National Labour: “Quite dead” or “The coming force”? The Labour faction of Britain’s National Government under Baldwin & Chamberlain, 1935-39

The National Labour Committee, from 1937 the National Labour Organisation, was the last political party to provide Britain with a prime minister outside of Labour and the Conservatives and has to date been the longest-lived (and arguably most successful) party to break away from Labour. However, it currently represents a significant blind spot in the historiography of interwar British politics. Although the crisis and general election of 1931, and the Labour Party split they entailed, are well-understood, as are the ‘high politics’ of the National Government, practically nothing has been written on National Labour as a party.

This thesis aims to remedy this deficiency by examining National Labour as an institution in the period 1935-39. The general election of 1935 proved a bruising experience for the party, amidst the context of near-total lack of organisational activity and Ramsay MacDonald’s recent retirement from the premiership. Although the consensus to date has been that the poor performance in that election marked “the end of the road” for National Labour, in fact the next four years saw a remarkable and unexpected rebirth.

As MacDonald left the political stage, National Labour evolved from a London-based committee that supported candidates and published essays into a modern political party with constituency organisations, area councils and conferences and women’s and youth wings. The party’s personnel also changed, from being a rump of MacDonaldite defectors, to, by the end of the decade, a youthful core of progressive centrists, forward-looking and largely free from the baggage of 1931. Competitive internal elections, a steady trickle of prominent recruits and intense ideological clashes over appeasement indicate the emergence of a genuine institutional life by 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War removed the party’s raison d'être.