Hugh Dalton - Political Career

Political Career

Dalton stood unsuccessfully for Parliament four times: at the Cambridge by-election, 1922, in Maidstone at the 1922 general election, in Cardiff East at the 1923 general election, and the Holland with Boston by-election, 1924, before entering Parliament for Peckham at the 1924 general election.

At the 1929 general election, he succeeded his wife Ruth Dalton as Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Bishop Auckland in 1929 and became a junior Foreign Office minister in the second Labour Government. As with most other Labour MPs, he lost his seat in 1931, though he was re-elected in 1935. During the World War II coalition, Winston Churchill appointed him Minister of Economic Warfare from 1940 and he established the Special Operations Executive, and was later a member of the executive committee of the Political Warfare Executive. He became President of the Board of Trade in 1942; the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, drafted into the Civil Service during the war, was his Principal Private Secretary.

Although a Labour politician, Dalton was a strong supporter of Churchill during the crisis of September, 1938, when Lord Halifax and other Conservative supporters of appeasement in the war cabinet urged a compromise peace.

After the Labour victory in the 1945 general election, Dalton had been expected to become Foreign Secretary, but instead the job was given to Ernest Bevin. Dalton became Chancellor of the Exchequer and nationalised the Bank of England in 1946. In the same year Dalton established a £50million National Land Fund, for the purchase of land and buildings with a view to preserving them for the nation as "a thank-offering for victory and a war-memorial". Alongside Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps Dalton was initially seen as one of the "Big Five" of the Labour Government.

During this time Britain, whose overseas investments had been sold to pay for the war (thus losing Britain their income), was suffering severe balance of payments problems to pay for the effort of maintaining a global military presence. The American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes in 1946 was soon exhausted, and by 1947 rationing had to be tightened and the convertibility of the pound suspended. In the atmosphere of crisis Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps intrigued to replace Clement Attlee with Ernest Bevin as Prime Minister; Bevin refused to play along and Attlee bought off Cripps by giving him Morrison's responsibilities for economic planning. Ironically, of the "Big Five" it was to be Dalton who ultimately fell victim to the events of that year.

Dalton was under great strain. Walking into the House of Commons to give the autumn 1947 Budget speech, he made an off-the-cuff remark to a journalist, telling him of some of the tax changes in the budget, which was printed in the early edition of the evening papers before he had completed his speech, and whilst the stock market was still open. This led to his resignation for leaking a Budget secret; he was succeeded by Stafford Cripps. Though initially implicated in the allegations that led to the Lynskey tribunal in 1948, he was ultimately exonerated.

In 1948 he returned to the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, then became Minister of Town and Country Planning in 1950, renamed as Minister of Local Government and Planning in 1951. He still had the ear of the Prime Minister, and enjoyed promoting the careers of candidates with potential, but was no longer a major political player as he had been until 1947. He left government after the 1951 General Election.

Budgetary policy under Dalton was strongly progressive, as characterised by policies such as increased food subsidies, heavily subsidised rents to council house tenants, the lifting of restrictions of house-building, the financing of national assistance and family allowances, and extensive assistance to rural communities and Development Areas. Dalton was also responsible for funding the introduction of Britain's universal family allowances scheme, doing so "with a song in my heart," as he later put. In addition, the National Lund Fund was established.

Food subsidies were maintained at high wartime levels in order to restrain living costs, while taxation structures were altered to benefit low-wage earners, with some 2.5 million workers taken out of the tax system altogether in Dalton’s first two budgets. There were also increases in surtax and death duties, which were opposed by the Opposition. According to one historian, Dalton’s policies as Chancellor reflected “an unprecedented emphasis by central government on the redistribution of income”.

He was president of the Ramblers' Association from 1948 to 1950 and Master of the Drapers' Company in 1958-59. He was made a life peer as Baron Dalton, of Forest and Frith in the County Palatine of Durham in 1960.

Although Dalton was married and had a daughter who died in infancy in the early 1920s, his biographer Ben Pimlott suggested that he was a repressed homosexual. As a young man, Dalton was close to the poet Rupert Brooke, who died of disease on his way to Gallipoli in 1915, and in later years, he acted as a mentor to various handsome young men - who were almost uniformly heterosexual. One notable beneficiary of Dalton's support was Anthony Crosland, whom Dalton talent-spotted at the Oxford Union in 1946 and whose selection for a winnable seat for the 1950 General Election Dalton later helped to arrange. Another was James Callaghan.

His papers, including his diaries, are held at the London School of Economics Library.