Hugh Dalton
Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, PC (16 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947. He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism and promoting rearmament against the German threat, and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; after the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established the Special Operations Executive. As Chancellor, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947. His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947, when, he, seemingly inadvertently, revealed a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech. Prime Minister Clement Attlee accepted his resignation; Dalton later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions.
The Lord Dalton | |
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| Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster | |
| In office 31 May 1948 – 28 February 1950 | |
| Prime Minister | Clement Attlee |
| Preceded by | The Lord Pakenham |
| Succeeded by | A. V. Alexander |
| Chancellor of the Exchequer | |
| In office 27 July 1945 – 13 November 1947 | |
| Prime Minister | Clement Attlee |
| Preceded by | John Anderson |
| Succeeded by | Stafford Cripps |
| President of the Board of Trade | |
| In office 22 February 1942 – 23 May 1945 | |
| Prime Minister | Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | John Llewellin |
| Succeeded by | Oliver Lyttelton |
| Minister of Economic Warfare | |
| In office 15 May 1940 – 22 February 1942 | |
| Prime Minister | Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | Ronald Cross |
| Succeeded by | Roundell Palmer |
| Chairman of the Labour Party | |
| In office 9 October 1936 – 8 October 1937 | |
| Leader | Clement Attlee |
| Preceded by | Jennie Adamson |
| Succeeded by | George Dallas |
| Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs | |
| In office 11 June 1929 – 3 September 1931 | |
| Prime Minister | Ramsay MacDonald |
| Preceded by | Anthony Eden |
| Succeeded by | James Stanhope |
| Member of Parliament for Bishop Auckland | |
| In office 14 November 1935 – 8 October 1959 | |
| Preceded by | Aaron Curry |
| Succeeded by | James Boyden |
| In office 30 May 1929 – 27 October 1931 | |
| Preceded by | Ruth Dalton |
| Succeeded by | Aaron Curry |
| Member of Parliament for Peckham | |
| In office 29 October 1924 – 30 May 1929 | |
| Preceded by | Collingwood Hughes |
| Succeeded by | John Beckett |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 26 August 1887 Neath, Wales, UK |
| Died | 13 February 1962 (aged 74) |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Labour |
| Alma mater | King's College, Cambridge, London School of Economics and Political Science |
His biographer Ben Pimlott characterised Dalton as peevish, irascible, given to poor judgment and lacking administrative talent.[1] Pimlott also recognised that Dalton was a genuine radical and an inspired politician; a man, to quote his old friend and critic John Freeman, "of feeling, humanity, and unshakeable loyalty to people which matched his talent."[2]
Early life
Hugh Dalton was born in Neath, in Wales. His father, John Neale Dalton, was a Church of England clergyman who became chaplain to Queen Victoria, tutor to the princes George (later King George V) and Albert Victor, and a canon of Windsor.
Dalton was educated at Summer Fields School and then at Eton College. He then went up to King's College, Cambridge, where he was active in student politics; his socialist views, then very rare amongst undergraduates, earned him the nickname "Comrade Hugh". Whilst at Cambridge he was President of the Cambridge University Fabian Society. He did not succeed in becoming President of the Cambridge Union Society, despite three unsuccessful attempts to be elected Secretary.
He went on to study at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Middle Temple. During the First World War he was called up into the Army Service Corps, later transferring to the Royal Artillery. He served as a lieutenant on the French and Italian fronts, where he was awarded the Italian decoration, the Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare, in recognition of his "contempt for danger" during the retreat from Caporetto; he later wrote a memoir of the war called With British Guns in Italy. Following demobilisation, he returned to the LSE and the University of London as a lecturer, where he was awarded a DSc for a thesis on the principles of public finance in 1920.[3][4]
There have been suggestions that he was homosexual, but they are rejected by his major biographer Ben Pimlott, who states "no evidence exists that Dalton ever had a sexual relationship with another man, and his private life seems to have been one of blameless monogamy."[5] However he does refer to Dalton having "homosexual tendencies", mentioned below.
Political career
Dalton stood unsuccessfully for Parliament four times: at the 1922 Cambridge by-election, in Maidstone at the 1922 general election, in Cardiff East at the 1923 general election, and the 1924 Holland with Boston by-election, before entering Parliament for Peckham at the 1924 general election.
At the 1929 general election, he succeeded his wife Ruth Dalton, who retired, as Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Bishop Auckland. Widely respected for his intellectual achievements in economics, he rose in the Labour Party's ranks, with election in 1925 to the shadow cabinet and, with strong union backing, to the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC). He gained ministerial and foreign policy experience as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in Ramsay MacDonald's second government, between 1929 and 1931. He lost this position when he, and most Labour leaders, rejected MacDonald's National Government. As with most other Labour MPs, he lost his seat in 1931; he was elected again in 1935.
Dalton published Practical Socialism for Britain, a bold and highly influential assessment of a future Labour government's policy options, in 1935. The book revived updated nuts-and-bolts Fabianism, which had been out of favour, and could be used to attack the more militant Left. His emphasis was on using the state as a national planning agency, an approach that appealed well beyond Labour.[6]
Foreign policy
Turning his attention to the looming crisis in Europe, he became the Labour Party's spokesman on foreign policy in Parliament. Pacifism had been a strong element in Labour Party (and other parties as well), but the Spanish Civil War changed that, as the Left moved to support arms for the Republican ("Loyalist") cause. Aided by union votes, Dalton moved the party from semi-pacifism to a policy of armed deterrence and rejection of appeasement. He was a bitter enemy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
Second World War
When war came, Chamberlain's position became untenable after many Conservative MPs refused to support him in the Norway Debate in April 1940, and Dalton and other senior Labour leaders made clear they would join any coalition government except one headed by Chamberlain. After Chamberlain resigned early in May, and Lord Halifax had declined the position, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. During Churchill's coalition government (1940–45) Dalton was Minister of Economic Warfare from 1940 to 1942. He established the Special Operations Executive, and was later a member of the executive committee of the Political Warfare Executive. He became President of the Board of Trade in 1942; the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, drafted into the civil service during the war, was his Principal Private Secretary.
Chancellor of the Exchequer
After the unexpected Labour victory in the 1945 general election Dalton wished to become Foreign Secretary, but the job was instead given to Ernest Bevin. Dalton, with his skills in economics, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Alongside Bevin, Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps, Dalton was one of the "Big Five" of the Labour government.[7]
The Treasury faced urgent problems. Half of the wartime economy had been devoted to mobilizing soldiers, warplanes, bombs and munitions; an urgent transition to a peacetime budget was necessary, while minimizing inflation. Financial aid through Lend Lease from the United States was abruptly and unexpectedly terminated in September 1945, and new loans from the United States and Canada were essential to keep living conditions tolerable. In the long run, Labour was committed to nationalization of industry and national planning of the economy, to more taxation of the rich and less of the poor, and to expanding the welfare state and creating free medical services for everyone.[6]
During the war, most overseas investments had been sold to fund the cost of its prosecution (the state thus losing the income from them), and Britain suffered severe balance of payments problems. The $3.75 billion 50-year American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes in 1946 (and the $1.25 billion loan from Canada) was soon exhausted. By 1947, rationing had to be tightened and the convertibility of the pound suspended. In the atmosphere of crisis, Morrison and Cripps intrigued to replace Attlee with Bevin as Prime Minister; Bevin refused to play along, and Attlee bought off Cripps by giving him Morrison's responsibilities for economic planning. Ironically, of the "Big Five" it was Dalton who ultimately fell victim to the events of that year.
Cheaper money—that is, low interest rates—was an important goal for Dalton during his Chancellorship. He wanted to avoid the high interest rates and unemployment experienced after the First World War, and to keep down the cost of nationalization. He gained support for this cheaper money policy from Keynes, as well as from officials of the Bank of England and the Treasury.[8]
Budgetary policy under Dalton was strongly progressive, as characterised by policies such as increased food subsidies, heavily subsidised rents to council house tenants, the lifting of restrictions on housebuilding, the financing of national assistance and family allowances, and extensive assistance to rural communities and Development Areas.[7] Dalton was also responsible for funding the introduction of Britain's universal family allowances scheme, doing so "with a song in my heart", as he later put it.[9][10] In one of his budgets, Dalton significantly increased spending on education (which included £4 million for the universities and the provision of free school milk), £38 million for the start (from August 1946) of family allowances, and an additional £10 million for Development Areas. In addition, the National Land Fund was established. Harold Macmillan, who inherited Dalton's housing responsibilities, later acknowledged his debt to Dalton's championing of New Towns, and was grateful for the legacy of Dalton's Town Development Bill, which encouraged urban overfill schemes and the movement of industry out of cities.[6]
Food subsidies were maintained at high wartime levels in order to restrain living costs, while taxation structures were altered to benefit low-wage earners, with some 2.5 million workers taken out of the tax system altogether in Dalton's first two budgets. There were also increases in surtax and death duties, which were opposed by the Opposition. According to one historian, Dalton's policies as Chancellor reflected "an unprecedented emphasis by central government on the redistribution of income".[11]
Budget-leaking and resignation
Walking into the House of Commons to give the autumn 1947 budget speech, Dalton made an off-the-cuff remark to a journalist, telling him of some of the tax changes in the budget. The news was printed in the early edition of the evening papers before he had completed his speech, and whilst the stock market was still open. This was a scandal, and led to his resignation for leaking a budget secret.[12] He was succeeded by Stafford Cripps. Though initially implicated in the allegations that led to the Lynskey tribunal in 1948, he was ultimately exonerated officially, but his reputation suffered another blow.[13]
Return to cabinet
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Dalton returned to the cabinet in 1948, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, making him a minister without portfolio. He became Minister of Town and Country Planning in 1950, the position being renamed as Minister of Local Government and Planning the following year. An avid outdoorsman, he served a term as president of the Ramblers Association, which promoted walking tours.[14] As Chancellor in 1946 he had started the National Land Fund to resource national parks, and in 1951 he approved the Pennine Way, which involved the creation of 70 additional miles of rights of way. He still had the ear of the Prime Minister, and enjoyed promoting the careers of candidates with potential, but was no longer a major political player as he had been until 1947. He left government after Labour lost the 1951 general election.
Awards and personal life
Dalton was president of the Ramblers' Association from 1948 to 1950, and Master of the Drapers' Company in 1958–59. He was created a life peer as Baron Dalton, of Forest and Frith in the County Palatine of Durham on 28 January 1960.[15][16]
He was happily married, and had a daughter who died in infancy in the early 1920s.[17] His biographer Ben Pimlott suggests that Dalton had homosexual tendencies but concludes he never acted on them.[18] His papers, including his diaries, are held at the LSE Library.
Contributions in economics
Dalton substantially expanded Max Otto Lorenz's work in the measurement of income inequality, offering both an expanded array of techniques but also a set of principles by which to comprehend shifts in an income distribution, thereby providing a more compelling theoretical basis for understanding relationships between incomes (1920).
Following a suggestion by Pigou (1912, p. 24), Dalton proposed the condition that a transfer of income from a richer to a poorer person, so long as that transfer does not reverse the ranking of the two, will result in greater equity (Dalton, p. 351). This principle has come to be known as the Pigou–Dalton principle (see, e.g., Amartya Sen, 1973).
Dalton offered a theoretical proposition of a positive functional relationship between income and economic welfare, stating that economic welfare increases at an exponentially decreasing rate with increased income, leading to the conclusion that maximum social welfare is achievable only when all incomes are equal.[19]
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References
- Loades, David ed. (2003) The Reader's Guide to British History vol. 1, p. 329. ISBN 9781579584269
- Pimlott (1985), p. 639.
- "LSE Archives".
- Great Britain. Committee on Industry and Trade, Factors in industrial and commercial efficiency (London: HMSO, 1927), ii.
- Pimlott (1985), p. 66.
- Pimlott, Ben (2004). "Dalton, (Edward) Hugh Neale, Baron Dalton (1887–1962)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/32697.
- Morgan, Kenneth O. (1985) Labour in Power: 1945–1951. Ch. 2. ISBN 978-0192851505
- Howson, Susan (1987). "The Origins of Cheaper Money, 1945-7". Economic History Review. 40 (3): 433–452. doi:10.2307/2596254. JSTOR 2596254.
- Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State
- Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee
- Jefferys, Kevin The Attlee Governments 1945–1951
- Pimlott (1985), pp. 524–48.
- Pimlott (1985), pp. 558–64.
- Matthew Hilton; et al. (2012). A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 187. ISBN 9781137029027.
- "No. 41942". The London Gazette. 29 January 1960. p. 764.
- "LORD DALTON (Hansard, 3 February 1960)". api.parliament.uk.
- Jefferys, Kevin (2002). Labour Forces: From Ernie Bevin to Gordon Brown. I.B.Tauris. p. 45. ISBN 9781860647437.
- Pimlott (1985), p. 66
- Rogers, F. H. (2004). The Measurement and Decomposition of Achievement Equity. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University.
- "Life Peerages – D". www.cracroftspeerage.co.uk.
Cited sources
- Pimlott, Ben (1985). Hugh Dalton. Macmillan. ISBN 9780333412510.
Further reading
- Brady, Robert A. (1950). Crisis in Britain: Plans and Achievements of the Labour Government. University of California Press., detailed coverage of nationalisation, welfare state and planning
- Dell, Edmund. The Chancellors: A History of the Chancellors of the Exchequer, 1945–90 (HarperCollins, 1997) pp 15–93.
Primary sources
- Hugh Dalton With British Guns in Italy (1919)
- Hugh Dalton Call Back Yesterday: Memoirs – 1887–1931 (1953)
- Hugh Dalton The Fateful Years: Memoirs – 1931–1945 (1957)
- Hugh Dalton High Tide and After: Memoirs – 1945–1960 (1962)
References
- Craig, F. W. S. (1983) [1969]. British parliamentary election results 1918–1949 (3rd ed.). Chichester: Parliamentary Research Services. ISBN 0-900178-06-X.
- Dalton, H. The measurement of the inequality of incomes, Economic Journal, 30 (1920), pp. 348–461.
External links
- Works by Hugh Dalton at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Hugh Dalton at Internet Archive
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Hugh Dalton
- "Archival material relating to Hugh Dalton". UK National Archives.
- Hugh Dalton's papers at LSE Archives
- Newspaper clippings about Hugh Dalton in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Collingwood Hughes |
Member of Parliament for Peckham 1924–1929 |
Succeeded by John Beckett |
| Preceded by Ruth Dalton |
Member of Parliament for Bishop Auckland 1929–1931 |
Succeeded by Aaron Curry |
| Preceded by Aaron Curry |
Member of Parliament for Bishop Auckland 1935–1959 |
Succeeded by James Boyden |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Godfrey Locker-Lampson |
Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1929–1931 |
Succeeded by Anthony Eden |
| Preceded by Ronald Cross |
Minister of Economic Warfare 1940–1942 |
Succeeded by The Earl of Selborne |
| Preceded by John Llewellin |
President of the Board of Trade 1942–1945 |
Succeeded by Oliver Lyttelton |
| Preceded by Sir John Anderson |
Chancellor of the Exchequer 1945–1947 |
Succeeded by Sir Stafford Cripps |
| Preceded by The Lord Pakenham |
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1948–1950 |
Succeeded by The Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by Jennie Adamson |
Chair of the Labour Party 1936–1937 |
Succeeded by George Dallas |
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