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LABOUR's new leader, Neil Kinnock, is in many ways a carbon copy of the past.

His crucial advantage is the ability to win the assent of left-wing activists while also appearing acceptable to the most conservative sections of the labour movement — a talent which in the past, too, has been the prime qualification for becoming Labour leader.

With such an ability, however, go certain drawbacks. Nothing illustrates this better than the career of Labour's first leader, Ramsay MacDonald.

In 1900 a conference of delesates from the trade unions, the independent Labour Party, and incialist societies decided to set ip the Labour Representation Committee to be a voice for the rade unions in Parliament. It vas a defensive, , reaction to the inti-union measures of the emlloyers and the then Tory govroment, rather' than a consious movement for socialism. - The delegates chose Ramsay MacDonald as secretary.. As Beatrice Webb said at the time, 'Jamie's mellifluous Celtic versona gives him a cosmopoli. an air that makes him acceptble to all factions in the movenent. Henderson isn't intellient enough for the job, Keir lardie smells, and the others re far too uncouth"

While acceptable to the iddle class Fabians like Webb. nd to conservative trade union saders, MacDonald also had a eff-wing base in the Independent Labour Party, which had been formed in 1893 and now became a component part in the federal structure of the new The ILP had many left-wing activists, but mostly it remained at the level of a vague, moralistic, oiten religious, socialism.

MacDonald, ironicaly, summed it up in 1904:

"Every time I go abroad and Bee on the bookstalls evidence of intellectual and imaginative activity amongst foreign socialists I am ashamed of our English movement"

• MacDonald himself, however, was much more fascinated by 'the goings-on in radical Establishment circles than in developing a socialist philosophy for the working class. From 1900 to 1914 he hoped that the way forward for Labour would be through a great split between the Asquith and Lloyd George wings of the Liberal Party, after which Labour would fuse with the latter to create a new 'Radical Party', carrying on the reforming work of Gladstone and the 1906 Liberal Government.

Desertion

For MacDonald, the working class was not quite good enough to deserve its own independent political party. His desertion in 1931 was intellectually prepared for long in advance.

Indeed, if the years 1889-95, 1910-14, and 1916-22 had not been characterised as they were by the enormous growth of the trade unions, MacDonald would not have been a Labour leader, but a semi orthodox Liberal MP, sitting alongside John Burns and Lloyd George.

In 1911 MacDonald forced his MPs to vote for the clause in the National Insurance Act that forced employees to pay one third of the contribution to the scheme. This was against the Labour Party's Annual Conference decision that the whole contribution must be paid by the employer and the Government. But MacDonald was contemptuous: "What would Lloyd George say if we were seen to be pettifogging over details?"

The cornerstone of MacDonald's tactics was the MacDonald/Gladstone pact of 1903, agreed with the 'old stager's' son Herbert. The Labour Representation Committee and the Liberals agreed on a division of seats so that in a few constituencies Labour could stand against the Tories without Liberal competition.

29 Labour MPs were returned • in the 1906 General Election. The price of the electoral success, however, was capitulation to Liberal policies. Anyone who opposed this orientation was, in MacDonald's eyes, 'a wrecker':

In 1918, for example, when a by-election occurred in Fifeshire, it was the Fifeshire Miners' . Federation who were the 'wreckers'. They nominated a local miner, Raymond McAttwell, as the Labour candidate, in preference to an ex-Liberal worthy.

MacDonald was furious. "Do not those dim-witted miners realise that the former Liberal MP, Sir Arthur Ponsonby, is willing to stand (for Labour)? I must go to Fifeshire to put some sense in their heads" • Sir Arthur became the candidate.

Here as always, MacDonald's guideline was the Fabian idea that social reform would come through the enlightened sections of the bourgeoisie, not through the crude, uncouth