Liberalism and the Rise of Labour 1890-1918

Keith Laybourn, Jack Reynolds

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429803215
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1984. This book is a detailed study of the way in which the growing Labour movement gradually ousted the Liberals in West Yorkshire between 1890 and 1924. It demonstrates the basis of old Liberalism and the strength of local non-conformity, and its powerful links with the textile and engineering industries. It shows how the Liberalism of this district was dominated by small groups of well-to-do leaders involved in these main industries. This study also shows the gradual breakdown of the political consensus established between the Liberal party and the working classes and explains how the increasing opposition to Liberalism was channelled into the socialist movement. In all, the authors present a thorough and extensive study of the political changes in a particularly interesting part of the British Isles.

Chapter One

THE RISE OF LABOUR AND THE DECLINE OF LIBERALISM: THE GENERAL PROBLEM AND WEST YORKSHIRE

The rise of the Labour Party between 1890 and 1924 and the decline of the Liberal Party in the same period are political events of more than usual significance for our own times. From a peak of 400 members of parliament in the 1906 General Election the Liberal Party crashed down to 40 in the general election of 1924. The Labour Party had made comparable gains, rising from a mere handful of members at the beginning of the century to 191 in 1923 – enough to form a minority government. Even in the general election of 1924, the defeated Labour Party had 151 parliamentary representatives and was clearly the alternative party of government to the Conservatives. It was little more than 30 years since the Independent Labour Party, the progenitor of the Labour Party, had held its first annual conference in Bradford in 1893.

The primary cause of the Liberal decline was obvious. Voters had abandoned the Liberal Party in favour of Labour or Conservatism. The problem of the historian was to analyse the timing of this change. Was the shift in political support before 1914 – the expression in politics of class division in society – decisive? Or did the Liberal Party lose a hold on public opinion, which it had recaptured after an apparant decline at the beginning of the century, as a result of the internal battles between Asquith and Lloyd George during the war and in the immediate post-war years? In other words, had the Liberal Party faced the challenge offered by the ‘emergence of the masses’ into politics, and become the natural party of the working classes before 1914 only to be destroyed in the 1920s by the conflicting political ambitions of their principal men. In our view, the evidence of the West Yorkshire textile area overwhelmingly suggests that decline of the Liberal Party was a continuous process from the late nineteenth century onwards and that this reflected the fundamental change in the structure and organisation of society. The Liberal Party was losing its supporters from the 1880s onwards. Despite the radicalism of the great governments dominated by Asquith and Lloyd George before 1914, the intransigence of hardcore Liberalism, as expressed for instance in the Liberal clubs of the West Yorkshire textile district, guaranteed that it did not offer itself as an effective party of social reform at the local level. Far less would its programme take on that element of crusading passion needed to arouse the working class into something like concerted political action. There was a long history of working-class support for Liberalism but few middle-class Liberals were unaware of class distinctions within the party or could bring themselves to ignore the assumptions of working-class deference this implied. In West Yorkshire, the Liberal Party never became, for working-class men and women, ‘our party’ in the comprehensive sense the Labour Party achieved.

The strength of nineteenth century Liberalism lay in its economic philosophy – its faith in the impersonality of economic forces; its view of the needs and obligation of the religious life – equality between the sects and hostility therefore to the special position of the Anglican church; the central principle of individualism which gave Liberals their deep-rooted suspicion of the executive power of the bureaucratic state. By the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, the value of these ideas was being challenged. A good many West Yorkshire woolmen were abandoning the economic liberalism which had been the corner stone of Victorian political consensus. In 1882, Samuel Cunliffe Lister, one of Bradford’s most influential manufacturers, began a nationwide campaign for what he called ‘Fair Trade’, the introduction of British tariffs against those who hampered the movement of British goods.¹ By 1904, in the Bradford and District Chamber of Commerce there was a majority in favour of the controlled introduction of tariffs. In religion also the position was weakening. The strength of the Liberal Party lay in its connection with Nonconformity but well-to-do Liberals were drifting into the Anglican church. As for the working class, while there was perhaps a significant increase in their numbers amongst Primitive Methodists, they as a whole remained indifferent to the claims of religion. And, of course, the importance of the connection generally diminished as society became increasingly secular. There were adjustments also required in the unifying principle of individualism and personal independence. Liberals themselves had contributed to the growth of the power of the state when they fought to transfer local power from the hands of self-elected oligarchies to the democracy of borough and county councils, working under the supervision of central authority. By the end of the century demarcation lines between individual and state responsibility were being redefined in ways which many Liberals found difficult to accommodate.

Some Liberals did however respond to the new circumstances. Recognising the importance of the spirit of collectivism developing in English society, men like J.A. Hobson, L.T. Hobhouse, C.F.C. Masterman and Herbert Samuel tried to remould Liberalism in such a way as to reconcile individualism with the need for social reform which allowed greater state intervention.² Some writers have in fact argued that their efforts were rewarded and that the fortunes of the Liberal Party picked up as the programme developed.³ There can be little doubt that in terms purely and simply of parliamentary elections the Liberal Party benefited enormously from the gratitude felt by working people for the great advances of the period 1906 to 1910. Indeed one writer goes so far as to maintain that the Liberal Party was benefiting from the development of class politics and was well on the way to countering the ILP/Labour Party claims to be the party of the working class.⁴

But this view, in our opinion, is based on a narrow view of the evidence for it concentrates too exclusively on the evidence of parliamentary elections. It ignores the physical difficulties of organising a completely new working-class party and the obstacles in the operation of the franchise which still hampered the expression of working-class political opinion. It has been estimated that about six million adult males could not vote under the provision of the two franchise acts of 1867 and 1884. Some were disenfranchised under the householder and lodger provisions, some through the difficulty of operating the seven different franchises and some simply because they could not fulfill the twelve-month residential qualification – a not unusual problem given the high level of residential mobility of working men. It is not enough to say that this was a question of randam inequality which affected the Liberal Party as much as Labour.⁵ An election agent was essential if any local party was to poll its full strength and clearly the Liberals were far better placed in this regard than Labour before the First World War. The working class did not begin to register its true vote until after the introduction of a new franchise act in 1918.⁶

Much of the discussion in favour of the post-1914 decline of the Liberal Party centres upon the work of P.F. Clarke in his book Lancashire and the New Liberalism. As the title implies the evidence is drawn almost exclusively from Lancashire and its politics are not necessarily typical of the country as a whole. In fact we think that the textile district of the West Riding of Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, probably offers a better insight into the process by which the Labour Party emerged. Apparently the Liberal Party in Lancashire was in great difficulty by the end of the century and compelled to look for new policies in the hope of surviving. In the West Riding the Liberal Party was much more powerful, returning either 19 or 20 of the 23 MPs who represented West Yorkshire between 1906 and 1914.⁷ perhaps inevitably the challenge to Liberalism in West Yorkshire was keener. Bradford was the birthplace of the Independent Labour Party, and the textile district of the West Riding the main initial centre of the movement which produced the Labour Party.⁸

A number of the central themes of Liberal and Labour history are well illustrated in a study of West Yorkshire. The importance of examining the results of local municipal and other elections is established for these show a steady, though not entirely continuous, rise in Labour fortunes before 1914.⁹ Thus in Bradford, working-class candidates standing independently of the two major parties took 22.4 per cent of the municipal vote in 1893, 18.8 per cent in 1900 and 43.1 per cent in 1913.¹⁰ Labour was in fact the most rapidly r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. THE RISE OF LABOUR AND THE DECLINE OF LIBERALISM: THE GENERAL PROBLEM AND WEST YORKSHIRE
• 2. THE ORIGINS OF SOCIALISM AND INDEPENDENT LABOUR
• 3. TRADE UNIONS AND THE INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY: THE GENESIS OF THE ILP IN WEST YORKSHIRE
• 4. LIBERAL RESPONSES AND LABOUR DIFFICULTIES IN THE 1890s
• 5. LABOUR RESURGENCE 1900–6
• 6. LIBERAL DECLINE AND LABOUR GROWTH 1906–14
• 7. THE FIRST WORLD WAR
• 8. CONCLUSION
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index