Хью Далтон: Жизнь и политическая карьера британского лейбориста.

British Labour politician (1887–1962)

Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, (16 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947. He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism; promoting rearmament against the German threat; and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; after the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established Special Operations Executive. As Chancellor, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947. His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947 when he, seemingly inadvertently, revealed a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech. Prime Minister Clement Attlee accepted his resignation; Dalton later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions. His biographer Ben Pimlott characterised Dalton as peevish, irascible, given to poor judgment and lacking administrative talent. Pimlott also recognised that Dalton was a genuine radical and an inspired politician; a man, to quote his old friend and critic John Freeman, "of feeling, humanity, and unshakeable loyalty to people which matched his talent."

Hugh Dalton was born in Neath in South Wales. His father, John Neale Dalton, was a Church of England clergyman who became chaplain to Queen Victoria, tutor to the princes George (later King George V) and Albert Victor, and a canon of Windsor. Dalton was educated at Summer Fields School and then at Eton College. He then went to King's College, Cambridge, where he was active in student politics; his socialist views, then very rare amongst undergraduates, earned him the nickname "Comrade Hugh". Whilst at Cambridge he was President of the Cambridge University Fabian Society. He did not succeed in becoming President of the Cambridge Union Society, despite three attempts to be elected Secretary. He went on to study at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Middle Temple. During the First World War he was called up into the Army Service Corps, later transferring to the Royal Artillery. He served as a lieutenant on the French and Italian fronts, where he was awarded the Italian decoration, the Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare, in recognition of his "contempt for danger" during the retreat from Caporetto; he later wrote a memoir of the war called With British Guns in Italy. Following demobilisation, he returned to the LSE and the University of London as a lecturer, where he was awarded a DSc for a thesis on the principles of public finance in 1920. There have been suggestions that he was homosexual, but they are rejected by his major biographer Ben Pimlott, who states "no evidence exists that Dalton ever had a sexual relationship with another man, and his private life seems to have been one of blameless monogamy." However he does refer to Dalton having "homosexual tendencies", mentioned below.

Dalton stood unsuccessfully for Parliament four times: at the 1922 Cambridge by election, in Maidstone at the 1922 general election, in Cardiff East at the 1923 general election, and the 1924 Holland with Boston by election, before entering Parliament for Peckham at the 1924 general election. At the 1929 general election, he succeeded his wife Ruth Dalton, who retired, as Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Bishop Auckland. Widely respected for his intellectual achievements in economics, he rose in the Labour Party's ranks, with election in 1925 to the shadow cabinet and, with strong union backing, to the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC). He gained ministerial and foreign policy experience as Under Secretary at the Foreign Office in Ramsay MacDonald's second government, between 1929 and 1931. He lost this position when he, and most Labour leaders, rejected MacDonald's National Government. As with most other Labour MPs, he lost his seat in 1931; he was elected again in 1935. Dalton published Practical Socialism for Britain, a bold and highly influential assessment of a future Labour government's policy options, in 1935. The book revived updated nuts and bolts Fabianism, which had been out of favour, and could be used to attack the more militant Left. His emphasis was on using the state as a national planning agency, an approach that appealed well beyond Labour.

The Treasury faced urgent problems. Half of the wartime economy had been devoted to mobilizing soldiers, warplanes, bombs and munitions; an urgent transition to a peacetime budget was necessary, while minimizing inflation. Financial aid through Lend Lease from the United States was abruptly and unexpectedly terminated in September 1945, and new loans from the United States and Canada were essential to keep living conditions tolerable. In the long run, Labour was committed to nationalization of industry and national planning of the economy, to more taxation of the rich and less of the poor, and to expanding the welfare state and creating free medical services for everyone.

Budgetary policy under Dalton was strongly progressive, as characterised by policies such as increased food subsidies, heavily subsidised rents to council house tenants, the lifting of restrictions on housebuilding, the financing of national assistance and family allowances, and extensive assistance to rural communities and Development Areas. In one of his budgets, Dalton significantly increased spending on education (which included £4 million for the universities and the provision of free school milk), £38 million for the start (from August 1946) of family allowances, and an additional £10 million for Development Areas. In addition, the National Land Fund was established. Harold Macmillan, who inherited Dalton's housing responsibilities, later acknowledged his debt to Dalton's championing of New Towns, and was grateful for the legacy of Dalton's Town Development Bill, which encouraged urban overfill schemes and the movement of industry out of cities.

Walking into the House of Commons to give the autumn 1947 budget speech, Dalton made an off the cuff remark to a journalist, telling him of some of the tax changes in the budget. The news was printed in the early edition of the evening papers before he had completed his speech, and whilst the stock market was still open. This was a scandal, and led to his resignation for leaking a budget secret. He was succeeded by Stafford Cripps. Though initially implicated in the allegations that led to the Lynskey tribunal in 1948, he was ultimately exonerated officially, but his reputation suffered another blow.

Dalton returned to the cabinet in 1948, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, making him a minister without portfolio. He became Minister of Town and Country Planning in 1950, the position being renamed as Minister of Local Government and Planning the following year. An avid outdoorsman, he served a term as president of the Ramblers Association, which promoted walking tours. As Chancellor in 1946 he had started the National Land Fund to resource national parks, and in 1951 he approved the Pennine Way, which involved the creation of 70 additional miles of rights of way. He still had the ear of the Prime Minister, and enjoyed promoting the careers of candidates with potential, but was no longer a major political player as he had been until 1947. He left government after Labour lost the 1951 general election.

In 1914 Dalton married Ruth with whom he had a daughter who died in infancy in the early 1920s. Dalton's biographer, Ben Pimlott, suggests that Dalton had homosexual tendencies but concludes he never acted on them. Michael Bloch, on the other hand, thinks that Dalton's love for Rupert Brooke, whom he met at Cambridge University's Fabian Society, went beyond the platonic, citing bike rides in the countryside and sleeping naked under the stars. In 1908, Dalton also made advances at James Strachey, "waving an immense steaming penis in his face and chuckling softly", as Brooke reported to James' brother Lytton. In later life, Dalton seems to have refrained from sexual relationships with men, though he kept a fatherly interest in the career of various young men (such as Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Crossman and Tony Crosland, who had been noted for their good looks and had had same sex experiences at Oxford) and was rather touchy feely with them. According to Nicholas Davenport, Dalton's unrequited feelings for Crosland became an embarrassing joke within the Labour Party. Dalton's papers, including his diaries, are held at the LSE Library. His diaries have been digitised and are available on LSE's Digital Library.