Rt Hon. Lord Manny Shinwell CH PC
(1884-1986)

Died aged c. 102

Emanuel Shinwell, Baron Shinwell, CH, PC (18 October 1884 – 8 May 1986) was a British politician who served as a government minister under Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee. A member of the Labour Party, he served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for 40 years, for Linlithgowshire, Seaham and Easington respectively. Born in the East End of London to a large family of Jewish immigrants, Shinwell moved to Glasgow as a boy and left school at the age of eleven. He became a trade union organiser and one of the leading figures of Red Clydeside. He was imprisoned in 1919 for his alleged involvement in the disturbances in Glasgow in January of that year. He served as a Labour MP from 1922 to 1924, and from a by-election in 1928 until 1931, and held junior office in the minority Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929–31. He returned to the House of Commons in 1935, defeating former UK Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who by that time had been expelled from the Labour Party. During the Second World War, he was a leading backbencher critic of the Coalition Government. Shinwell is perhaps best remembered as the Minister of Fuel and Power in the Attlee ministry that nationalised coal mining in 1946. He was in charge of Britain's coal supply during the extremely harsh winter of January to March 1947, during which the supply system collapsed, leaving the United Kingdom to freeze and close down. He became unpopular with the public and was sacked in October 1947. He then served as Secretary of State for War, and then as Minister of Defence from 1950–51. The high defence spending which he demanded, partly to pay for British involvement in the Korean War, was a major factor causing then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell to impose NHS charges, prompting the resignation of Aneurin Bevan from the Cabinet. After Labour's defeat in 1951, Shinwell continued to serve in the Shadow Cabinet in Opposition until he stepped down in 1955. Thereafter he was a senior backbencher until 1970, by which time he was in his mid-eighties. That year he accepted a life peerage and was an active member of the House of Lords until shortly before his death, aged 101, in 1986.

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