The Independent Labour Party, 1914-1939

The Political and Cultural History of a Socialist Party

Keith Laybourn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367495015
• eBook ISBN: 9781351866064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Historians of political history are fascinated by the rise and fall of political parties and, for twentieth-century Britain, most obviously the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberal Party. What is often overlooked in this political development is the work of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was a formative influence in the growth of the political Labour movement and its leaders in the late nineteenth century and the early to mid-twentieth century. The ILP supplied the Labour Party with some of its leading political figures, such as Ramsay MacDonald, and moved the Labour Party along the road of parliamentary socialism. However, divided over the First World War and challenged by the Labour Party becoming socialist in 1918, it had to face the fact that it was no longer the major parliamentary socialist party in Britain.

Although it recovered after the First World War, rising to between 37, 000 and 55, 000 members, it came into conflict with the Labour Party and two Labour governments over their gradualist approach to socialism. This eventually led to its disaffiliation from the Labour Party in 1932 and its subsequent fragmentation into pro-Labour, pro-communist and independent groups. Its new revolutionary policy divided its members, as did the Abyssinian crisis, the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Show Trials. By the end of the 1930s, seeking to re-affiliate to the Labour Party, it had been reduced to 2, 000 to 3, 000 members, was a sect rather than a party and had earned Hugh Dalton's description that it was the 'ILP flea'.

In the following monograph, Keith Laybourn analyses the dynamic shifts in this history across 25 years. This scholarship will prove foundational for scholars and researchers of modern British history and socialist thought in the twentieth century.

1
The Independent Labour Party and the Great War, 1914–1918

Historians have long recognised that the Great War was a crucial moment of change in British political history favouring the political Labour movement. To Arthur Marwick it damaged the Liberal Party and strengthened the Labour Party.¹ For Trevor Wilson it ‘increased the importance of the trade unions and so stimulated their political consciousness that it correspondingly enhanced the position of the Labour Party’.² Yet despite such developments, it also led to divisions between the pro-war and anti-war supporters within the ranks of the Labour Party and the trade unions, and greatly weakened the position of the ILP, the intellectual godparent of the Labour Party, especially as the Labour Party became a socialist party. Indeed, much has been made of the differences between the pro-war Labour Party and the anti-war ILP leading to a departure of many ILPers to the Labour Party, though this is to accept that the ILP members were largely pacifist.

Indeed, R. E. Dowse has argued, of the wartime ILP, that ‘Factionalism, the bane of the Left which had plagued the party before the war, ceased almost completely’, adding that ‘James Parker, MP. J. R. Clynes, MP, and Harry Dubery [Duberry], a member of the NAC’, who totally opposed the ILP’s policy of pacifism’, were old stalwarts whose opposition left them without influence in the party.³ Such was the agreement on the need for peace, he adds, that ‘Despite this range of opinion within the ILP [having identified at least four strands] the differences rarely broke to the surface’.⁴ Yet such equanimity within the ILP was simply not the case, for at the outbreak of the war the majority of Labour members and many of those affiliated to the ILP, perhaps even the majority, were pro-war or in favour of an Allied victory, even if they also wanted an early peace agreement. Indeed, Paul Ward has suggested that ‘the anti-war left was a small proportion of the left, and only a tiny minority when compared with the population as a whole’. And it would appear that most ILP members, including Ramsay MacDonald, wanted the Great War’s successful conclusion for all the Allies despite criticising the conduct of the war.⁵ Also, despite the fact that the ILP Annual Easter Conference of 1915 passed a resolution opposing war, many ILP members were, at the outbreak of war, willing to fight, attesting under the Derby Scheme. There were, indeed, marked differences of opinion within the ILP over the issue of peace and war.

Both Paul Ward and Marcus Morris have, nevertheless, noted that despite the divergent attitudes of ILP members on the Great War, there was more unity than division between the so-called pro-war and anti-war sections of the Labour movement. To them, both groupings wanted peace even if some of the leaders, like Robert Blatchford (Clarion Movement) and Henry Mayers Hyndman, leader of the British Socialist Party (BSP), wanted to negotiate peace from a position of strength rather than equality, claiming there was no such thing as an anti-war party but only a party of defence.⁶ Morris, in particular, suggests that having been divided between 1914 and 1916, the ILP became more united in a common cause to support Conscientious Objectors (COs), the Peace Campaign, the Women’s Peace Crusade, and the move to ‘Hail the Russian Revolution’ at the Leeds Conference in June 1917. The decline of the ILP membership between 1914 and the beginning of 1917 was then reversed in the ‘anti-war hotspots’ of the West Riding of Yorkshire and markedly so in Glasgow and the Clydeside, which was thrust forward as a new centre of ILP activity. This change may have been partly influenced by the Munitions Act of 1915, denying workers the freedom to move from job to job without a leaving certificate from their employer. The introduction of the Military Conscription Act of January 1916, and the work of the War Emergency: Workers’ National Committee (WEWNC) – an organisation of about 100 Labour and socialist bodies – in demanding the ‘conscription of riches’ if the nation could demand the ‘conscription of life’, and advocating public ownership of wealth and the defence of civil liberties may have been another unifying factor. Indeed, in common with the Labour Party, many ILP branches, including those in Glasgow and London, had supported the actions of the WEWNC in protesting at the rise in prices of consumer products and rents; the Glasgow ILP branches becoming involved in the Glasgow rent strikes and the City of London ILP expressing concern, also, for the treatment of the wives of soldiers and sailors.⁷ Nonetheless, the revivified ILP of 1917 faced a serious challenge to its omnipotent position as the leading social democratic party by the fact that the Labour Party introduced its new socialist constitution, with its commitment to Clause Four (3d) and public ownership of the means of production.

In the final analysis, there are three main questions about the impact of the Great War on the ILP. Firstly, what was the attitude of its members to the Great War? Secondly, how did this affect the ILP? Thirdly, how did changes in the Labour Party affect its position within the political Labour movement? The evidence presented here suggests that the ILP was inaccurately presented as a pacifist, or peace, party, that it lost membership but recovered under a widely based national Peace Campaign, but found that its prominence as the primary democratic socialist party in Britain was challenged and undermined by the Labour Party adopting a socialist constitution in 1918.

The ILP, its leaders and the Great War

On the eve of war, the ILP was the most successful socialist party in Britain, with 40,000 members, organised into nine divisions with 750 branches, though dominated by the Yorkshire and London branches (Appendix 1), and run nationally by the National Administrative Committee (NAC). The NAC was composed of the usual executive members (such as Chairman, Secretary, Treasurer) elected at conference, along with nine divisional representatives, and had a total membership of 16. In 1914 the ILP’s leading figures were James Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden and J. Bruce Glasier, the ‘Big Four’, who were supported by powerful regional and national figures, such as Fred Jowett and William Leach of Bradford, and E. J. Sandham of Lancashire. All were prominent and powerful figures from the pre-war ILP, usually both within their local area and in the national Labour Party, and eight were MPs sponsored by the ILP: W. C. Anderson (Sheffield Attercliffe), J. R. Clynes (Manchester North-East), James Keir Hardie (Merthyr Tydfil), Fred Jowett (Bradford West), George Lansbury (Bow & Bromley), James Ramsay MacDonald (Leicester), Thomas Richardson (Whitehaven), and Philip Snowden (Blackburn), forming an important rump in the Labour Party’s 42 MPs who had been returned in December 1910. However, from the start the leaders of the ILP were divided on the war in a way in which the leaders of the Labour Party, and Arthur Henderson, were not. Whilst they, and the ILP, were opposed to war per se, the leading figures in the ILP were often ambiguous in their attitude to it in a way which made it seem out of tune with the wartime nationalism that prevailed.

When war broke out, Hardie, MP for Merthyr Tydfil, and Jowett, the ILP and Labour MP for Bradford West, driven on by a belief in individual conscience, honoured both those who opposed the war and those who felt compelled to fight. In August 1914 Hardie said that ‘the lads who have gone forth to fight their country’s battles must not be disheartened by any discordant notes at home’.⁸ In December 1914 he was wanting all those who were fighting to come back safely, though he exclaimed ‘But I cannot become a recruiting agent’.⁹ At the beginning of January 1915, Hardie also declared that the position of the NAC of the ILP was one of ‘complete neutrality’.¹⁰ Later, in his famous article, ‘We must see the war through, but denounce secret diplomacy’, he paid homage to those giving their lives in the war, defended those who opposed it, and denounced the secret treaties that had led to it.¹¹ Jowett’s views, like those of Hardie, appeared equally ambiguous given that the Annual ILP Conference at Norwich in the Easter of 1915, supported peace, and especially so since he wished to see the war speedily concluded in favour of the Allies. In his Chairman’s speech to the 1915 Conference he stated that ‘Now is the time to speak and ensure that never again shall the witches cauldron of secret diplomacy brew the war broth of Hell for mankind’.¹² He was far more explicit at the ILP Conference of 1916, where, in his Chairman’s speech, he reminded one critic that

The ILP resolution to which you refer [the one approved at the 1915 Conference] expressed the view that Socialist parties as organised bodies should support no war. It did not attempt to lay down such a policy for individuals. If it did I should be opposed to it in principle.¹³

Such a fine distinction between the actions of individuals within the ILP and the policy of the Party was confusing to many of those whom the ILP permitted, with Jowett’s sympathies, to both support and oppose the war in different guises – although Philip Snowden, ILP and Labour Party MP for Blackburn, did suggest that this was no different from individuals opposing a war which the state had entered into without prior consultation.¹⁴

James Ramsay MacDonald, rather like Jowett and Hardie, was also opposed to the secret treaties that had led to war. Indeed, MacDonald resigned as Chairman of the Labour Party when the Executive Committee of the Labour Party decided to support the Asquith government’s pursuit of the war on 5 August 1914 by agreeing to the measure to raise £100 million war credits whilst still objecting to the secret treaties that had led to war. His objection was to the secret treaties, though he stated in the Leicester Pioneer that ‘Prussian militarism must be broken and the Russian people freed’.¹⁵ Many years later Emanuel Shinwell reflected that ‘He [Hardie] was neither for nor against it. In speaking his audiences heard a man who loathed past wars, regarded future wars with abhorrence, but carefully evaded giving his opinion on the basic question of the present one’.¹⁶ Nevertheless, as a result of resigning from the chairmanship of the Labour Party, MacDonald became more involved the ILP and a group of anti-war radicals on the left-wing of the Liberal Party – most notably Philip Morrell, Norman Angell, Charles Trevelyan, E. D. Morel, Arthur Ponsonby and S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Independent Labour Party and the Great War, 1914–1918
• 2 Should we stay or should we go? The Independent Labour Party and its new role, 1918–1922
• 3 Clifford Allen, the ‘Red Clydesiders’ and ‘Socialism in Our Time’, 1922–1928
• 4 Conflict with the Labour Party and Labour government, and disaffiliation c. 1928–1932: reasoned debate or emotional suicide?
• 5 ‘The ILP flea’: the rapid demise and factionalism of the Independent Labour Party in the early and mid-1930s
• 6 A mass of contradictions: internationals, communism, the Labour Party and war
• 7 Voices from the ranks making the most of moment and form: a distillation of the essence of the cultural and political life of ILP branches, federations, divisions and their members, 1914–1939
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index