Henry Slesser

Sir Herman Henry Slesser[1][2] PC (born Schloesser; 12 July 1883 – 3 December 1979) was an English barrister and British Labour Party politician who served as Solicitor-General and Lord Justice of Appeal.

[3] Born 12 July 1883 in London, England, he was the second son of Ernest Theodore Schloesser (Slesser) (1835–1929) a leather merchant from Frankfurt, and Anna Gella Seligmann, a concert pianist .

[4] He also joined the Fabian Society, and his legal and political careers became entwined; much of his casework involved defending workers, and in 1912 he was appointed standing counsel to the Labour Party.

The Liberal and Labour parties had agreed to only put forward one candidate each, against two Conservatives, which would have given Schloesser a good chance of victory.

He had grown wary of socialism, and based his campaigns on what he described as "medieval economics", principles drawn from his Anglo-Catholic religious faith; in his 1941 book Judgment Reserved, he attributed his defeat in 1922 to the "secularist and Hebrew" elements in the constituency disliking the presence of monks among his supporters.

Slesser's advocacy for distributist thought in government meant being part of a movement working against both unregulated capitalism and traditional socialism, as stated before, while arguing on behalf of a more mixed economy.