Ramsay MacDonald(1866–1937)

James Ramsay MacDonald was born at Gregory Place in Lossiemouth on the Moray Firth on 12 October 1866, the illegitimate son of Anne Ramsay, a housemaid, and John MacDonald, a ploughman from Easter Ross. He was raised in a one-room cottage in the fishing town by his mother, his grandmother and an aunt, on the herring season and the parish school. He was schooled at the Free Church school in Lossiemouth until thirteen, did three years as a pupil-teacher at the same school, and at eighteen left for Bristol to clerk for a Unitarian minister with radical politics. By twenty he was in London, working his way into the socialist circles of the 1880s.

He joined the Fabian Society in 1886 and the Independent Labour Party at its founding in 1893; he was the ILP's first secretary. In 1896 he married Margaret Gladstone, a serious-minded social reformer of independent means whose financial security allowed him to give up clerking and write full-time. The Labour Representation Committee, formed in 1900 by the trade unions, the ILP and the Fabians to put working men into Parliament, made MacDonald its secretary. He drafted its constitution, ran its first general election in 1906 (which returned twenty-nine MPs and became the Labour Party in name later that year), and built the organisational machine that brought Labour to its first 1.5 million votes by 1910. Margaret died of septicaemia in 1911. Three years later he opposed British entry into the First World War on principled pacifist grounds, was driven from the Labour leadership and from his Leicester seat, and spent the war years writing in the wilderness, denounced in the press as a traitor.

The wilderness ended in 1922. He won the Aberavon seat that year, was elected leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party the same week, and in January 1924, after the Conservatives lost their working majority, was sent for by George V to form Britain's first Labour government. He was fifty-seven. The minority administration lasted nine months and fell on a confected scandal, the Zinoviev Letter, engineered to break Labour at the autumn election. He was returned to office in May 1929 with the second Labour government, this time at the head of the largest party in the Commons, with the Wall Street Crash arriving five months later.

The Depression broke his second government and his political career. Through the summer of 1931 the Treasury and the Bank of England demanded a balanced budget; the cabinet majority would not agree to a 10 per cent cut in unemployment benefit and the government collapsed on 23 August. The next morning, after a meeting with George V at the Palace, MacDonald did not resign as Labour expected him to; he agreed to lead a National Government of Conservatives, Liberals and a handful of Labour ministers. The Labour movement saw it as betrayal. He was expelled from the party he had built and is still remembered inside it as the great betrayer. The historians' view since has been more balanced: he believed, on the advice he was given, that the alternative was the collapse of sterling, and the National Government did stabilise the currency and won the October 1931 election by a landslide. The cost was that he led the National Government for four years more as a leader without a party, his health and his powers visibly going, and was eased aside as Prime Minister by Stanley Baldwin in 1935.

He served on as Lord President of the Council into 1937 and died of heart failure on the SS Reina del Pacifico on 9 November 1937, on a sea voyage to South America that his doctors had recommended for his health. He was buried beside Margaret at Spynie cemetery outside Lossiemouth, looking out over the firth where he had grown up. The MacDonald name carries his memory in two distinct ways. Inside the British Labour movement he is the cautionary figure, the leader who chose coalition over party at the moment of crisis. In the wider history of British democracy he is the boy from a Moray fishing town who broke into a system that had locked working men out of government for two centuries, and who proved that a workers' party could form a government of the United Kingdom. Both verdicts are true.