Edward Frank Wise CB (3 July 1885 – 5 November 1933) was a British economist, civil servant and Labour Party politician.
Following the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, he was a Delegate to the Supreme Economic Council and led the negotiations for the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement 1920–21.
He had a close relationship with Jennie Lee, which ended in 1933 with his sudden death at Wallington Hall, the home of Sir Charles Trevelyan.
Frank Wise was born on 3 July 1885 at 13 Albert Street, Bury St. Edmunds, the county town of West Suffolk.
He and Clement Attlee were in the cast of Ali Baba and the Forty Borough Councillors, the Toynbee Hall Christmas pantomime in December 1909.
[12][13] In this position he created a Raw Materials Section, consciously imitating the work of Walther Rathenau in the German War Office, introducing state trading and control of Russian flax.
[15] He was described as an ‘aggressive and impatient spirit', convinced of the ‘danger and impossibility of half-measures' and harshly contemptuous of ‘self-interest, timidity and caution'.
He was ‘constantly taking risks, doing unprecedented things, defying the precedents, incurring the disapproval of his colleagues, butting in and suggesting improvements, short-circuiting the established routine and stretching the authority given to him to its extreme limit... he was a thruster; a man of action; an adventurer who took a creative artist's delight in a successful piece of organisation.
He made an ‘on the ground' inspection and his report on the need to provide food supplies was accepted by the UK Cabinet[20] and the Supreme Economic Council.
[21] He remained in Paris during this period and in September was appointed as a UK representative on the Supreme Economic Council[22] when it moved to London that autumn.
The Cabinet minute[24] confirmed that discussions would begin with the Soviet Representatives on opening trade and negotiations developed over the following months.
[25][26] Wise took a key role as the Chairman of the Interdepartmental Russia Committee,[27] acting as the British Representative on the Supreme Economic Council, which was tasked with the detailed arrangements for concluding the trade negotiations.
[30] His role as an adviser to Lloyd George provoked resentment in the Foreign Office, which considered him to have "decidedly left wing views"[31] being an "arch-bolshevist" with little "experience of international politics.
[33] His involvement in the negotiations at the Genoa Conference that culminated in the Rapallo Treaty between the Soviet Union and Germany, was the subject of much speculation and dispute.
[45] The organisation brought together all the co-operatives in Russia which had been formed from the consumer cooperative societies which had been introduced from England and Germany in the late 19th century.
This led eventually to the setting up of a number of commissions by 1925, the most significant of which was to forge a plan for the ‘abolition of poverty and the realisation of socialism' based on John A. Hobson's theory of 'under consumption'.
The Living Wage Commission under its secretary H. N. Brailsford, produced its interim report Socialism in Our Time for the 1926 ILP Party Conference.
[60] Beatrice Webb called The Living Wage a monument of conceit and ignorance, suggesting that Brailsford was probably the author with Wise's help.
[63] More than any other document produced by the ILP, it was a comprehensive statement of domestic policy in which, though the overt emphasis was on a living wage, the central argument was for the adoption of full-scale planning.
[70] He supported the Soviet Government through speeches in the House of Commons,[71] in contributions to conferences and journals[72] and lobbying for diplomatic recognition.
[76] In December 1929 there were a series of amendments proposed for the Unemployment Insurance Bill, which caused considerable dissension within the Labour Party and within the ILP Group in Parliament.
[82] During the debate in the House of Commons, the budget was called a complete gamble by the Conservatives' Oliver Stanley[83] and attacked by Wise as insufficiently socialist.
[83][84] Matters came to a head with the publication at the end of July 1931 of the May Report on National Expenditure[85] It proposed major reductions in government spending and balancing the budget.
Wise wrote in the New Leader of 7 August that it was almost unthinkable that the Government could identify itself with a report which reversed the principles of the Labour Movement.
Maxton's response is quoted by Gordon Brown – "Frank Wise asks me if I have another instrument than the Labour Party for the achievement of Socialism and if I have counted the cost.
[95] Neither of these groups sought to take any direct part in parliamentary politics or seek formal affiliation to the Labour Party.
[94] Negotiations between the SSIP and the Affiliation Committee led to amalgamation and the formation of the Socialist League which was founded prior to the Labour Party Conference in October 1932.
[100] The Times commented that this had hung chains on its leaders and fettered its parliamentary candidates with a crippling burden of Socialist obligations.
[101] Following the Conference, the Labour Party's Finance and Trade Committee invited Wise and Clement Attlee to prepare memoranda on the joint stock banks and at the same time Hugh Dalton initiated a series of research projects.
[104] Their affair is detailed at some length in both her own book My Life with Nye and in her biography by Patricia Hollis[105] and lasted until his death in November 1933.