ABSTRACT
The prospect of a minority Labour Government created a great deal of anxiety in the pages of newspapers and the periodical press during the first few weeks of 1924. The English Review warned its readers that ‘For the first time in history the party of revolution approach their hands to the helm of the state…with the design of destroying the very bases of civilised life’.1 A letter writer to The Times solemnly informed readers that the Labour Party ‘was supported in Parliament by the votes of Communists, the wild men, the illiterate, and the thousand and one of the submerged or semi-submerged, who, for one cause or another, are thoroughly disgruntled, and who are prepared to denounce every Government in turn which neglects, regardless of merit and cost, to supply homes, food and pensions in abundance for all’.2 Philip Snowden, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1924 government, later recalled that he was asked in all seriousness whether ‘it was true that the first thing the Labour Party would do would be to cut the throats of every aristocrat and steal all their property’.3 There was doubtless something artificial about the hysteria whipped up by sections of the press over the prospect of a Labour Government. The phlegmatic reaction of King George V, who noted ruefully that he had to ‘march with the times’,4 was echoed by many denizens of the political establishment who hoped that experience of government might encourage the Labour leadership to abandon altogether its residual commitment to radical socialism. The appointment of the first Labour Government nevertheless had the potential to serve as a significant watershed in the development of British political life.
