Chancellor Gordon Brown’s biography of
the last leader of the Independent Labour Party reveals his own political journey

WHO or what is Chancellor Gordon Brown’s ruling passion? It used to be Prudence. Well, in this paperback edition of his biography of James Maxton, first published in 1986, we know.

James Maxton was the last parliamentary leader of the Independent Labour Party, which was formed in 1892 to distinguish it from the Lib-Labs, an uneasy alliance which has returned to us in different forms over the years.

To avoid confusion you must understand that the Labour Party was not formally constituted until 1918. But the ILP remained within [the Labour Party] and most ‘Labour MPs’ were members of it, including Ramsey McDonald, Labour’s first Prime Minister.

Maxton could have been mistaken for Fester from the Addams Family, with his long black hair and piercing blue eyes. He chain-smoked and became a great orator after an apprenticeship of speaking nightly on street corners. He was the star of the mass meeting and a sardonic wit.
He was born in 1885 and from 1922 until his death in 1946 he was the ILP member for Bridgeton in Glasgow. These were the days when it was known as the Red Clyde. “Glasgow,” Lenin said, “was the Petrograd of the West.”

Maxton started out as a teacher, and he would storm against working-class poverty, slums, malnutrition and rickets which he saw daily in his classroom. This was a time when revolution and power to the people was palpable – the Red Dawn.

Nothing intimidated the working classes. They took to the streets, they rioted against poor wages and high rents, and were not a bit cowed by visiting Prime Ministers or cabinet members sent to calm them. Maxton went to jail under the Defence of the Realm Act as did Communist leaders.

In the turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s Maxton sought to work with Communists and others on the left. This was never a success, although he believed long after the decline that a new Socialist party was possible, embracing the Communist Party.

It was a long road from the incredible mass demonstration after the General Election of 1922, which bid goodbye to ten out of 15 Glasgow MPs who caught the train to London to change society.

Gordon Brown admires his hero for not being “embourgeoisiefied” but Maxton never missed a curtain call and became a House of Commons figure. Even Churchill sent him books when he was in hospital.
The second Labour Government was again led by McDonald between 1929-1931. It ended up with a Conservative coalition, which brought in savage cuts in unemployment benefit with harsh means-tests and penalised those “not genuinely seeking work” – that phrase used by Chancellor Brown 70 years later.

Most Labour MPs were members of the ILP and after the 1931 betrayal 122 MPs were expelled – this was just before July 1932 when the ILP left the Labour Party. Its four remaining MPs trickled on, until Maxton died.
Maxton was a complex, passionate and vain man. I met him in my early teens in South Wales. This was in 1943 and he was advocating a “Socialist Britain Now!” – a concept even my youthful arrogance found startling, with Hitler not yet beaten down.

Gordon Brown says this biography was “20 years in the making”, but what is he saying? Was Maxton an exhibitionist rather than a revolutionary? Was Brown, in 1986, the dour, phlegmatic PM-in-waiting, still hoping for a new Socialist Commonwealth and Maxton his ego.

But Brown, looking around at an increasingly remote elite, must come back to Maxton. While speaking to Scottish students in March 1928, Maxton said: “The capacity for anger – anger against a strong, cruel system – is a necessary part of the Socialist make-up.”