She was one of the first three female Labour MPs, alongside Dorothy Jewson and Margaret Bondfield,[1] and the first woman elected to represent a London constituency.

The minority government lasted only nine months; following the Zinoviev letter, the Labour Party lost the election of October 1924 and Lawrence was personally defeated.

Unlike the Webbs and other Fabians who went to Russia she did not believe everything the Bolsheviks alleged to foreign visitors, but tried to make contact with a wide variety of people, and she retained a critical attitude towards the Soviet system.

She subsequently tried, not very successfully, to persuade the Labour Party Conference that a socialist utopia was being created in Palestine which was benefitting Jewish and Arab workers alike.

In May 1936, the government appointed a Royal Commission under Lord Peel to investigate how the mandate was working in view of much communal strife between Jews and Arabs.

Just before this finished its work in early 1937, Susan wrote a memorandum for the Labour Party's Advisory Committee on Imperial Affairs, on whose Palestine sub-committee she sat, stressing the problems arising for the Arabs because Jewish development was going so far ahead.