Praying for those in authority

 

I’ve recently been reading up on Ramsey MacDonald who, a hundred years ago this week, became Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister.  I did this for a LunchBreak talk and afterwards a member of the audience told me that Ramsey MacDonald, whilst an MP, selected Amersham as his weekend home and lived at Chesham Bois just down the road from the church!

He was a Scot and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on three occasions.  He was also a pacifist and never fully supported the first World War.  This not only lost him his membership of the Moray Gold Club but also made him reviled in some quarters.

 Ramsey MacDonald, along with Keir Hardy, was one of the founders of the Labour Party, popularly thought of as a people’s party after the general public began falling out of love with the Liberals.  He was more at home with philosophy and books than with carrying a placard and marching.  Yet, he rose to become leader of the Labour Party and its first Prime Minister.

When elected much of his time was taken up dealing with the aftermath of the Great War and coping with the financial crisis that caused the Great Depression.

 His personal background was one of poverty.  He was an illegitimate child born to a parlour maid and agricultural worker.  Yet he did well at school in Lossiemouth and eventually moved to London and continued his studies at night school with the Birkbeck Institute.  He had six children but lost his wife early on to blood poisoning.  He was faithfully supported by his children, especially his daughters and historians tell us that he was the favourite Prime Minister of King George V.

Perhaps history teaches us that very little is new in life, and we have probably been here before.  I’ve certainly got that impression reading up on MacDonald’s life.  We may think that war and the economic crisis of 2024 is immense, yet it seems it was equally, if not more so, in 1924 with one war just ten years behind and another a mere 15 years in front.

And if the goings on in parliament exasperate us today, give some thought to Ramsey MacDonald’s fate after heading up a Nation Government with the Conservatives to deal with the financial crisis.  Such collaboration was viewed as treachery by the Labour Party, and they expelled him.  He never quite got over that the party he helped to bring to birth eventually kicked him out and he died something of a broken man.

 So, although we may nostalgically call that decade the Roaring Twenties, the reality was Ramsey MacDonald’s time leading the United Kingdom was a very turbulent and worrying one.

The Bible is clear that one of our responsibilities is for us to pray for those in authority.  Such prayers were needed a century ago, as they most certainly are today.