A disgrace in 1931, and now

Formation of a national government would be an attack on democracy and give succour to fascism
Comments (10)

Tony Benn
The Guardian, Thursday December 11 2008
Article history

The argument that we might have to consider a national government to deal with the economic crisis, as put in these pages on Monday by Frank Field, is the clearest indication that capitalism and democracy are incompatible. It is of course not a new argument - Ramsay MacDonald, then Labour prime minister, followed that course in 1931, joining with the Tories and the Liberals and calling an election in which only 51 Labour MPs survived. That national government continued until 1940 and was directly responsible for the appalling suffering during the slump that followed, with mass unemployment and destitution for the many thrown out of work.
Oswald Mosley, once a Labour MP and minister, responded by setting up the New party, which developed into the British Union of Fascists; he used the Jews as scapegoats in much the same way as some MPs today seem ready to blame immigrants. Stanley Baldwin, who succeeded MacDonald, then followed a policy of appeasement towards Hitler and it was only when Churchill came to power in 1940 and Labour entered into the wartime coalition that this period ended.
In 1931 MacDonald described the party he had helped to found as "Bolshevism gone mad". He swept to power while many of his old colleagues, including my father, who had been in MacDonald's cabinet, were defeated.
A national government in peacetime amounts to a declaration that democracy cannot be maintained if market demands are so strong that no party can expect to challenge them and survive.
During the 1930s Labour did survive, increasing its seats by 100 in the 1935 election. When the manifesto was drafted for the postwar election in 1945, it contained a very clear statement about the causes of that prewar crisis: "The sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men." This manifesto won an overwhelming majority and gave the party the support it needed to establish the welfare state and the NHS, and public ownership of gas, electricity, water and transport.
This formed the basis of a broad political consensus, until the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. She launched a counter-revolution against democracy, to break the power of trade unionism, strangle local government, and launch a programme of privatisation - all designed to put the market back in charge. Tony Blair's New Labour project was based on his belief that the only way to win an election was to adopt those policies, and it should be no surprise that Thatcher described New Labour as "her greatest achievement".
In this sense the present economic crisis is actually a crisis of democracy as the market has taken from parliament the power to shape the policy of the nation. Elected leaders, such as George Bush and the prime minister, have been left the role of commentators on the crisis and suppliers of endless cash in an attempt to save a system that failed us.
If a national government is formed, it will constitute a direct attack on democracy. Electors will be denied any choice in government policies, and it will be no surprise if the BNP seeks to benefit from the crisis, as Mosley did, by finding its own scapegoat. The Labour movement will be in opposition, and the various sectarian left groups that waste so much time fighting each other might realise that they have to work with that movement to provide relevant alternatives.
We should therefore all be grateful to Frank Field for speaking up in favour of a national government. If it happens, we shall be ready to reassert the importance of democracy and what it can offer us.
• Tony Benn is a former Labour MP and cabinet minister

tony@tbenn.fsnet.co.uk