Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, PC (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, opposed pacifism, promoted rearmament against the German threat, and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. He served in Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet. As Chancellor, he pushed his cheap money policy too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947. Dalton's 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, but he 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. He 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."

Political career

Foreign policy

Turning his attention to the looming crisis in Europe, he became the Labour Party's spokesman on foreign policy in Parliament. Pacifism had been a strong element in Labour Party (and other parties as well), but the Spanish Civil war changed that, as the Left moved to support arms for the Republican ("Loyalist") cause. Aided by union votes, Dalton moved the party from semi-pacifism to a policy of armed deterrence and rejection of appeasement. He was a bitter enemy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who tried to buy off ("appease") Germany at Munich in 1938.

Second World War

When war came, Chamberlain's position became untenable after many Conservative MPs refused to support him in the Norway Debate in April 1940, and Dalton and other senior Labour leaders made clear they would join any coalition government except one headed by Chamberlain. After Chamberlain resigned early in May, and Lord Halifax had declined the position, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. During Churchill's coalition government (1940–45) Dalton was Minister of Economic Warfare from 1940–42. He established the Special Operations Executive, and was later a member of the executive committee of the Political Warfare Executive. He became President of the Board of Trade in 1942; the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, drafted into the Civil Service during the war, was his Principal Private Secretary.

Chancellor of the Exchequer

منطق رئيسي: Political history of the United Kingdom (1945–present)

After the unexpected Labour victory in the 1945 general election, Dalton wished to become Foreign Secretary, but instead the job was given to Ernest Bevin. Dalton, a highly skilled economist, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Alongside Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps, Dalton was one of the "Big Five" of the Labour Government.

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.

During the war most overseas investments had been sold to pay for the war (thus losing their income), and Britain suffered severe balance of payments problems. The $3.75 billion 50-year American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes in 1946 (and the $1.25 billion loan from Canada) was soon exhausted. By 1947 rationing had to be tightened and the convertibility of the pound suspended. In the atmosphere of crisis Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps intrigued to replace Clement Attlee with Ernest Bevin as Prime Minister; Bevin refused to play along and Attlee bought off Cripps by giving him Morrison's responsibilities for economic planning. Ironically, of the "Big Five" it was to be Dalton who ultimately fell victim to the events of that year.

ذات يوم عام 1947 خطب هيودالتون وزير الخزانة البريطانية فى مجلس العموم خلال جلسة الديون البريطانية لمصر والتى بلغت 400 مليون جنيه استرلينى قائلا اطالب المسؤولين المصريين بتقديم مقترحات لتسوية جميع اوجزء منها فقد كانت التكلفة باهظة وجزء كبير منها كان فى مجهود حربي دفاعا عن مصر

الهامش

للاستزادة

• Brady, Robert A. (1950). . University of California Press., detailed coverage of nationalisation, welfare state and planning
• Dell, Edmund. The Chancellors: A History of the Chancellors of the Exchequer, 1945-90 (HarperCollins, 1997) pp 15–93.
• Morgan, Kenneth O. Labour in Power 1945–51 (1984).
• Pelling, Henry. The Labour Government 1945–51 (1984)
• Pimlott, Ben. Hugh Dalton (1985), awarded the Whitbread Prize
• Pimlott, Ben. "Dalton, (Edward) Hugh Neale, Baron Dalton (1887–1962)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2011 accessed أربعة June 2013
• Howe, Stephen. "Hugh Dalton" in Kevin Jefferys, ed., Labour Forces: From Ernie Bevin to Gordon Brown (2002) pp 43–62

مصادر رئيسية

• Dalton, Hugh. Call back yesterday: memoirs, 1887–1931 (1953) ·
• Dalton, Hugh. The fateful years: memoirs, 1931–1945 (1957)
• Dalton, Hugh. High tide and after: memoirs, 1945–1960 (1962)
• Pimlott, Ben, ed. Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45 (1986) 913pp
• Pimlott, Ben, ed. The political diary of Hugh Dalton, 1918–1940, 1945–1960 (1986)

مراجع

• Craig, F. W. S. (1983) [1969]. British parliamentary election results 1918–1949 (3rd ed.). Chichester: Parliamentary Research Services. ISBN .
• Rogers, F. H. (2004). The Measurement and Decomposition of Achievement Equity. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University.
• Dalton, H. The measurement of the inequality of incomes, Economic Journal, 30 (1920), pp. 348–461.

وصلات خارجية

• أعمال من هيودالتون في مشروع گوتنبرگ
• خطأ لوا في وحدة:Internet_Archive على السطر 573: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Hugh Dalton
• نطقب:UK National Archives ID
• Hugh Dalton's papers at LSE Archives
• Newspaper clippings about هيودالتون in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

نطقب:Presidents of the Board of Trade