AS CAMPAIGN groups make preparations for the March 19 national day of action against vicious jobless benefit sanctions — with jobcentres a focus for protests across the country — we can draw inspiration from history.

One example might be the alarmed retreat just 80 years ago, by another government friendly to the rich and hostile to the poor, when faced with unstoppable waves of public protest against brutal attacks on welfare benefit.

In January 1935, Britain’s “national” government — the Tory-Liberal coalition headed from October 1931 by arch-smoothie Labour Party renegade and expellee J Ramsay MacDonald — was confronted with innumerable rallies and marches up and down the country.

And so was challenged an unemployment benefit “cuts and cuts again” regime, long promised by “baby starver” and Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain and his new Unemployed Assistance Board.

The “final and unalterable” regulations were announced to shock on December 11 1934 and were implemented to catastrophic effect on January 7.

A massive campaign was provoked, fronted by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), led by legendary communist leader Wal Hannington.

On January 25 1935, the Independent Labour Party’s weekly New Leader — edited by life-long socialist and anti-imperialist Fenner Brockway — reported on the effect of the new benefit scales.

“Thousands of the unemployed found that their allowances had been reduced by 5 shillings, 10s and even 15s a week. There is a bitter ferment among them everywhere.”

The bitter ferment was to become more bitter still and it spread from the streets into the House of Commons, reassembling on January 28.

It was then that WH Mainwaring, Labour MP for East Rhondda, said to cheers from the public gallery: “I hope the working classes of this country will pay heed … and that from now onwards the agitation which is at such a height in south Wales will spread like a flame throughout the country and that the English and Scottish working classes will join with the Welshmen and make the demand that come what may these damnable regulations must be withdrawn.”

Faced with overwhelming public wrath, the MacDonald government surrendered, albeit in stages, and on February 13 the Times remarked with aloof disapproval on the manner in which surrender had taken place: “The breakdown of the regulations suggests the need for fresh resolution rather than for panic. Nevertheless, panic has raised its head.”
Life was far from comfortable for millions of people in the early ’30s. The responsibility for dole distribution was split between the Labour Exchanges and the local Public Assistance Committees (PACs).

Most unemployed people after losing their jobs were entitled to half a year’s benefit at standard rates paid by the Labour Exchanges if they had previously been employed for long enough, but when this time period had run out or did not apply, what were known as transitional payments of up to the same rates could be paid by the PACs.

But such payments were subject to a severe means test applicable from late 1931.

This had the effect, as Wal Hannington explained in his classic Unemployed Struggles 1918-36, of making parents maintain their unemployed sons and daughters, and of making sons and daughters maintain their parents, sisters and brothers.

Brockway had recorded, in his 1932 book Hungry England, many examples of out-of-work poverty. One visit was to a West Midlands home where a man, wife and 17-year-old son were receiving a transitional payments allowance of 23s under the means test, paying 7s rent for three rooms, 3s for coal and 13s for the rest. Save for dole day, they lived mostly on bread, dripping, margarine, tea and condensed milk. The entitlement to benefit was barely enough to keep body together, let alone soul.

The understated official number of unemployed in January 1935 hovered around the two million mark (15 per cent), an enormous number for a British population of around 40 million, in a world of families in which the man was expected to be the breadwinner and the wife to be based at home.

The cuts bit and bit hard. It was — as the Daily Worker, the Morning Star’s predecessor, put it — “cold-blooded starvation.”

A workless couple were now to get 24s weekly, instead of the previous maximum of 26s. On top of that, workless sons and daughters in the household had their weekly allowances slashed by 7s or more.

That was not all, as if sons and daughters were working a third or more of their earnings was to be offset against the full allowance notionally available for their parents.

Following the announcement of the cuts, a NUWM conference in Derby called for united action. On December 17 the Labour opposition opposed the new scales and many marched in Glasgow.

On January 3 a joint call for a campaign against the regulations was issued by the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party. January 7 was made a day of national demonstration.

The Daily Worker was engaged in a daily support campaign (as well as moving premises from an old warehouse in Tabernacle Street to another in Cayton Street, off City Road). On January 12 it raised the case of a couple in their early 60s with three adult sons at home. The father had been receiving 13s and 6d. Now, because of his sons’ earnings, he was to receive nothing.

By mid-month there were daily campaign marches in every large town.

There were mass marches in the Rhondda, in Glasgow, in North Shields and elsewhere, culminating in a south Wales united front conference attracting 1,600 delegates and revealing a rising drive to strike action on a national scale. Many elected councils registered protests. Revolt was spreading, in the Daily Worker’s words, “like a prairie fire.”

On February 1 the National Council of Labour issued an “appeal to the national conscience,” urging “all leaders of public opinion … in no partisan spirit” to address this “lamentable state of affairs.”

Two days later 300,000 people demonstrated in Wales. On February 5 a scared government put its hands up. It announced that the regulations would be cancelled and the old scales reinstated. A standstill order would take effect in a week’s time.

But the raging protest movement refused to stand still. Demands for immediate refunds proved irresistible.

The decisive moment came a day later in Sheffield where many thousands, determined the council would receive a deputation, fought the police for hours before the Sheffield authorities caved in, sending their own deputation to London to demand immediate restoration. The following day a nervous Ministry of Labour restored the full previous status quo in Sheffield and soon afterwards elsewhere too.

On February 12 national legislation making the turnabout fully official was waved through. Those entitled to benefit previously had to be paid either their former entitlement or their entitlement under the new regulations, whichever was higher. The government’s panicky response had illuminated what a united and powerful community campaign could achieve.
It was, wrote Michael Foot in his acclaimed biography of Aneurin Bevan — then a Labour MP active in opposition to the cuts and a decade later Minister of Health and Housing, the biggest explosion of popular anger in the whole interwar period, second only to the 1926 General Strike itself.
Of course, a return volley from the government was to be expected. But that came more than a year later. For the moment, victory was complete and sweet.
Eighty years after that forced government defeat, the national day of action on March 19, by and in support of victimised jobseekers, can say something loud and strong to a coalition government — including Neville Chamberlain-imitator Iain Duncan Smith — no less punitive and vicious than Ramsay MacDonald’s.