Sir Richard Stafford Cripps (24 April 1889 – 21 April 1952) was a British Labour Party politician, barrister, and diplomat.
A wealthy lawyer by background, Cripps first entered Parliament at a by-election in January 1931, and was one of a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain his seat at the October general election that year. He became a leading spokesman for the left wing and for co-operation in a Popular Front with Communists before 1939, in which year the Labour Party expelled him. During this time he became intimately involved with Krishna Menon and the India League.
During World War II (1939–1945), Cripps served from May 1940 to January 1942 as Ambassador to the USSR, with major responsibility for building rapport with Molotov and Stalin, and upon the commencement of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 he was crucial to the forging of the alliance between the USSR and the UK. Back in London in early 1942, he became a member of the War Cabinet of the wartime coalition government.
In March 1942, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent him to India to negotiate with Indian leaders about Indian cooperation in the war effort in exchange for dominion status after the war. Cripps failed in this mission, as his proposals were too radical for Churchill and the Cabinet, while being too conservative for Mahatma Gandhi and other Indian leaders. Nonetheless, he kept the trust and friendship of V. K. Krishna Menon, allowing him to retain a role in Indian affairs, including as a member of the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India and, ultimately, in having a voice in the selection of the final Viceroy in 1947. From November 1942 he served as Minister of Aircraft Production, an important post, but one outside the inner War Cabinet.
Cripps rejoined the Labour Party in February 1945, and after the war he served in the 1945-1951 Attlee ministry, first as President of the Board of Trade and between 1947 and 1950 as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Labour Party member and historian Kenneth O. Morgan claimed of his role in the latter position that he was "the real architect of the rapidly improving economic picture and growing affluence from 1952 onwards".
The economy improved after 1947, benefiting from American money given through grants from the Marshall Plan as well as from loans. However, the pound had to be devalued in 1949. Cripps kept the wartime rationing-system in place to hold down consumption during an "age of austerity", promoted exports and maintained full employment with static wages. The public especially respected "his integrity, competence, and Christian principles".
Cripps was born in Chelsea, London, the son of Charles Cripps, a barrister and later Conservative MP, and the former Theresa Potter, the sister of Beatrice Webb and Catherine Courtney. Cripps grew up in a wealthy family and was educated at Winchester College, where the Headmaster described him as "a thoroughly good fellow" and at University College London, where he studied chemistry. He left science for the law, and in 1913 was called to the bar by the Middle Temple. He served in the First World War as a Red Cross ambulance driver in France, and then managed a chemical factory producing armaments. He practised as a barrister during the 1920s, where he specialised in patent cases, and was reported to be the highest paid lawyer in England. He was appointed a King's Counsel in 1927.
Cripps was a member of the Church of England and in the 1920s became a leader in the World Alliance to Promote International Friendship through the Churches, as his father had been. From 1923 to 1929 Cripps was the group's treasurer and its most energetic lecturer.
At the end of the 1920s, Cripps moved to the left in his political views, and in 1930 he joined the Labour Party. The next year, he was appointed Solicitor General in the second Labour government, and received the then customary knighthood. In 1931, Cripps was elected to Parliament in a by-election for Bristol East. As an MP, he was a strong proponent of Marxist social and economic policies, although he had strong faith in evangelical Christianity, and did not subscribe to the Marxist rejection of religion.
In the 1931 general election, Cripps was one of only three former Labour ministers to hold his seat, alongside George Lansbury, who subsequently became party leader, and Clement Attlee, deputy leader. In 1932, Cripps helped found and became the leader of the Socialist League, which was composed largely of intellectuals and teachers from the Independent Labour Party who rejected its decision to disaffiliate from Labour. The Socialist League put the case for an austere form of democratic socialism. He argued that on taking power the Labour Party should immediately enact an Emergency Powers Act, allowing it to rule by decree and thus "forestall any sabotage by financial interests", and also immediately abolish the House of Lords.
In 1936, Labour's National Executive Committee dissociated itself from a speech in which Cripps said he did not "believe it would be a bad thing for the British working class if Germany defeated us". Cripps also opposed British rearmament:
Money cannot make armaments. Armaments can only be made by the skill of the British working class, and it is the British working class who would be called upon to use them. To-day you have the most glorious opportunity that the workers have ever had if you will only use the necessity of capitalism in order to get power yourselves. The capitalists are in your hands. Refuse to make munitions, refuse to make armaments, and they are helpless. They would have to hand the control of the country over to you.
Cripps was an early advocate of a united front against the rising threat of fascism and he opposed an appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany. In 1936, he was the moving force behind a Unity Campaign, involving the Socialist League, the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain, designed to forge electoral unity against the right. Opposed by the Labour leadership, the Unity Campaign failed in its intentions. Rather than face expulsion from Labour, Cripps dissolved the Socialist League in 1937. Tribune, set up as the campaign's newspaper by Cripps and George Strauss, survived. In early 1939, however, Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party for his advocacy of a Popular Front with the Communist Party, the Independent Labour Party, the Liberal Party, and anti-appeasement Conservatives. In 1938, Cripps visited Jamaica to investigate violence which took place during mass strikes. During one of the political meetings he spoke at, the audience included the future pioneer of black civil rights in Britain, Billy Strachan, who had been taken by his father to hear Cripps speak. During this same meeting, the People's National Party was formed.
Soon after war broke out in October 1939, Cripps set off on an informal five-month world tour with a friend, Geoffrey Masterman Wilson, as his secretary. In India, they met Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah, then on to Burma and China, where they met Chiang Kai-shek, then to Moscow, to visit Molotov. They then went on via China to the United States, where Cripps carried out a "propaganda tour", and returned to England in April 1940. On their travels, they jointly kept a shared diary, which came to some 180,000 words.
When Winston Churchill formed his wartime coalition government in 1940 he appointed Cripps Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the view that Cripps, who had Marxist sympathies, could negotiate with Joseph Stalin who had a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, attacking the Soviet Union in June 1941, Cripps became a key figure in forging an alliance between the western powers and the Soviet Union.
In 1942, Cripps returned to Britain and made a broadcast about the Soviet war effort. The popular response was phenomenal, and Cripps rapidly became one of the most popular politicians in the country, despite having no party backing. He was appointed a member of the War Cabinet, with the jobs of Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons, and was considered for a short period after his return from Moscow a rival to Churchill in his hold on the country.