Augmenting Democracy

Political Movements and Constitutional Reform During the Rise of Labour, 1900-1924

Andrew Chadwick

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138607064
• eBook ISBN: 9780429863691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1999, Andrew Chadwick provides an important new interpretation of British radical, suffrage-feminist and socialist movements during the first quarter of the twentieth century, based on analysis of their visions of democratic constitutional reform. He argues that a shared discourse of 'radical constitutionalism' allowed these groups to forge alliances based upon a common preoccupation with extending and improving constitutional democracy. This book is a significant contribution to current methodological debates around the importance of language and discourse in social and political history. It is the first detailed study to integrate material on three important constitutional campaigns of this era: the reform of the House of Lords, women's suffrage, and proportional representation. It will be of interest to students of British politics, social and political history, historical methodology and political theory.

PART ONE:
A Panoramic Approach

Introduction

Since the late 1980s there has been a wave of revisionism in nineteenth and early twentieth century British history. New interpretations have emerged, new evidence has been uncovered, and established evidence has been presented within new interpretive frameworks. The fundamental issue is the explanatory value of ‘class’ as it has been understood since the emergence of labour and social history during the 1960s. Around this, several other issues soon gathered. As one of the pillars of historical interpretation began to crumble, new research agendas emerged. The potency of new empirical evidence combined with fresh approaches to that evidence is undeniable. The shift has produced a widespread reappraisal of earlier class-based interpretations of politics and a reassertion of the importance of ideas in history. The examination of political discourse, and the organisational structures of parties, movements, and the state, has gone hand in hand with a new sensitivity to the means through which historical evidence is mediated, exhibited in ‘postmodernist’ approaches to the study of political identities.¹ One of the outcomes of this revisionism has been a recognition of the influence of radical liberal discourses on the early twentieth century ‘left’ in general, and on the early Labour party in particular. This study emerges out of such concerns. It aims to further our understanding of the relations between radical liberalism, labourism, socialism and feminism during the years between 1900 and 1924 through an examination of how these groups discussed three distinct constitutional issues: the House of Lords, the suffrage, and proportional representation (PR).

Class, socialism and labour history

Historians and political scientists have long sought to understand the ideology of the Labour Party by reference, both positively and negatively, to ‘socialism’ as the authentic expression of a homogeneous working-class party. This is not to argue that the dominant interpretation has been that the Labour movement in Britain has been ‘socialist’. It is simply to state that the degree of influence socialism has exerted has been accepted as the universal yardstick. From such a perspective, as Miliband’s influential study indicates, it is equally possible to argue that Labour has been influenced very little by socialist ideas.² But the overwhelming effect of this organising perspective has been that many ideological currents are left under-discussed because they do not seem to ‘fit’.³ There has been a general refusal to take seriously the idea that, historically, it may have been perfectly rational for groups to argue in terms of non-socialist discourses during this period, yet still see themselves as progressives. A whole assortment of legitimate historical questions were, until recently, simply not asked. Crucially, there was a general neglect of non-socialist, or what might be termed hybrid discourses, many of which, as this study shows, formed an important component of the political identity of the British left during the key period between the founding of the Labour Representation Committee and the first Labour minority government.

‘The nineteenth century and all that’

A corollary of this neglect has been the establishment of a conventional wisdom in interpretations of socialism and the Labour Party. Many studies have tended to narrate those issues which seemed to have distinguished Labour from its closest rival: radical liberalism. This has involved the overriding aim of demonstrating the impact upon British politics of socialist and collectivist ideas during the 1880s, a process which is said to have effected a decisive break with nineteenth century radicalism, and which led, ultimately, to the emergence of a class-based Labour Party after 1900. The principles of democracy which inspired nineteenth century radical liberals through their protracted campaigns for constitutional reform, the argument runs, were displaced in the early twentieth century by the more ‘modern’ principles of ‘social democracy’. Socialism therefore expanded and enriched British democracy with the addition of new ideas. Fundamental to ‘social’ democracy was the idea of the state as provider of services and regulator of the capitalist economy. State provision meant the piling of certain ‘social’ rights on top of those ‘civil’ and ‘political’ rights which, it was often assumed, had already been gained during ‘the nineteenth century’. According to this perspective, it is assumed that intellectuals and activists writing and participating in the debate about the future of the British left during the early part of the twentieth century saw a merely political democracy as taking a poor second place to what was seen as a superior social democracy.⁴

Beer, an early, and highly influential, labour historian and socialist participant, exhibited this perspective in his landmark History of British Socialism, where he wrote that

Between the years 1865 and 1885 Great Britain entered on a period of change. Thought was moving away from its old moorings. The rise of the working classes could no longer be denied; their influence on legislation and the wage contract was visibly on the increase. They had obtained the franchise and the legalisation of trade unionism. The British Constitution was turned into a democracy.⁵

Beer’s remarks were more precise and limited than the genealogy of ‘freedom’ offered in 1907 by Keir Hardie, but the underlying assumptions were identical. Flushed with the moderate success of the Labour party in the 1906 election, Hardie was able to position Labour and socialism, as he saw them, with deft precision and a knack for neat linearity, when he wrote that

The vision of freedom is an ever expanding conception of life and its possibilities. Its evolution, like that of every other growth, can only proceed by stages from the crude and the immature to the more and more perfected. The slave dreams of emancipation; the emancipated workman of citizenship; the enfranchised citizen of Socialism; the Socialist of Communism. It is hopeless to expect that a people who are in the full enjoyment of political liberty will be content to continue for ever in a state of industrial servitude. Socialism represents the same principle in industry which Radicalism represented in politics - Equality. The workman who is a fully enfranchised Citizen of the State is a veritable Helot in the workshop. Obviously this state of things cannot go on for ever. He will use the political freedom which his fathers won for him to win industrial freedom for his children. That is the real inward meaning of the rise of the Labour party.⁶

These remarks have been echoed down the years, both in scholarly and polemical interpretations of the rise of the Labour Party.⁷ But although it was undoubtedly influential, Hardie’s was only one view among many, an intervention in a contemporary debate rather than a final analysis. It is my argument that discussions over the varying definitions, perceived scope, and means of maintaining and extending, ‘political freedom’, were crucial in defining the political identity of both the Labour Party and the broader left during these years. At its most fundamental, debate centred around the very implications raised by Hardie’s theory of the inexorable rise of socialism, with its functionalist view of radical liberal democratic thought as a force whose role on the historical stage had already been played out.

The overall argument of this study is therefore twofold. First, it is that these two core assumptions - ‘socialism’ as the yardstick by which the early twentieth century left should be measured, and the easy displacement of political democracy (‘civil’ and ‘political’ citizenship), by social democracy (‘social’ citizenship) - have led to a general underestimation of the importance of constitutional reform in shaping the left’s political identity before 1924. Substituted in their place should be a number of ‘yardsticks’ - radicalism, labourism, socialism, feminism, and, crucially, a discourse whose elements together combined in the form of what I term ‘radical constitutionalism’. Instead of an uncomplicated transition from political to social democracy, the complexity and contingency of the arguments needs to be highlighted. My second argument is that the conventional wisdom has contributed to a general neglect of the extent to which radicalism, labourism, socialism and feminism were intertwined right through to the 1920s, and of the extent to which attacks on the constitutional settlement, which made use of a body of established radical discourse and rhetorical genres, were of crucial importance in promoting the cross-fertilisation of ideas between these diverse groups. The pre-1924 left in Britain cannot be understood outside of an analysis of the role played by ‘radical constitutionalism’ as a discourse of reform.

Attitudes to the constitution during this period represent a neglected area, the chief consequence of which is that, in Britain, at a time when constitutional reform is enjoying its greatest prominence since 1918, there exists only one book-length account of this issue during one of the crucial formative periods for the British left.⁸ Interpretations of socialist economic and social thought abound, as do analyses of intra-party conflicts, or the relationship with the trade unions. There are also, of course, many general studies of the British left’s ideology or political thought. But the reader has to look long and hard for analysis of the left’s attitude to the constitution. Most surveys contain nothing, and have therefore proved to be of limited use for this study.⁹ Indeed, in its use of a range of what might elsewhere be considered discrete literatures, this study presented its own challenge. It will be evident that it was necessary to draw upon a range of historical works that have normally been kept apart. For too long, the distinction between the histories of radicalism, socialism, labourism and feminism during the early twentieth century have been too tightly drawn.

The influence of non-socialist ideas: some precursors

The portrait of the mainstream I have just painted does little justice to those writers who have problematised the issues of class and socialism. The labour history framework did produce work which gave class analysis a subtle inflection. Indeed, this sometimes involved an emphasis on the importance of non-socialist popular radicalism. That there were serious doubts about the ‘purity’ of socialist ideas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is clear. However, as will be demonstrated, the picture soon became highly confusing.

Despite its tendency to unproblematically use class background as an explanation of political ideas, Hobsbawm’s early interpretation of Fabianism is notable for the importance of what he termed ‘liberal-radicalism’. Since Fabianism did not operate within the ‘framework of historic liberalism’, Hobsbawm argued, it did not take root among the broader labour movement, and this was especially the case among trade unionists, who were firmly wedded to the values of ‘independence’ to be found within Gladstonian Liberalism.¹⁰ The intermingling of ‘liberal-radical’ and socialist beliefs within the labour movement was stressed not only as a reason for the failure of the Fabians but also as an explanation of the relative success of the political ideas and strategy of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Despite the fact that this argument was still based upon many of the assumptions of labour history outlined above, it showed that non-socialist, or hybrid beliefs could not be ignored.

Interpretations also emerged out of different theoretical frameworks. Clarke, in an early critique of Marxist labour history argued against the obsession with ‘class’ - ‘the prevailing historical orthodoxy’ about pre-1914 British politics. In terms of electoral support, the idea that the pre-1914 period saw a new class-based politics which benefited the Labour Party at the Liberals’ expense, and that the ‘new’ Liberalism had little or no influence on government policy or popular attitudes, was shown to be dubious. Painstaking analysis of Lancashire politics revealed that far from undermining the pre-war Liberal revival, Labour actually contributed to it. The Labour and Liberal parties had many ideas in common, and both parties benefited from a changed political climate. The Gladstone-MacDonald electoral pact, made in 1903, produced a grass-roots culture of co-operation which was electorally rational for both the LRC and the Liberal Party. Many socialists and Liberals were prepared to go forward under an inclusive ‘progressive’ banner rather than risk a protracted period of marginalisation. The assumption that liberalism was, by the time of the outbreak of war, intellectually and ideologically exhausted, is seen to be a gross exaggeration, and the steady growth of Labour happened because of its association with Liberalism. Liberal decline did not begin before, but during, the war, when the issue of its conduct caused the split between Asquith and Lloyd George. This precipitated a political crisis, the magnitude of which proved impossible to accommodate.¹¹

Clarke’s account rested upon a particular conception of the basis of Edwardian politics which he held up in opposition to Marxism. The ‘status politics’ approach, derived from Weber, involved an ‘insistence on the irreducibility of both ideal and material interests’.¹² Status groups, it was argued, were not in the last instance held together by their shared economic position, but by their shared values; religious, political, social, and cultural. This approach allowed for a more subtle explanation of the rise to prominence of the Labour Party, and it stressed the positive role of ideas in that process. The chief ideological spur could not simply be labelled ‘liberalism’, ‘socialism’, or even ‘collectivism’, but deserved a different label, one contemporaries themselves frequently used: ‘progressivism’.

Clarke was essentially interested in party support. However, the ‘progressivism’ approach was powerful, and could be used as a framework for analysis of the political ideas of key political intellectuals. Barker’s study of the political thought of Ramsay MacDonald benefited greatly from its subtlety. MacDonald, it was argued, could be understood in terms of the radical political and intellectual inheritance.¹³ Barker argued that MacDonald was attempting to ensure that socialism would become the leading edge of the progressive movement. The eclecticism and theoretical incoherence which characterised his writings reflected the need to appeal to diverse constituencies. This he did to great effect, achieving the status of Labour’s foremost political intellectual, even though his works were highly derivative. The crucial point about seeing MacDonald in this context was that it did not depend upon a view of ideologies as hermetically-sealed units. Liberalism and socialism were blended in different ways by different thinkers: they were far from distinct.¹⁴ The framework allows for exploration of the radical inheritance, the contemporary popularity of new Liberalism, and it is not committed to judging MacDonal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part One: A Panoramic Approach
• Part Two: Aristocracy or the People? The Edwardian Constitutional Crisis
• Part Three: Constitutionalism and Citizenship: the Struggle for the Vote
• Part Four: ‘Equality, Equity and Truth’? Proportional Representation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index