History of The British Labour Party - Opposition During The Time of The National Government

Opposition During The Time of The National Government

Arthur Henderson, who had been elected in 1931 as Labour leader to succeed MacDonald, lost his seat in the 1931 General Election. The only former Labour cabinet member who survived the landslide was the pacifist George Lansbury, who accordingly became party leader.

The party experienced a further split in 1932 when the Independent Labour Party, which for some years had been increasingly at odds with the Labour leadership, opted to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. The ILP embarked on a long drawn out decline. The role of the ILP within the Labour Party was taken up for a time by the Socialist League led by Stafford Cripps, until it was wound up in 1937.

The Labour Party moved to the left during the early 1930s. The party's programme "For Socialism and Peace" adopted in 1934, committed the party to nationalisation of land, banking, coal, iron and steel, transport, power and water supply, as well as the setting up of a National Investment Board to plan industrial development.

Public disagreements between Lansbury and many Labour Party members over foreign policy, notably in relation to Lansbury's opposition to applying sanctions against Italy for its aggression against Abyssinia, caused Lansbury to resign during the 1935 Labour Party Conference. He was succeeded by his deputy Clement Attlee, who achieved a revival in Labour's fortunes in the 1935 General Election, winning a similar number of votes to those attained in 1929 and actually, at 38% of the popular vote, the highest percentage that Labour had ever achieved, securing 154 seats. Attlee was initially regarded as a caretaker leader, however he turned out to be the longest serving party leader to date, and one of its most successful.

With the rising threat from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Labour Party gradually abandoned its earlier pacifist stance, and came out in favour of rearmament. This shift largely came about due to the efforts of Ernest Bevin and Hugh Dalton who by 1937 also persuaded the party to oppose Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement.

Labour achieved a number of by-election upsets in the later part of the 1930s despite the world depression having come to an end and unemployment falling.