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A series on Labour’s bad boys has been suggested. At first sight it seemed akin to climbing Everest, there are just so many but on reflection, as one of the current phrases goes, it is doable.
Why concentrate on Labour you ask and that is a very good question. There have been plenty of dodgy Tory MPs and even quite a few Liberals/LibDems. Who could forget John Profumo, Reginald Maudling and Lords Lambton and Jellico. We should not forget Jeremy Thorpe and Cyril Smith who blotted the copybook of the Liberals. There are more than enough scandals outside the Labour Party but the sanctimonious posturing and gut wrenching superiority complex of the left just make them too tempting a target.
One who probably won’t figure in this series (I lie, he does – in this article) is Ramsay Macdonald. Ramsay was the first Labour Prime Minister and ruled from 1929 to 1935. He committed the cardinal sin of the left by entering into a coalition with both the Tories and the Liberals. For this crime he has never been forgiven
The 1929 GE (the first where women aged 21-29 had the vote [pace Gripper]) resulted in Labour having the most MPs, 287, but not an overall majority. In 1931 he tried to introduce spending cuts but failed with Labour MPs outraged. Plus ça change. Ramsay then decided on the coalition and the Labour Party expelled him. More plus ça change. His reaction was to set up the National Labour Organisation and carry on being Prime Minister of a coalition.
This story perfectly exposes that socialists are wedded to their dogma and have no interest in anything like the national interest. As a brief aside I recently saw a program on UK TV which claimed that between 1931 and 1939 the British economy had its best period ever as a result of spending cuts and possibly tax cuts. I have no idea if this is true or not, I believe it was in one of War Factories series of programs.
Ramsay was not guilty of financial impropriety or sexual escapades but of acting in what he believed to be the national interest and took what turned out to be one of the wisest decisions a PM ever made. The left of course have learnt no lessons from this and still carry on with this mindset in probably an even stronger belief they are right and everyone else is a fascist and/or a nazi.
In a similar vein I will not be addressing the gang of four who left Labour to set up the Social Democrats. These were Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers. The party had some initial success but foundered and went on to merge with the Liberals. I half suspect they were inspired by behind the scenes people who wanted Maggie Thatcher to succeed and how better to accomplish that than putting the old duffer Michael Foot in charge of Labour and splitting their vote with an alternative party of big name lefties.
For historical accuracy it wasn’t only in Labour’s 1983 manifesto that Foot was advocating disarmament, during the 1935 GE he was demanding disarmament in the face of Nazi Germany. Some may remember that during the 1930s we were quietly building up our armaments industry, had we not many of our winning weapons would not have been available during WW2 and we would have stood no chance. Against my better judgement I shall call him naïve rather than any heavier insult. I always thought he was welsh but he was born in Plymouth and the closest he came to the Celts was having a Scottish mother.
In the 1983 GE Labour recorded its lowest share of the vote for 65 years, unsurpassed until the tramp’s pathetic showing against the fat Turk in 2019. The left love their firebrands, one day they will figure out that the rest of us don’t.
That’s quite enough for an introduction, it is time to dig up lots of dirt and there is plenty.
© well_chuffed 2025
