Ramsay MacDonald in the context of "Leader of the Labour Party (UK)"

The Labour Party, commonly Labour, is one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, along with the Conservative Party. It sits on the centre-left of the left–right political spectrum, and has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. It has been the governing party since the 2024 general election. Keir Starmer has been Leader of the Labour Party since 2020 and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since 2024. There have been twelve Labour governments and seven Labour prime ministers.

The Labour Party was founded in 1900, having emerged from the trade union movement and socialist parties of the 19th century. It was electorally weak before the First World War, but in the early 1920s overtook the Liberal Party to become the main opposition to the Conservative Party, and briefly formed a minority government under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. In 1929 Labour for the first time became the largest party in the House of Commons, with 287 seats, but fell short of a majority, forming another minority government. In 1931, in response to the Great Depression, MacDonald formed a new government with Conservative and Liberal support, which led to his expulsion from the party. Labour was soundly defeated by his coalition in 1931, winning only 52 seats, but began to recover in 1935 with 154 seats.

Appeasement, in an international context, is a diplomatic negotiation policy of making political, material, or territorial concessions to an aggressive power with intention to avoid conflict. The term is most often applied to the foreign policy between 1935 and 1939 of the British governments of Prime Ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and most notably Neville Chamberlain towards Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Under British pressure, appeasement of Nazism and Fascism also played a role in French foreign policy of the period but was always much less popular there than in the United Kingdom.

In the early 1930s, appeasing concessions were widely seen as desirable because of the anti-war reaction to the trauma of World War I (1914–1918), second thoughts about the perceived vindictive treatment by some of Germany in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and a perception that fascism was a useful form of anti-communism. However, by the time of the Munich Agreement, which was concluded on 30 September 1938 between Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, the policy was opposed by the Labour Party and by a few Conservative dissenters such as future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War Duff Cooper, and future Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Appeasement was strongly supported by the British upper class, including royalty, big business (based in the City of London), the House of Lords, and media such as the BBC and The Times. However, it would be mistaken to say that the policy was not similarly supported amongst the working and middle classes as well, who were not enthusiastic about another war until popular opinion changed following events like Kristallnacht and Hitler’s invasion of rump Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939, and that at the time of Munich elite endorsement rang in concordance with popular opinion.

Herbert Louis Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel (6 November 1870 – 5 February 1963) was a British Liberal politician who was the party leader from 1931 to 1935. The first Jew to serve as a Cabinet minister, he became the leader of the Liberal Party, a major British political party. Samuel promoted Zionism within the British Cabinet, beginning with his 1915 memorandum entitled The Future of Palestine. In 1920 he was appointed as the first High Commissioner for Palestine, in charge of the administration of the territory.

Samuel was the last member of the Liberal Party proper to hold one of the four Great Offices of State (as Home Secretary from 1931 to 1932 in the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald). One of the adherents of "New Liberalism", Samuel was on the progressive wing of the Liberal Party. He helped to draft and present social reform legislation while he was serving as a Liberal cabinet member. Samuel led the party in both the 1931 general election and the 1935 general election, during which period the party's number of seats in parliament fell from 59 to 21.

Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley (3 August 1867 – 14 December 1947), was a British statesman and Conservative politician who was prominent in the political leadership of the United Kingdom between the world wars. He was prime minister on three occasions, from May 1923 to January 1924, from November 1924 to June 1929 and from June 1935 to May 1937.

Born to a prosperous family in Bewdley, Worcestershire, Baldwin was educated at Hawtreys, Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the family iron- and steel-making business and entered the House of Commons in 1908 as the member for Bewdley, succeeding his father Alfred. He was Financial Secretary to the Treasury (1917–1921) and President of the Board of Trade (1921–1922) in the coalition ministry of David Lloyd George and then rose rapidly. In 1922, Baldwin was one of the prime movers in the withdrawal of Conservative support from Lloyd George; he subsequently became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Bonar Law's Conservative ministry. Upon Law's resignation for health reasons in May 1923, Baldwin became prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party. He called an election in December 1923 on the issue of tariffs and lost the Conservatives' parliamentary majority, after which Ramsay MacDonald formed a minority Labour government.

The first Labour government of the United Kingdom was formed by Ramsay MacDonald. A minority government, it lasted from January to November 1924, when they lost a vote of no confidence and were defeated by the Conservatives in the subsequent election.

After the Carlton Club meeting, in which the Conservatives voted to separate from the Lloyd George coalition, a general election was held in 1922, which resulted in a victory for the Conservatives and their Unionist allies, winning 344 seats and a convincing parliamentary majority of 74 seats — sufficient for a full parliamentary term.

The National Government of August–October 1931, also known as the First National Government, was the first of a series of national governments formed during the Great Depression in the United Kingdom. It was formed by Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom following the collapse of the previous minority government, led by the Labour Party, known as the Second MacDonald ministry.

As a National Government, it was dominated by members of the Conservative Party, and also included a few from Liberals and National Labour, as well as individuals who belonged to no political party. The breakaway Liberal Nationals supported the National Government after their formation in September 1931 but none received posts in the new administration. Subsequently, two Liberal ministers, Alec Glassey and John Pybus, defected to the Liberal Nationals. It did not contain members of the Labour Party as MacDonald had been expelled from it. The Labour Party led the opposition.

The 1931 United Kingdom general election was held on Tuesday, 27 October 1931. It saw a landslide election victory for the National Government, a three-party coalition which had been formed two months previously after the collapse of the second Labour government. Journalist Ivor Bulmer-Thomas described the result as "the most astonishing in the history of the British party system".

Unable to secure support from his cabinet for his preferred policy responses to the economic and social crises brought about by the Great Depression, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald split from the Labour Party and formed a new national government in coalition with the Conservative Party and a number of Liberals. MacDonald subsequently campaigned for a "Doctor's Mandate" to do whatever was necessary to fix the economy, running as the leader of a new party called National Labour within the coalition. Disagreement over whether to join the new government also resulted in the Liberal Party splitting into three separate factions, including one led by former Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

The 1935 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 14 November 1935. It resulted in a second (though reduced) landslide victory for the three-party National Government, which was led by Stanley Baldwin of the Conservative Party after the resignation – due to ill health – of Ramsay MacDonald earlier in the year. It is the most recent British general election to have seen any party or alliance of parties win a majority of the popular vote.

As in 1931, the National Government was a coalition of the Conservatives with small breakaway factions of the Labour and Liberal parties, and the group campaigned together under a shared manifesto on a platform of continuing its work addressing the economic crises caused by the Great Depression. The re-elected government was again dominated by the Conservatives, but, while the National Liberals remained relatively stable in terms of vote share and seats, National Labour lost most of its seats – including that of leader Ramsay MacDonald.

The 1929 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday, 30 May 1929, with Parliament dissolved on 10 May. It resulted in a hung parliament: despite receiving fewer votes than the Conservative Party, led by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Party won the most seats in the House of Commons, with the Liberal Party, led again by former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, regaining some of the ground lost in 1924 and holding the balance of power.

The election was often referred to as the "Flapper Election", because it was the first in which women aged 21–29 had the right to vote (owing to the Representation of the People Act 1928). Women over 30, with some property qualifications, had been able to vote since the 1918 general election, but the 1929 vote was the first general election with universal suffrage for adults over 21, which was then the age of majority.