Ellen Wilkinson: From Red Suffragette to Government Minister. By Paula Bartley. * 'Red Ellen' Wilkinson: Her Ideas, Movements and World. By Matt Perry.

Abstract

Ellen Wilkinson is today best remembered for her role in the October 1936 march of unemployed shipwrights from her constituency of Jarrow to the Palace of Westminster. The Jarrow march and her role in it highlighted many of the key features of ‘Red Ellen’s’ three-decade long political career. As a self-professed Marxist, Wilkinson had little time for the National Government’s protestations that the soaring levels of unemployment in the Tyneside port town (nearly two-thirds of adult men were out of work) was the result of inexorable fluctuations in international trade. The only long-term solution to mass unemployment was the socialization of the means of production and the direction of national investment by the state. In the meantime, she condemned the government’s supine failure either to support the Tyneside shipping industry or to incentivize the development of a domestic steel industry in the region. Wilkinson’s lack of faith in even a regulated private market placed her on the ideological left of the interwar Labour party. In 1929, she had stood nearly alone on the party’s National Executive Committee in arguing for the inclusion of a commitment to nationalize the Bank of England in the party’s election manifesto. Even after she left the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1924 due to unease with the party’s increasingly authoritarian direction, she continued to admire the Soviet ‘experiment’. She maintained close affiliations with left-wing groups and leaders inside and outside the CPGB, including Wal Hannington, the leader of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), which organized a series of high-profile hunger marches in the 1920s and 1930s.