As an amateur Local Historian, who lives in the hamlet where Philip Snowden was born, it was with great interest that I learnt about this book.
Alex Clifford has done an excellent job of condensing the two volumes of the original autobiography into a single, more manageable 330-page book. His foreword is interesting and very informative about Philip Snowden’s character and life in politics. He shows Snowden’s early work to be that of a very important figure in the founding of the Labour Party.
In shortening the work, it loses none of the essential episodes in Snowden’s political life, in the very fraught inter-war years and he still manages to make the narrative flow throughout.
All in all, it makes a good read for anyone wishing to discover the essence of the Iron Chancellor, a self-made man who rose to high office from a very humble background.

Mark Barnes

"Britain’s Iron Chancellor is a book that provides a greater insight into what made Philip Snowden tick than any more recent works, of which there have been few. It also offers an insight into the Labour Party’s history that is far more complex and nuanced than is often presented in other work. Snowden’s contribution to the economic orthodoxy of the early Labour Party and his relationship with MacDonald, Hardie and the Trade Union movement give a clear understanding of both how Labour succeeded in the early years of the twentieth century and how it also failed. Echoes of those failures can be seen in subsequent decades, especially in the at times deep antagonism felt between the Parliamentary Party and the Trade Union movement, an antagonism laid bare in Snowden’s autobiography.

Philip Snowden was certainly a product of his time and his autobiography, complex in the tight rope it walks between a personal memoir and an attempt to create an authoritative history of the period in which he lived, is a fine example of that. Snowden and his life’s work – to help create a Labour Party that could be a force for change in British politics- helped create the times that we live in. The past can often act as an imperfect guide to the present and whether you read this book because you want to understand Philip Snowden better or because it may provide some insight into how a Labour government can attempt to handle an economic crisis, I would highly recommend that you do."

Will Barber-Taylor; The Social Review