Lansbury, George

Lansbury, George (1859-1940), English politician and pacifist who was a leader of the British Labour Party. Born in Halesworthy in Suffolk, Lansbury began to support himself financially while still a boy, and at the age of 20 he embraced socialism. Beginning in 1903, Lansbury was active in municipal politics, serving as mayor of the Poplar borough of London from 1919 to 1920 and again from 1936 to 1937. He was elected to Parliament on the Labour Party’s ticket in 1910, but he resigned from that office two years later to take up the fight for women's suffrage.

In 1913 Lansbury became editor of the Daily Herald, a workers’ publication. In the early 1920s he fought for more generous relief for the unemployed, a crusade that brought him into frequent conflict with London authorities. He entered Parliament again in 1922, became first Commissioner of Works in the Labour government of 1929-1931, and was elected Leader of the Labour Party in Parliament in 1931. He became alienated from Labour in 1935, however, when its members voted to support the League of Nations in its economic sanctions against Italy, imposed as retribution for the latter’s recent invasion of Ethiopia in the Italo-Ethiopian War. A pacifist who could not condone such an open invitation to hostility, Lansbury withdrew from active leadership, went abroad, and interviewed leaders in many countries in behalf of world peace. He was author of What I Saw in Russia (1920), Your Part in Poverty (1920), These Things Shall Be (1934), My Life, My England (1934), Looking Backwards and Forwards (1935), and My Quest for Peace (1938).