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Philip Snowden: The First Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer

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Besides repudiating the unquestioned commitment to public ownership of the means of production, now seen as merely one of numerous useful devices, he emphasised the goals of personal liberty, social welfare and above all social equality. Margaret Thatcher compared Blair with Gaitskell in a different manner, warning her party when Blair came to power that he was the most formidable Labour leader since Hugh Gaitskell. At Newcastle, with a general election clearly imminent, Gaitskell pledged that Labour's spending plans would not require him to raise income tax, for which he was attacked by the Tories for supposed irresponsibility.

In the speech Gaitskell summoned up the memory of Vimy Ridge and Gallipoli, where Canadian and ANZAC troops had fought alongside British, mixing his defence of national identity with the tradition of the Commonwealth. Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell CBE (9 April 1906 – 18 January 1963) was a British politician who served as Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1955 until his death in 1963. In opposition, Gaitskell's house at Frognal Gardens, Hampstead, became a centre for political intrigue.Gaitskell was elected Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Leeds South in the Labour landslide victory of 1945. When Crossman interjected that Bevan "was only half wanting" to be leader, had not made any conspiracy against Attlee and was mainly concerned at voicing protests against Morrison and Gaitskell, the latter replied that "there are extraordinary parallels between Nye and Adolf Hitler. While convalescing he became convinced of the value of socialism and started making rousing anti-capitalist speeches. Gaitskell again rejected Treasury advice to raise interest rates to cool the economy in June, July and August 1951. Following the retirement of Attlee as leader in December 1955, Gaitskell stood for party leader against Bevan and the ageing Herbert Morrison.

Historian Brian Brivati believes that the importance of the charges was "irrelevant" to the huge cost of rearmament, which damaged Britain's recovery in the years which followed by absorbing earnings from exports. When perhaps any Government would have been broken by economic events beyond the control or even the influence of this country—but when the outdated Treasury views of the pre-Keynes era, reinforced by the Puritan Cobdenism of Snowden, prevented any expansionist action to relieve unemployment. This was loudly condemned by Bevan's wife Jennie Lee and by Michael Foot, editor of Tribune but out of Parliament at the time. Gaitskell was given his first ministerial appointment in May 1946 as Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Fuel and Power, serving under Emmanuel "Manny" Shinwell. Early in 1950 Cripps backed off from a plan to introduce further charges, this time on false teeth and spectacles, after Bevan threatened to resign, but Gaitskell was put on a committee to monitor Bevan's agreement to a ceiling on NHS spending.Winston Churchill, 'Philip Snowden', Sunday Pictorial (2 August 1931), quoted in Richard Langworth (ed. There were also very real worries that the Soviets might invade western Europe (which was unarmed, with strong communist influence in many countries) and that the US would not help Britain if she did not help herself. The Treasurership election was seen as particularly important as it was lining up a successor to Attlee, whose retirement was clearly fairly imminent. On 4 November 1956 Gaitskell gave a powerful broadcast, attacking the Prime Minister now it was clear Eden had been lying to him in private. Neil Kinnock (Labour Leader 1983–92) grew up in South Wales and was brought up as an admirer of Bevan, but although he disliked the comparison his battle with the hard-left Militant tendency in the mid-1980s had echoes of Gaitskellism; John Smith (Labour Leader 1992–4) had been a Gaitskellite as a young man in the early 1960s; Tony Blair's first act as leader in 1994 was finally to abolish Clause IV – for this and other acts he was supported by the elderly Roy Jenkins, who had become a Liberal Democrat by then.

During the 1959 election campaign Crossman thought Gaitskell had become "a television star" with Bevan "a rather faded elder statesman behind him" (22 September 1959). Not only were higher interest rates seen as associated with the Gold standard and the deflationary policies of the 1920s, but the policy preference in the 1940s was for quantitative controls (e. Cole, Gaitskell became a socialist and wrote a long essay on Chartism, arguing that the working class needed middle class leadership. Gaitskell, unusually, supported the strikers and acted as a driver for people like his Oxford contemporary Evan Durbin and Cole's wife Margaret, who made speeches and delivered the trade union newspaper British Worker.Gaitskell visited Washington in the autumn of 1951, where he thought US Treasury Secretary John Wesley Snyder "a pretty small-minded, small town, semi-isolationist". By this point other ministers felt that Bevan was looking for an issue on which to resign, and that it was pointless making too many concessions as he needed to be made to appear to be in the wrong. However, Dell comments that he often went into excessive detail, including personally overseeing economic forecasts, and held excessively long meetings. Gaitskell made himself very unpopular by abolishing the basic petrol ration for private motorists, but encouraged the building of oil refineries, a move little-noticed at the time which would have important repercussions for the future. In a speech to the party conference in October 1962, Gaitskell argued that if the aim was for Britain to participate in a Federal Europe, this would mean "the end of Britain as an independent European state, the end of a thousand years of history!

In the election the previous month, Labour secured its best result up until that point, pushing the Liberals into third.

Gaitskell soon emerged as the leader of the group, the others being Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade, and Douglas Jay, Economic Secretary to the Treasury. In the end he made a conciliatory speech, mentioning that Barbara Castle (who had attacked Gaitskell's proposal) and Gaitskell had both quoted his own dictum that Socialism was about controlling the "commanding heights" of the economy.

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