Philip Snowden: The First Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer

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Perhaps its greatest achievement was lasting as long as it did, brought down in the end by dirty tricks and lies in the press.

Although his parents and sisters were involved in weaving at the Ickornshaw Mill, he did not join them; after attending a local board school (where he received additional lessons in French and Latin from the schoolmaster) he stayed on as a pupil-teacher. Bevan resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in April 1954 over Labour's support for the setting-up of SEATO.In the summer of 1959 Bevan supported Gaitskell on the NEC against Frank Cousins over unilateralism, which Bevan had opposed at the 1957 Conference, and nuclear tests (24 June 1959). Gaitskell again rejected Treasury advice to raise interest rates to cool the economy in June, July and August 1951. During the 1959 election campaign Crossman thought Gaitskell had become "a television star" with Bevan "a rather faded elder statesman behind him" (22 September 1959). After breaking with Labour policy in 1931, Snowden was expelled from the party but continued to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ramsey MacDonald’s National Government coalition. His predecessor Stafford Cripps wrote to him praising him for not giving in to "political expediency", whilst he was supported in public by two younger MPs later to be staunch allies, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland.

He attempted to resign in the summer but was dissuaded by Gaitskell and Plowden because of the outbreak of the Korean War. This period was characterised by factional infighting between the ' Bevanite' left of the Labour party led by Aneurin Bevan, whose strength lay mainly in the constituency Labour Parties ("CLP"s) and the ' Gaitskellite' right who had the upper hand in the Parliamentary Party (Labour MPs – known collectively as the "PLP"). Many other countries followed suit, so it was mainly UK trade with dollar-using countries which was affected. In 1930 he rejected the Mosley Manifesto issued by junior Labour ministers led by Oswald Mosley proposing a programme of high spending on public works and autarkic Imperial Preference to combat unemployment. In September 1950, with Britain's balance of payments now in surplus, Gaitskell negotiated British membership of the European Payments Union, meaning that instead of bilateral clearing, European currencies were to be convertible against one another even if not against the US dollar.He argued that higher interest rates would be perceived as generating profits for the banks, which would not sit well with trade unions, and he was only prepared to consider demanding that the banks restrict credit. Although he had chaired the ILP for a second time, from 1917 to 1920, Snowden resigned from the party in 1927 because he believed it was "drifting more and more away from. However, with the decline of Keynesianism as a model after 1968, historians have re-evaluated Snowden in a more favourable light. His first speech on Suez (2 August 1956) attacked Nasser and was welcomed by many Conservatives, and implied that he would support the use of force, but in Brivati's view did not give enough emphasis to his stipulation that it be done through the United Nations.

Bondfield would later become the first female cabinet minister and the first woman to be a privy counsellor in the UK. Richard Hamilton with his wife, Terry Hamilton, both supporters of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, collaborated to produce Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland, 1964, with Richard completing the piece in 1964 after Terry's death in 1962. Winston Churchill, 'Philip Snowden', Sunday Pictorial (2 August 1931), quoted in Richard Langworth (ed.Harold Wilson ( President of the Board of Trade) and George Strauss ( Minister of Supply) warned Gaitskell that the burden of rearmament was too much for the shortage of raw materials and manufacturing capacity, but Gaitskell ignored them as they were friends of Bevan. on armaments, although most of his speech was a warning not to rearm too fast and that communism would be defeated through democratic socialism not through arms. He did not reject public ownership altogether, but also emphasised the ethical goals of liberty, social welfare and above all equality, and argued that they could be achieved by fiscal and social policies within a mixed economy. Gaitskell and Wilson met with Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Cripps at Chequers on 19 August, and Bevin and Cripps agreed with some reluctance to devaluation. Gaitskell was given his first ministerial appointment in May 1946 as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Fuel and Power, serving under Emmanuel "Manny" Shinwell.

The men and women who formed Labour’s government included many of the greats who had led Labour in its first quarter-century. Margaret Thatcher compared Blair with Gaitskell in a different manner, warning her party when Blair came to power that he was the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell.

In 1898, he launched the Keighley Labour Journal, using it to denounce waste, pettiness, and corruption. After her divorce, hard to obtain prior to the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937, they were eventually married on 9 April 1937, Gaitskell's thirty-first birthday, with Evan Durbin as best man. In the event Wilson's closest allies as Prime Minister – Crossman and Castle – were former Bevanites. The object of Socialism is not to render the individual capable of living on his personal resources. Gaitskell thought balance of payments problems should be solved not by realignments of currencies but by asking surplus countries like the US and Belgium to inflate their economies (so they would import more).