Let's all step down one rung!"

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to capitalism.

•From there on the logic of their decision, however unpleas ant they might personally find it, was inescapable.

MacDonald summed up the situation which his government faced in August 1931.

"States get into a condition for which an immediate remedy is required ... when leadership required-not merely to follow what is easy but to face what is difficult."

But MacDonald's remedy was rooted in his own cross class politics. For MacDonald, Labour MPs and governments represented not just the workers who supported them but the whole cross class electorate.

They were, therefore, accountable not to the labour movement, but to the framework of capitalist society.

Thus, in the interest of maintaining, the traditions of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, MacDonald, Thomas and Snowden were obliged to attack the working class.

During the parliamentary recess of summer 1931 a major gold crisis developed. Millions of pounds worth of gold was withdrawn from London banks by foreign investors.

The government's budget was already massively in deficit, and this new crisis of confidence in British capital threatened to send the whole ship aground, leading to major social convulsions and class confrontation.

Government attempts to stave off the crisis by loans were hampered by the insistence of US banks on major cuts in public spending to restore the value of British currency and stabilise British capitalism.

For world imperialism there could be no half measures: defence of capital and profits meant an all-out attack on workers' living standards and rights.

In late July 1931 Snowden had already concluded that unemployment was not only a problem for workers-it was also a problem for capitalism.

Unemployment benefits cost money, money had to be saved. MacDonald in court regalia, Ja MacDonald's [and the Tories'] target of £78 million. They literally swallowed the camel then strained at the gnat.

Turning point

Nowhere did they show a clear, principled opposition to the whole of MacDonald's pro-capitalist line!

The turning point was the August 21 joint meeting with the Labour NEC and the TUC. The assembled bureaucrats refused to go the whole hog and swallow the massive 10% reduction in unemployment benefits.

Two days later MacDonald made his cabinet resign. On the morning of 24 August he informed the King of their decision. At 9.30 pm. that same evening the formation of a National Government was announced.

The behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing had obviously been well done.

As the King's private secretary put it in his memoirs:

"It was quite by chance that Mr Baldwin did not come to see the King before Sir Herbert Samuel. inuary 1924 the poorest, most exploited layers of the electorate.

In addition, taxes were increased to raise another £81m. And on September 21 Britain quietly abandoned Snowden's "Gold Standard'.

Faced with such open treachery it is worthwhile examining the response of the remaining Labour leaders to the exit of the 15. They can hardly be accused of acting with undue haste.

It was not until October 2 some six weeks after MacDonald had decided to dissolve the Labour government he led to join the Tory National Government, that he and his cronies were expelled.

Harassed

Yet, in contrast, the members of the ILP had been harassed throughout the whole of 1931. As early as the ILP Conference of April there had been complaints that "ILP candidates are being refused endorsement throughout the Mac old in the guise of country. defender of socialism, no less!] JRHORRADIN Labour election poster 1931 had informed the Labour Women's Conference that he would not tolerate criticism of the government. "We must have discipline" he had informed the audience.

In fact the expulsion of MacDonald came only just in time for by October 11 MacDonald had already launched his own party, National Labour. The NLP posters bore the caption: The Captain who did not desert his ship'.

For workers all over Britain, however, his obituary was to be -traitor of the century.

At Shotton, Co. Durham, he was booed from the platform by angry miners during the election campaign.

• The NLP only won 18 seats at the November 1931 election: Surrounded on the National Government benches battalions of Tories, it was clear to almost all that the new government was in all but name a Tory government.

When, four years later, MacDonald was defeated at Seaham by Emmanuel Shinwell this 'truth was declared public. MacDonald was replaced as Prime Minister by Chamberlain. The Tories could rule in their own name again.

As for MacDonald and his crew of fellow turncoats, they disappeared, totally obliterated from the political scene. There never had been a "middle of Toad" politics above classes.

Their bourgeois political masters wept no tears for their "saviours' of yesteryear.

Meanwhile, in the Labour Party, reformism still ruled supreme. In 1945 Labour was returned with its biggest-ever majority.

Again the challenge loomed: reform or revolution.

Again the Labour leaders chose the capitalist road. By 1950-51 they were contemplating the use of anti-strike laws against dockers, cuts in the level of health spending and the use oi the courts against communists.

As MacDonald had told them, "You still have a job to • op Crippled by the self same reformism which drove MacDonald into the hands of the Tories, they too remained the servants of capital, not its master.

Today, the impending departure of the openly pro-capitalist clique of the Council for Social Democracy from Labour opens up all these old questions.

Stark warning

Of course, Williams and Co. cannot in óne blow reduce Labour to a tiny rump in Parliament as MacDonald did. But their presence within the ranks of Labour, and Foot's pleas for them to remain there, should be a stark warning to workers everywhere.

The departure of the Gang of 3' solves nothing.

Yes. Undoubtedly they should be driven out of the party. But this time we should be absolutely clear. They leave behind a fifth column far larger than they themselves.

For they leave behind Callaghan and Healey, the archiment's wage cutting, job slash- tects of the last Labour governpolicies. They also leave behind Mason, Labour's torture chief in Ireland. And behind them stand the ranks of the PLP who, under the leadership of Foot, are determined never to be accountable to the organised working class.

When Harold Wilson described Labour during the 1960s as the new, natural governing party' he was expressing no more than the confidence of the bourgeoisie in reformism's ability to staunchly defend the exploiters' jealously guarded "right" to exploit.

The lesson of 1931 is stark and clear. Only a party absolutely committed to the defence of the independent interests of the working class can genuinely represent and respond to the needs of that class. But for that a very different kind of party will be required from the Labour Party-whether that of 1931 or that we see in 1981.