George Lansbury

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Lansbury, George (b. 22 Feb. 1859, d. 7 May 1940). British Labour leader 1931–5 Born near Lowestoft, Suffolk, Lansbury emigrated to Australia in 1884, but had an unsuccessful time there, and returned a year later. He immediately started a campaign against what he saw as misleading propaganda about the potentials of life as an emigrant. After initial work for the Liberal Party he joined the Labour Party. Together with Beatrice Webb, he wrote the 1909 Minority Report of the Royal Commission of the Poor Laws, which became instrumental in the eventual abolition of the Victorian Poor Law system. He was elected to Parliament for Bow and Bromley in 1910, but resigned in 1912 over the harsh treatment of the suffragettes. He did not return to Parliament until 1922, though he achieved new prominence as a defiant Mayor of Poplar (1919–20). In this post, he chose to be imprisoned rather than to reduce unemployment relief benefits. He was in the Cabinet as First Commissioner of Works in 1929–31. When MacDonald formed the National Government, he refused to join. Following Labour's electoral disaster of 1931, he was, with Attlee, one of only two former Cabinet Ministers left on the Labour benches, and he was elected as leader of the Labour Party. When the Labour conference called for sanctions against Italy after the Abyssinian War he resigned, to be succeeded by Clement Attlee. He was a lifelong pacifist and Christian socialist.

George Lansbury , 1859–1940, British Labour party leader. During the 1880s he was influenced by Christian socialism, and he later joined (1892) the Social Democratic Federation. A reformer, he campaigned constantly for the amelioration of poverty and for woman suffrage. He was a member of the royal commission on the Poor Laws (1905–9) and signed the famous minority report. He helped to found the Daily Herald (1912), which he edited until 1922, when it became the official Labour party newspaper. A Labour member of Parliament (1910–12, 1922–40), he served as commissioner of works (1929–31) and as leader of the opposition (1931–35) against the National government of Ramsay MacDonald . A lifelong pacifist, he had defended conscientious objectors during World War I, and in 1935 he resigned as party leader over the issue of League of Nations sanctions against Italy, a move he thought would lead to war. He advocated unilateral disarmament by Great Britain during the 1930s, and in 1937 visited Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in an attempt to avoid war.

Bibliography: See his autobiographical Looking Backwards—and Forwards (1935); biographies by R. W. Postgate (1951), R. Holman (1990), and J. Schneer (1990).