The First Labour Party 1906-1914

K. D. Brown

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429831171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

First published in 1985. The essays in this book pull together the diverse strands of research to give a comprehensive picture of the Labour Party, which strived to carve out for itself a niche within an existing political framework. The first part of the book examines the composition, the national, local and regional organisation of the party, and its relations with the working classes, the TUC and the Liberals. In the second part the contributors discuss the party's stand on the main political issues of the day: education, the suffragettes, Ireland and other major areas of concern in the political arena at the beginning of the century.

Chapter One

IDEOLOGY AND COMPOSITION¹

Of the fifteen candidates endorsed by the Labour Representation Committee, only Keir Hardie and Richard Bell were returned at the general election of 1900. Yet between them they represented the two main strands that were to make up the Labour Party down to 1914, and beyond. Hardie, chairman of the Independent Labour Party, was the country’s leading socialist politician, known through both his oratory and journalism as an unsparing critic of the exploitation and ugliness of capitalism. Bell was not a socialist. As general secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, he was mainly concerned to represent the case for trade unionism. Whereas Hardie had defeated a Liberal opponent, Bell had been elected with Liberal Party co-operation and by the general election of 1906 he had virtually entered the Liberal fold. However, Bell’s defection had been offset by three LRC successes in by-elections at which two pragmatic trade union leaders, David Shackleton and Arthur Henderson, and a veteran of London Progressivism, Will Crooks, were returned. Of the three only Henderson had faced a Liberal opponent.

In January 1906 Hardie, Shackleton, Henderson and Crooks were re-elected, and with twenty-six other newly-elected MPs formed the parliamentary Labour Party. Of this thirty, twenty-two had been supported by their trade unions and eight were sponsored by the ILP. All the ILPers regarded themselves as socialists; of the trade unionists about half did not (eleven of the trade-union sponsored MPs were also members of the ILP). The members of the PLP were mostly middle-aged – in 1906 the average age was forty-six – and this meant that they had tended to form their views when socialism in Britain was almost unknown. Consequently many had first entered politics via the radical wing of the Liberal Party. In some cases the connection with Liberalism had been intimate. Among the Labour Party’s more prominent members, David Shackleton had been elected as a Liberal town councillor and Arthur Henderson had worked as an agent of the Liberal Party and was closely associated with the party in the north-east until the early 1900s. Hardie, the chairman of the PLP from 1906 to 1908, had earlier broken away from the Liberal Party, but the process had been a protracted one.² Moreover, in twenty-four constituencies Labour MPs had been returned in tandem with Liberals, as a result of the Gladstone-MacDonald pact. Nevertheless the Labour Party sat on the opposition benches (those on the government side were in any case crowded with four hundred Liberal MPs) and in other ways tried to emphasise the distinct nature of the party. Invariably, its members stressed their ‘specialist knowledge’ of the issues ‘which affect the great mass of the workers’. ‘When workers’ questions come up for discussion’, wrote Shackleton, Labour MPs ‘have to do little more than open the book of their own lives’ and ‘consider what they have themselves in most instances gone through’.³ Labour propagandists also stressed the vested interests bound up with Liberalism and the ways in which society was evolving towards a socialistic state.⁴

However, some of the flavour of the older party always stuck with Labour. In particular Labour politicians had the same attitude towards accepting piecemeal reforms and working within the existing framework.⁵ Many had experience of trade union negotiations which conditioned them to think in terms of compromise and limited improvement. Some of the moral reform rhetoric of Liberalism was also found in Labour pronouncements. Collectivist solutions to society’s ills were not regarded as putting an end to individual responsibility. There was held to be a need also for thrift and temperance, and about a dozen Labour MPs were known as supporters of teetotalism.⁶ Such attitudes, however, were not invariably drawn from middle-class Liberalism. There was a long tradition of working-class radicalism in which emphasis was placed on self-improvement and individual effort, often coupled with a suspicion of local or central authority. Dislike of the poor law was one aspect of such an attitude. Another was opposition to the established church, and inevitably matters of religion were major influences on the ideology of the early Labour leaders. No-one raised in Victorian Britain could escape entirely the pervasive influence of religion. Some reacted against orthodox beliefs and not only rejected the state church but also adopted a secularist position. Many Social Democratic Federation members had begun as followers of Charles Bradlaugh, while Robert Blatchford and other contributors to the Clarion were hostile to conventional religion.⁷ The Labour Churches catered for the less dogmatic who accepted ‘the moral and economic laws that may be adduced from the Fatherhood of God or the Brotherhood of Man’, and in a sense, too, the Socialist Sunday School movement, with its ‘Ten Commandments’ and so forth, acknowledged the role of religion even while trying to rechannel it.⁸ In this period ‘the religion of Socialism’ made converts from Christianity. The vocabularies of advanced politics and evangelical Christianity contained similar phrases, and often similar energies and aspirations were redirected from religion to Labour propaganda.⁹

On the other hand, few Labour leaders ranged very far from convention. In electoral terms, there was more to be lost than gained from a reputation for freethinking. MacDonald, for example, had a complex and unconventional attitude to religion, although he gave his denomination simply as Free Church of Scotland.¹⁰ In the general election of 1906 the role of the non-conformist churches was particularly significant. In many constituencies Labour was in unofficial alliance with the Liberal Party which in turn was closely allied to non-conformity, probably at this time more so than ever before.¹¹ Of the Labour candidates elected, eighteen had described themselves as non-conformists, and some of this number were lay preachers. However, not all seem to have had a firm adherence; of the eighteen only eight – Crooks, Hardie, Henderson, A.H. Gill, John Hodge, Walter Hudson, J.H. Jenkins and J.W. Taylor – were claimed by the denominational press.¹² For many, non-conformity probably helped to provide an ethical underpinning to their political creed. The remarks made by J.A. Seddon while LRC candidate were not untypical of a section of the Labour leadership. Addressing the men’s Bible class at a local Congregational chapel, Seddon, who had been raised as a non-conformist, referred to his own beliefs as ‘a sacred personal matter between himself and his maker’. Even so, he believed that a man’s religion should consist of ‘his duty to his fellow man and his Creator’ and that the churches had neglected some of their duties. ‘While humanity was bleeding at every pore, and crying out for brotherliness, it was not for the churches to quarrel about “isms”, but to see what they could do for their fellowmen, and so hasten the Kingdom of God upon earth’.¹³

Many Labour activists invoked the ‘New Jerusalem’ of the socialist millennium that was to arise. The similarity between the language of politics and that of religion was particularly marked in the northern areas where Labour had most support. Undoubtedly other factors, notably occupational structure, help to explain the regional variations in Labour-voting.¹⁴ But it is probable that by using the phraseology of the non-conformist pulpit, speakers helped to secure the allegiance of workers inculcated with the values of the chapel. The final passage in one of Philip Snowden’s most popular lectures offers a striking example of religiosity in the service of socialism.

But the only way to regain the earthly paradise is by the old, hard road to Calvary – through persecution, through poverty, through temptation, by the agony and bloody sweat, by the crown of thorns, by the agonising death. And then the resurrection to the New Humanity – purified by suffering, triumphant through sacrifice.¹⁵

II

‘What culture they have’, wrote W.T. Stead rather patronisingly of the first generation of Labour MPs, ‘they obtained from the chapel, from that popular university the public library, or still more frequently from the small collection of books found in the homes of the poor’. These remarks prefaced the perennially-fascinating replies that Stead received from twenty-five Labour and twenty Lib-Lab MPs to a question about which books they found ‘most useful’ in their early days when the ‘battle was beginning’.¹⁶ Perhaps not surprisingly, many wrote respectfully of the bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Shakespeare, while Dickens was the most popular novelist.¹⁷ Only James O’Grady, a Roman Catholic, and Will Thorne, who had retained his SDF membership, mentioned Marx. Five Labour Party MPs referred to Henry George – Hardie, O’Grady, George Barnes, John Hodge and Thomas Summerbell – and all were of an age to have been influenced in the first half of the 1880s when George lectured in Britain and when Progress and Poverty circulated widely.

Perhaps most significantly, many of Stead’s respondents mentioned the works of those two pillars of Victorian social criticism, John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle. Ruskin seems to have been regarded by many who were active in the movement as a fellow socialist. Blatchford, for instance, wrote ‘I know many Socialists, and many Socialistic leaders. I know none who can make profit of it. Most of the leaders, such as Ruskin, Morris, Hyndman, Carpenter, Shaw, De Mattos, Annie Besant, and Bland, would lose in money and position were Socialism adopted now’.¹⁸ Such views were held notwithstanding the opening sentence of Ruskin’s autobiography: ‘I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school; Walter Scott’s school that is to say, and Homer’s’.¹⁹ Ten of the Labour MPs included in Stead’s survey acknowledged Ruskin, and the work most often referred to was Unto this Last. Fred Jowett, for example, said it was the book that made him a socialist.²⁰

Carlyle was about...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction. The Edwardian Labour Party
• Chapter 1. Ideology and Composition
• Chapter 2. The Labour Party in Scotland
• Chapter 3. The Labour Party in Wales
• Chapter 4. Labour in the Municipalities
• Chapter 5. The Labour Party Press
• Chapter 6. Labour and the Trade Unions
• Chapter 7. Labour and Education
• Chapter 8. The Labour Party and State ‘Welfare’
• Chapter 9. Labour and the Constitutional Crisis
• Chapter 10. Labour and Women’s Suffrage
• Chapter 11. Labour and Ireland
• Chapter 12. Labour and Foreign Affairs: A Search for Identity and Policy
• INDEX