DisMember writes
MacDonald defends cutting the dole to the party that has just expelled him for it — 'I have known you of old' — ten days before the markets took sterling off gold and made the sacrifice moot.
The speech
11 September 1931 · MP for Seaham · House of Commons
The key quote
“I know that. I have known you of old.”
Defending the emergency cuts in unemployment benefit before the party he led until a fortnight before, MacDonald argues the choice was never cuts or no cuts but visible cuts or invisible ones — through tariffs or a collapsing pound — and reminds his old comrades, across a wall of interruption, that their own Cabinet weighed the same figures. The benches he faces contain his oldest friends; his aside to their coming attacks — 'I have known you of old' — carries the whole tragedy of the moment.
Historical context
11 September 1931, among the most charged scenes in the House's modern history. Three weeks earlier the Labour Cabinet had split over the May Committee's demanded benefit cuts; MacDonald went to the Palace to resign and emerged, to his colleagues' stupefaction, as Prime Minister of a National Government in coalition with Baldwin's Conservatives and the Samuelite Liberals. Labour expelled him within the month. Now he stands at the box defending a 10 per cent cut in the dole to benches filled with men he had led for a generation — Seaham miners' sponsored member against the miners' party — while the crisis he invokes was real enough: sterling was haemorrhaging gold even as he spoke, and within ten days of this speech Britain was forced off the gold standard anyway, the invisible devaluation-cut arriving on top of the visible ones. The pathos is doubled by what the interruptions show: this is not a leader arguing with opponents but a family quarrel conducted in public, 'I have known you of old' both a plea and an epitaph. The October election that followed reduced Labour to 52 seats, the deepest trauma in the party's history; 'betrayal' entered its liturgy, MacDonald's name became its curse, and every subsequent Labour leader tempted toward national coalition — down to 2010 and beyond — has governed in the shadow of this afternoon.
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Search Parliament →Historical context and scoring written by AI (Gemini). The key quote is verbatim from Hansard. Verify against source before publishing.