ABSTRACT
If ramsay macdonald had died at some point in the early 1920s, his reputation as a Labour pioneer, party organiser and socialist philosopher would have been as revered as those of his contemporaries Keir Hardie, Philip Snowden or Arthur Henderson. He would be commemorated on banners and in socialist songs and quoted in politicians’ speeches. He helped to build the Labour Party from a disparate collection of local groups and socialist societies into a unified political party capable of forming governments, and he did it in only 25 years. Through his prolific outpouring of books and pamphlets, he gave Labour, along with the Fabians, trade unions, co-operatives and Christian Socialists, a distinctly British brand of ethical socialism. Yet, because of his impotence as Labour Prime Minister in the face of the Great Depression in 1929, and his tragic miscalculation in splitting the Labour government to form the National Government with the Conservatives in 1931, his place in Labour’s history is as its greatest traitor: the leader who betrayed us. Even the mild-mannered and taciturn Clement Attlee, who was MacDonald’s PPS between 1922 and 1924 and eventually succeeded him as Labour Leader, wrote that he had perpetrated ‘the greatest betrayal in the political history of this country’. 1
