By Liam Payne

This October sees the 90^th anniversary of the completion of the ‘Great National Hunger March against the Means Test’. An initiative of the National Unemployed Workers Movement, the march began in Glasgow on 26^th September 1932, culminating in London’s Hyde Park almost a month later.

This march was the largest of a series of such initiatives, aimed at highlighting the plight of working class Britain and advocating for alternative economic solutions to capitalism’s latest catastrophe – the Great Depression – which, by 1932, had racked up an unemployment count of 2,750,000.

Over the course of 90 years, much has changed – but certain old truths still hold their own. This is the story of 1932’s National Hunger March, and its familiar echoes today.

Background and Context

Prior to 1932, similar marches to London had taken place. The 1920s were a period of economic and political turmoil. Britain’s pre-eminent position in the hierarchy of capitalist nations was forfeited for good due to the exactions of the recent world war and the crushing of industrial competitiveness and capacity that maintaining the gold standard for the pound’s valuation entailed.

1920 saw trade union membership peak for the decade at 8.3 million workers and 1921 was a year in which 85 million working days were lost due to strike action. This militancy came to a head in the famous General Strike of 1926. The brittle labour movement leadership threw in the towel within days, leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of ordinary rank-and-file members – encouraging the growing influence of the harder-line Communist Party of Great Britain within the labour movement.

After an election in which they gained only 191 seats to the Conservatives 258, the Labour Party, led by Ramsay MacDonald, formed its very first government after the Tories lost a vote of confidence in late January 1924. Aside from a housing bill steered by the socialist John Wheatley and finally recognising the Soviet Union, this government was hardly the advent of the promised land its supporters had been led to believe. The national budget was balanced through spending and tax cuts.

A raid on the offices of the Communist Party’s newspaper that August purported to turn up a letter from prominent Soviet official Grigory Zinoviev advocating support for Labour’s policies on the Soviet Union and encouraging ‘sedition’. Taking a principled stand, the Labour government used its power to have the case against one of the paper’s journalists dropped and learned a hard lesson when it was subsequently brought down by another vote of ‘no confidence’ by the opposition parties. Labour lost 42 seats at the subsequent election, with the Tories gaining 100. The ‘Zinoviev letter’ is now known to have been a fake. The labour movement’s first taste of state power had lasted eleven months.

When the great stock market casinos finally ran out of other people’s money to spend in 1929 – choking on the already stagnant economic performance at large – the ravages of the past decade were drastically increased. Returning to power as the largest party in 1929, Labour again managed to pass progressive legislation on housing alongside providing the long-struggling miners with some of their demands in the form of the Coal Mines Act of 1930.

Reacting to the cataclysmic economic crash rippling out of New York and trying to protect the gold standard system of valuing the pound in 1931, the government rejected a left wing policy platform devised by one Oswald Mosley, opting instead to try to stem the carnage through increased taxation and swingeing spending cuts. A run on the pound following the announcement of these proposed measures led to the terms being updated to include a further 10 percent cut to unemployment benefit. 

These proposals caused an existential split in the Labour Party and the larger movement, from top to bottom. The failure of the labour movement to back his folly led MacDonald to acquiesce to his own vanity and take up the king’s offer to form a National Government. Consisting of a few other lost Labourites, but mostly staffed with Tories and the fast-shrinking Liberals, this administration pushed through the measures originally proposed by MacDonald and his cohort. A further run on the pound followed. Ironically the pound was forced off the gold standard by default.

MacDonald was expelled from the Labour Party later that year and known thereafter as a traitor by the majority remaining in the labour movement fold.

National Unemployed Workers Movement

The National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM) was a rank-and-file organisation created and led by members and supporters of the Communist Party. Formed in 1921, and gaining the NUWM moniker in 1929, the movement was led overall by Communist Party founding member Wal Hannington and Harry McShane, comrade of the late John Maclean, in Scotland.

Its main motives were to bring attention to the plight of unemployed workers and their communities and specifically to campaign against the hated means test for welfare provisions. The hunger marches were one of the innovative and potent strategies the movement employed to these ends, and these marches are amongst the most iconic events of this turbulent but animating era.

The NUWM, as can probably be imagined, attracted little more than ire from the established labour movement organisations in Britain. Throughout this period, the Labour Party and trade unions offered little meaningful official support to the unemployed, with Labour’s National Executive Committee and the Trades Union Congress instructing local parties and trades councils to offer no assistance to passing hunger marchers. Many in the labour movement thought and acted differently.

Despite its credentials, the NUWM wasn’t immune to the perceived priorities of realpolitik. The nascent movement suffered a split when those inspired by the radical syndicalism of the International Workers of the World union formed a rival unemployed movement in 1923. Active in that years Poplar dock strike and backed in this by local hero and future Labour Party leader George Lansbury, this organisation was shattered by naked state coercion at the hands of the police on the streets of east London. Wal Hannington defended this state violence in a meeting following this, held in Glasgow – sectarianism on the left being yet another old truth.

The March

Starting in Glasgow, the march itself consisted in total of about 3,000 people, in eighteen different contingents. Drawn mostly from working class communities of Scotland, northern England and the valleys of south Wales, the march descended on Hyde Park in London at the end of October. The marchers carried with them a petition of over a million signatures demanding the end of the means test.

Met with a media blackout for much of the route, the marchers were surprised on reaching the capital to be at the centre of a hysterical media storm – being described as a visceral threat to ‘public order’. The petition they had carried with them was confiscated by the police when they tried to present it to Parliament at Westminster, on the orders of the ever-faithful Ramsay MacDonald.

70,000 police officers were mobilised on the streets of London, the largest such action in Britain since the revolutionary year of 1848. Mounted police were used to charge the crowd in Hyde Park and street battles ensued across the city for the following few days. 75 people were seriously injured in consequence of the actions of the police and the directions of the state.

In the aftermath of the march and its violent and hysterical repression, the National Council for Civil Liberties was formed to try and ensure such a reaction would be checked in future. The founders of the organisation were particular concerned by the flagrant use of agent provocateurs, empowered to concoct seemingly violent actions from amongst the marchers and their supporters – giving the police and media an apparent cover for their reactionary response to such a campaign of non-violent, and popular, political practice.

Familiar Echoes

The events surrounding the National Hunger March of 1932 make for startling comparison with the present situation. Today, once again, an arrogant and intellectually bankrupt political consensus amongst the major parties and institutions of Britain has unsurprisingly resulted in the repetition of thoroughly discredited and disastrous doctrines and concepts in the face of a 1920s-style crisis.

Outside of this, trade union membership has again been on the rise. A recent cascade of militancy within these growing unions has brought the labour movement, and the left in particular, back from the brink after the crushing of the movement around Jeremy Corbyn. Strikes are breaking out across key sectors of the British economy, with the membership being led by confident and cogent elected personnel, not afraid to stand up for themselves and treat the hypocrisy and ignorance which has met this spate of industrial action with the utter contempt it deserves.

The political left has been marginalised in the field of institutional politics. First by lies and smears from nefarious political opponents masquerading as champions of decency – amplified to a ludicrous degree by an all too compliant media – then by ‘the establishment within’ their very own party. On the left itself, a general confusion hangs heavy over the efficacy or direction of any future political projects – with disagreements and disillusion halting anything of purpose taking shape.

Financial markets have behaved in a wearyingly rollercoaster fashion since 2007-8. The latest threat to their fragile supremacy in Britain comes from an ideologically driven, consequence-lite ‘mini-budget’ by the newly ascended Tory leadership – another large scale run on the pound causing inept and minimal backtracking on certain aspects, only to be replaced by other more sinister and long-term goals of steroid austerity.

Alongside the energetic strike wave currently in operation, the launch of the Enough is Enough campaign has caught the imagination of the labour movement and socialists all around the country. Holding rallies, marches and solidarity actions right across Britain, this campaign is gaining real momentum – perhaps helped by nimbly avoiding the quagmire of the left’s indecision over political purpose and agency in a ‘back to the streets’ pivot.

It is to be hoped that the steady return of union density and militancy alongside the direct political campaigning of a movement like Enough is Enough can again galvanise the left across Britain, and give it the time, confidence and perspective to regenerate itself in the arena of institutional politics and overarching strategies for power. Combining these first two relatively recent re-developments with a renewed political project is crucial for our times – and, even more importantly, for those that follow.

Liam Payne is a Labour Party member based in Edinburgh.

Image: https://a24now.com/2020/11/uk-unemployment-rate-continues-to-surge/. Licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)