Patrick Hastings - Politics

Politics

Hastings first became involved in politics after the First World War, when he joined the Liberal Party to help improve social conditions for the poorer people of the United Kingdom. He was being prepared to be the Liberal candidate for Ilford in the 1918 general election but grew disheartened by the Liberal alliance with the Conservative Party, and also by the divisions in the party; as a result, he gave up the candidacy.

Hastings eventually switched sides and joined the Labour Party. His conversion, especially in the light of later events, was regarded by some as suspect: his entry in the Dictionary of Labour Biography reports speculation that Hastings foresaw that Labour may come to Government and had few senior lawyers to fill the Law Officer posts. John Paton, after speaking from the same Independent Labour Party (ILP) platform as Hastings, came to the conclusion that Hastings gave political speeches using his skill as a lawyer to master a brief; on the train home, Hastings appeared not to have heard of the ILP.

After an interview with Sidney and Beatrice Webb he became the Labour candidate for Wallsend in December 1920. Beatrice Webb was later to write in her diaries that Hastings was "without any sincerely held public purpose" and "an unpleasant type of clever pleader and political arriviste, who jumped into the Labour Party just before the 1922 election, when it had become clear that the Labour Party was the alternative government and it had not a single lawyer of position attached to it". However Hastings was returned for Wallsend with a majority of 2,823 in the 1922 general election.

After returning to London from Wallsend, he attended a full meeting of Labour MPs to decide who would become the Party Chairman. This effectively meant choosing the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, because Labour was the largest opposition party in the House of Commons. The two candidates were Ramsay MacDonald and J. R. Clynes, and Hastings, who supported MacDonald, persuaded six new MPs to support him. MacDonald was elected by a margin of only five votes, and Hastings later regretted his support.

Hastings was indeed Labour's only experienced barrister in the House of Commons at that time, and immediately became a frontbencher and the party's main spokesman on legal matters. He made his debut speech on 22 February 1923 against the Rent Restrictions Bill, an amendment to the Rent Act 1921. He attacked it as "a monstrous piece of legislation", and was repeatedly shouted down by Conservative MPs as a "traitor to his class". As a result of this and the slow workings of Parliament, Hastings quickly became frustrated by politics.