10 - Life in the Labour party

Summary

The early 1920s saw the peak of Josiah Wedgwood's political career. No longer an obsessive campaigner for land-values taxation, he had matured as a politician and found a wider empathy with the public. The strains of the war had proved too much for the Liberal party, yet paradoxically the break-up of what might be termed his natural party provided a wonderful opportunity for him. As a war hero turned Liberal internationalist, he had managed that rare achievement for a Radical in 1918 of getting returned to parliament. Soon after, as the lone upper-middle-class Radical on the Labour benches, he was using his education, fluency and redoubtable energy to make himself one of the Opposition's leading front-benchers.

At first sight Wedgwood might seem a rather exotic bloom to thrive on the rather dour Labour benches. Indeed, as Charles Masterman was to say of him in September 1924, ‘Of all the gigantic paradoxes presented by the present conditions of Parliament, perhaps the most humorous is that which exhibits Mr. Wedgwood as member of a “Socialist” Cabinet.’ And yet on policy issues his opinions were not untypical of the Labour party of that time. His views on foreign relations and the empire were very much in line with official Labour policy, and on imperial matters he was becoming a leading theorist. On domestic issues there would seem to be more of a problem, particularly if his anti-statism is compared with clause 4 of Labour's 1918 constitution with its call for the common ownership of the means of production. The precise meaning of clause 4 was, however, deliberately left vague, for the Labour party was far from united in its economic ideology except for a general wish to reduce unemployment and improve the lives of the poor. There were genuine Socialist economic radicals, but they were not in the leadership, while Wedgwood's Cobdenite outlook – even his sympathy with the taxation of land values – was very much in line with the thinking of Philip Snowden, who dominated Labour economic policy-making until 1931.

Yet despite his parliamentary prowess Wedgwood failed to establish any position of real political power within the Labour party. If on policy matters, he was not untypical of Labour's most influential leaders, what was his Achilles heel? There were two possibilities.