Editing Ramsay MacDonald (section)

== Reputation ==
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For half a century, MacDonald was demonised by the Labour Party as a turncoat who consorted with the enemy and drove the Labour Party to its nadir. Later, however, scholarly opinion raised his status as an important founder and leader of the Labour Party, and a man who held Britain together during its darkest economic times.{{sfn|Shepherd|2007|pp=31–33}}<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Owen | first1 = Nicholas | year = 2007 | title = MacDonald's Parties: The Labour Party and the 'Aristocratic Embrace' 1922–31 | journal = Twentieth Century British History | volume = 18 | issue = 1| pages = 1–53 | doi=10.1093/tcbh/hwl043}}</ref>

MacDonald's expulsion from Labour along with his National Labour Organisation's coalition with the Conservatives, combined with the decline in his physical and mental powers after 1931, left him a discredited figure. The downfall of the Labour government in 1931, his National coalition with the Conservatives and the electoral defeat were blamed on him, and few spoke on his behalf.{{sfn|Marquand|2004|p=700}} [[MacNeill Weir]], MacDonald's former parliamentary private secretary, published the first major biography ''The Tragedy of Ramsay MacDonald'' in 1938. Weir demonised MacDonald for obnoxious careerism, class betrayal and treachery.{{sfn|Martin|2003|pp=836–837}}  [[Clement Attlee]] in his autobiography ''As it Happened'' (1954) called MacDonald's decision to abandon the Labour government in 1931 "the greatest betrayal in the political history of the country".<ref>Clement Attlee, ''As it Happened''. Heinemann: 1954</ref>  The coming of war in 1939 led to a search for the politicians who had appeased Hitler and failed to prepare Britain; MacDonald was grouped among the "[[Guilty Men]]".<ref>[http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/themes/70/70401.html ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'']</ref>

By the 1960s, while union activists maintained their hostile attitude, scholars wrote with more appreciation of his challenges and successes.{{sfnm|Martin|2003|1pp=836–837|Shepherd|2007|2pp=31–33}}  Finally in 1977 he received a long scholarly biography that historians have judged to be "definitive".<ref>{{cite book|author=David Dutton|title=Liberals in Schism: A History of the National Liberal Party|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=g_BeBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT88|year=2008|publisher=I.B. Tauris|page=88|isbn=978-0857737113}}</ref> Labour MP [[David Marquand]], a trained historian, wrote ''Ramsay MacDonald'' with the stated intention of giving MacDonald his due for his work in founding and building the Labour Party, and in trying to preserve peace in the years between the two world wars. He argued also to place MacDonald's fateful decision in 1931 in the context of the crisis of the times and the limited choices open to him. Marquand praised the prime minister's decision to place national interests before that of party in 1931. He also emphasised MacDonald's lasting intellectual contribution to socialism and his pivotal role in transforming Labour from an outside protest group to an inside party of government.{{sfn|Martin|2003|p=837}}

Similarly, scholarly analysis of the economic decisions taken in the inter-war period, such as the return to the Gold Standard in 1925 and MacDonald's desperate efforts to defend it in 1931, has changed.  Thus [[Robert Skidelsky]], in his classic 1967 account of the 1929–31 government, ''Politicians and the Slump'', compared the orthodox policies advocated by leading politicians of both parties unfavourably with the more radical, proto-Keynesian measures proposed by David Lloyd George and Oswald Mosley; subsequently, in the preface to the 1994 edition Skidelsky argued that recent experience of currency crises and [[capital flight]] made it hard to be critical of politicians who wanted to achieve stability by cutting so-called "labour costs" and defending the value of the currency.<ref>{{cite book|author=Robert Skidelsky|title=Politicians and the slump: The Labour Government of 1929–1931|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=aEW5AAAAIAAJ|year=1994|publisher=Papermac|isbn=978-0333605929}}</ref> In 2004 Marquand advanced a similar argument:
<blockquote>In the harsher world of the 1980s and 1990s it was no longer obvious that Keynes was right in 1931 and the bankers wrong.  Pre-Keynesian orthodoxy had come in from the cold. Politicians and the public had learned anew that confidence crises feed on themselves; that currencies can collapse; that the public credit can be exhausted; that a plummeting currency can be even more painful than deflationary expenditure cuts; and that governments which try to defy the foreign exchange markets are apt to get their—and their countries'—fingers burnt.  Against that background, MacDonald's response to the 1931 crisis increasingly seemed not just honourable and consistent, but right ... he was the unacknowledged precursor of the [[Tony Blair|Blairs]], the [[Gerhard Schröder|Schröders]], and the [[Bill Clinton|Clintons]] of the 1990s and 2000s.{{sfn|Marquand|2004}}</blockquote>