whose fortunes were very much determined by the relationship between Britain and the Soviet Union, although that was played out within the context of a nine-month-long minority socialist Labour government dependent upon the Liberal Party to maintain it in power.

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© 2013 Keith Laybourn

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Laybourn, K. (2013). The Fall of the First MacDonald Government, 1924. In: Heppell, T., Theakston, K. (eds) How Labour Governments Fall. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314215_2

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