| Biography | John Robert Clynes PC (27 March 1869 23 October 1949) was a British trade unionist and Labour Party politician. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) for 35 years, and led the party in its breakthrough at the 1922 general election. He was the first Englishman to serve as leader of the Labour Party
The son of a labourer named Patrick Clynes, he was born in Oldham, Lancashire, and began work in a local cotton mill when he was 10 years old. At the age of 16, he wrote a series of articles about child labour in the textile industry, and a year later he helped form the Piercers' Union.
In 1892, Clynes became an organiser for the Lancashire Gasworkers' Union and came in contact with the Fabian Society. Having joined the Independent Labour Party, he attended the 1900 conference where the Labour Representation Committee was formed; this committee soon afterwards became the Labour Party.
Clynes stood for the new party in the 1906 general election and was elected to Parliament for Manchester North East, becoming one of Labour's bright stars. In 1910 he became the party's deputy chairman.
During the First World War Clynes was a supporter of British military involvement (in which he differed from Ramsay MacDonald), and in 1917 became Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Food Control in the Lloyd George coalition government. The next year he was appointed Minister of Food Control, and at the 1918 general election he was returned to Parliament for the Manchester Platting constituency.
Clynes became leader of the party following the war, and led it through its major breakthrough in the 1922 general election. Before that election, Labour only had 52 seats in parliament; but as a result of the election, Labour's total number of seats rose to 142.
MacDonald had resigned as Labour leader in 1914, due to his wartime pacifism, and at the 1918 general election he lost his seat. Not for another four years did he return to the House of Commons. By that stage, MacDonald's pacifism had been forgiven. When the occupant of the Labour leadership had to be decided on through a vote of Labour parliamentarians, MacDonald narrowly defeated Clynes.
When MacDonald became Prime Minister he made Clynes the party's leader in the Commons until the government was defeated in 1924. During the second MacDonald government of 19291931, Clynes served as Home Secretary. In this role, Clynes gained literary prominence, when he explained in the Commons his refusal to grant a visa to the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, then living in exile in Turkey, who had been invited by Ramsay MacDonald's party to give a lecture in Britain. Clynes had then been immortalized by the scathing criticism of Clynes' concept of the right to asylum, voiced by Trotsky in the last chapter of his autobiography "My Life" entitled "The planet without visa".
In 1931, Clynes sided with Arthur Henderson and George Lansbury, against MacDonald's support for austerity measures to deal with the Great Depression. Clynes split with MacDonald when the latter left Labour to form a National Government. In the 1931 election, Clynes was one of the casualties, losing his Manchester Platting seat. Nevertheless he regained this constituency in 1935, and then remained in the House of Commons until his retirement ten years later at the 1945 general election. |