Philip Snowden, 1st Viscount Snowden, PC (; 18 July 1864 – 15 May 1937) was a British politician. A strong speaker, he became popular in trade union circles for his denunciation of capitalism as unethical and his promise of a socialist utopia. He was the first Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position he held in 1924 and again between 1929 and 1931. He broke with Labour policy in 1931, and was expelled from the party and excoriated as a turncoat, as the party was overwhelmingly crushed that year by the National Government coalition that Snowden supported. He was succeeded as chancellor by Neville Chamberlain.

Early life: 1864–1906

Snowden was born on 18 July 1864 in Cowling in the West Riding of Yorkshire. His father John Snowden had been a weaver and a supporter of Chartism, and later a Gladstonian liberal. Snowden later wrote in his autobiography: "I was brought up in this Radical atmosphere, and it was then that I imbibed the political and social principles which I have held fundamentally ever since". 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. He learned to walk again with the aid of sticks within two years.

Snowden married Ethel Annakin, a campaigner for women's suffrage, in 1905. He supported his wife's ideals, and he became a noted speaker at suffragist meetings and other public meetings.

In 1906, he became the Labour MP for Blackburn. He continued his writing and lectures, and now was advocating more radical measures than the ruling Liberal government was implementing. He even devised his own "Socialist budget" to rival David Lloyd George's 1909 "People's Budget". and sworn of the Privy Council. Despite his socialist rhetoric, Snowden believed that in order to transition towards a socialist society the capitalist British economy had to recover from World War I and the Depression of 1920–1921. He therefore cut taxes and tariffs in order balance the national budget, and continued to commit the government to reentering the gold standard by 1925.

In his budget, Snowden lowered the duties on tea, coffee, cocoa, chicory and sugar; reduced spending on armaments; and provided money for council housing. However, he did not implement the capital levy. Snowden claimed that because of the lowering of duties on foodstuffs consumed by the working class, the budget went "far to realize the cherished radical idea of a free breakfast table". He profoundly believed in the morality of the balanced budget, with rigorous economy and not a penny wasted. He grasped how serious unemployment was becoming, but differed with the rising belief in deficit spending as a way to combat it. A. J. P. Taylor said his budget "would have delighted the heart of Gladstone".

In his first budget, Snowden earmarked £38 million for the reduction of food taxes, the introduction of pensions for widows, and a reduction in the pensionable age to 65. However, only the first of these measures was realized during the first Labour Government's time in office.

Opposition: 1924–1929

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... evolutionary socialism into revolutionary socialism". He was also opposed to the new Keynesian economic ideas which provided a rationale for deficit spending, and criticized their expression in the Liberals' manifesto for the 1929 election, titled We can Conquer Unemployment. His economic philosophy was one of strict Gladstonian Liberalism rather than socialism. His official biographer wrote, "He was raised in an atmosphere which regarded borrowing as an evil and free trade as an essential ingredient of prosperity".

He was the principal opponent to any radical economic policy to tackle the Great Depression, and blocked proposals to introduce protectionist tariffs. 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. The government eventually collapsed over arguments about a budget deficit when Snowden accepted the Committee on National Expenditure's recommendations for budget cuts while a significant minority of ministers led by Arthur Henderson, the National Executive Committee, and the General Council of the Trades Union Congress refused to enact cuts in unemployment benefits.

Snowden retained the position of Chancellor during the National Government of 1931. As a consequence he was expelled from the party, along with MacDonald and Jimmy Thomas. In a BBC Radio broadcast on 16 October 1931, he called Labour's policies "Bolshevism run mad" and contrasted them unfavourably with his own "sane and evolutionary Socialism". Snowden decided not to stand for parliament in the election of October 1931. At that election, Labour's number of seats declined catastrophically from 288 to 52. It was during that year he had prostate gland surgery, following which his health and mobility declined. However, with the decline of Keynesianism as a model after 1968, historians have re-evaluated Snowden in a more favourable light. Ross McKibbin argues that the Labour government had very limited room to manoeuvre in 1929–31, and it did as well as could be expected; and that it handled the British economy better than most foreign governments handled theirs, and the Great Depression was less severe in Britain than elsewhere. Future Prime Minister Harold Wilson would also be inspired by Snowden's policies to resist a devaluation of the pound sterling in 1967.

Later life: 1931–1937

thumb|210px|[[Vera Weizmann, Chaim Weizmann, Herbert Samuel, Lloyd George, Ethel Snowden, and Philip Snowden]]

thumb|Plaque of the Philip Snowden cairn

In the 1931 Dissolution Honours he was raised to the peerage as Viscount Snowden of Ickornshaw, in the West Riding of the County of York, and served as Lord Privy Seal in the National government from 1931 to 1932, when he resigned in protest at the enactment of a full scheme of Imperial Preference and protectionist tariffs. That year, Snowden said there was never a greater mistake than to say that Cobdenism was dead: "Cobdenism was never more alive throughout the world than it was to-day ... To-day the ideas of Cobden were in revolt against selfish nationalism. The need for the breaking down of trade restrictions, which took various forms, was universally recognized even by those who were unable to throw off those shackles".

He subsequently wrote his Autobiography in which he strongly attacked MacDonald. In the 1935 general election, Snowden supported the Keynesian economic programme proposed by Lloyd George ("Lloyd George's New Deal"). Snowden claimed that he was returning to long-held economic views, but that these had been "temporarily inadvisable" during the crisis of 1931, when "national necessity" demanded cutting public expenditure.

Snowden was one of the protagonists of Bill Broady's 2024 historical novel The Night-Soil Men.

Notes

Bibliography

  • Jenkins, Roy. The Chancellors: A History of the Leaders of the British Exchequer, 1886-1947 (1999) pp. 251–300. online
  • McKibbin, Ross. "The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government 1929-1931" Past & Present, No. 68 (Aug. 1975), pp. 95–123 online
  • Philip Snowden - Blackburn Labour Party