The Boundary Commission, 1925

Abstract

The first Labour government lasted ten months. When the end came it had nothing to do with Ireland or the inordinate amount of time MacDonald and his colleagues had spent on the outstanding issue of the Anglo-Irish Treaty — the establishment of the Boundary Commission. In July 1924, J. R. Campbell, editor of the communist Worker’s Weekly, published an article urging British soldiers not to fire on their fellow workers, either during a strike or at any other time. Both the content of the article and its distribution were viewed as seditious and, in August, Campbell was arrested. However, under intense pressure from left-wingers inside his own party, the Attorney-General, Sir Patrick Hastings, dropped the charges. Hastings, who had undoubtedly been so successful in his harrying of the Conservative government the year before on the issue of the Irish deportations, thus handed a clear-cut political opportunity to the opposition parties at Westminster. Both the Tories and the Liberals decided to make this an issue of confidence in the Labour government and combined in the subsequent censure motion on 8 October to defeat the Labour government by a substantial majority. A general election was held on 29 October, and Labour was replaced by a Conservative government elected with its largest majority since 1832.