page_title: Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield
section_title: Political career
hierarchical_section_title: Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield / Political career
caption_attribution_description: Setting off for Russia IMAGELIBRARY/73 Persistent URL: archives.lse.ac.uk/dserve.exe?dsqServer=lib-4.lse.ac.uk&amp;a...
context_page_description: Sidney James Webb, 1st Baron Passfield, OM, PC was a British socialist, economist, reformer and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. He was one of the early members of the Fabian Society in 1884, who like George Bernard Shaw joined three months after its inception. Along with his wife Beatrice Webb and with Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Edward R. Pease, Hubert Bland and Sydney Olivier, Shaw and Webb turned the Fabian Society into the pre-eminent political-intellectual society in Edwardian England. He wrote the original, pro-nationalisation Clause IV for the British Labour Party.
context_section_description: Webb and Potter were members of the Labour Party and took an active role in politics. Sidney became Member of Parliament for Seaham at the 1922 general election. The couple's influence can be seen in their hosting of the Coefficients, a dining club which attracted some of the leading statesmen and thinkers of the day. In 1929, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Passfield, of Passfield Corner in the County of Southampton. He served as both Secretary of State for the Colonies and Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in Ramsay MacDonald's second Labour Government in 1929. As Colonial Secretary he issued the Passfield White Paper revising the government's policy in Palestine, previously set by the Churchill White Paper of 1922. In 1930, failing health caused him to step down as Dominions Secretary, but he stayed on as Colonial Secretary till the fall of the Labour government in August 1931.
  The Webbs ignored the mounting evidence of atrocities being committed by Joseph Stalin and remained supporters of the Soviet Union until their deaths. Having reached their seventies and early eighties, their books Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935) and The Truth About Soviet Russia (1942) still gave a positive assessment of Stalin's regime. The Trotskyist historian Al Richardson later described Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? as "pure Soviet propaganda at its most mendacious".
caption: Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb
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