The great Labour unrest

Rank-and-file movements and political change in the Durham coalfield

Lewis Mates

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526145604
  9780719090684
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784998035
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Great Labour Unrest examines the struggle between liberals, socialists and revolutionary syndicalists for control of Britain's best established district miners' union. Drawing widely on a vast and rich body of primary sources, this study reveals the debates that grassroots activists had during the fascinating and turbulent 'Great Labour Unrest' period. It charts the contexts in which the socialists challenged the union's Liberal leaders from the late 1890s and considers the complex strikes in 1910 against the implementation of the Liberal government's miners' eight-hour day. It analyses the emergence and development of a mass rank-and-file movement in the coalfield based around demands for a miners' minimum wage and, when this principle was won in March 1912, for an improved minimum wage. This book is of interest to academics, advanced students and lay people interested in political, social and economic history, political thought, economics, and industrial relations.

1

Historiographical introduction

This book offers a new perspective on the nature and significance of the political, social, and economic turmoil in Edwardian Britain, especially during the ‘Great Labour Unrest’, a period of particularly acute industrial unrest in the years immediately preceding the Great War. The next section provides a general introduction to the period, describing the relevant events, individuals, processes, ideas and institutions. The following two sections then deal with the various approaches and debates over the Great Labour Unrest and syndicalism and the rise of Labour. The fourth part grounds this particular study more firmly in the literature on mining and develops its rationale, while the fifth develops essential aspects of this book’s approach drawn from the preceding sections. The final part outlines the major arguments mounted.

The Great Labour Unrest in outline

The British Labour Party faced significant challenges in its first fifteen years of life. Its tentative birth, as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in 1900, was a remarkable success for the socialist advocates of independent working-class representation in Parliament. Figures such as Scottish miners’ leader Keir Hardie, a founder of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893 and one of the first independent Labour MPs (for West Ham in 1892), had long argued that any successful independent working-class party had to tap the resources and influence of the trade unions. The unions resisted at first, but a series of setbacks in the 1890s, including an employers’ counter-offensive and the defeat of the demand for an engineers’ eight-hour day in 1898, began transforming perspectives. On the initiative of the Railway Servants’ Union, 55.7% voted at the 1899 Trades Union Congress (TUC) to support the parliamentary initiative, allying trade unions with socialists. A welcome boost came in the wake of the July 1901 Taff Vale judgement, which rendered trade unions liable for damages incurred by their members while striking. Initially reluctant unions flocked to affiliate to the LRC after Taff Vale. By 1904, the LRC was known as the Labour Party and its secretary, Ramsay MacDonald, had forged a secret electoral pact with the Liberals. This ‘Lib-Lab pact’ ensured Labour candidates a free run in selected constituencies in the 1906 general election and the nascent party duly secured twenty-nine MPs. In 1908, the last of the largest trade unions, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), voted to affiliate to Labour and the party’s parliamentary presence swelled to forty-five.¹

The Liberals won a landslide majority in the 1906 general election. The party drew inspiration from ‘new liberalism’, advanced most notably by T.H. Green from the 1880s, which advocated (in stark contrast to classical liberalism) a positive, interventionist role for the State in bringing about individual emancipation. The new government soon established its reforming credentials by passing legislation like the Workmen’s Compensation Act (1906), and the Old Age Pensions Act (1908). These, and the reversal of Taff Vale (in the 1906 Trades Disputes Act), established liberalism as a renewed, radical political force, capable of recognising and addressing working-class material concerns and seeming to render the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), and its reformist ‘socialism’, superfluous.

Apparently impotently trapped in the Liberal alliance, and struggling to differentiate themselves ideologically and programmatically from the larger party, some of Labour’s erstwhile keenest advocates began questioning whether the entire parliamentary strategy was ill-conceived. Tensions rose further when Victor Grayson won Colne Valley for ‘militant socialism’ at a by-election in July 1907. Grayson had stood against the wishes of the party and went on to cause it considerable embarrassment in Parliament. By 1908, Ben Tillett, the veteran dockers’ leader of the ‘new union’ struggles of the late 1880s and now a Labour MP, was already asking, ‘Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a failure?’ Tillett clearly thought so; he left Labour to join the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) (itself a founding, but very short-lived, affiliate to the LRC).

The situation appeared to worsen for Labour, threatening in different ways the ties between the political and industrial sides of the Labour movement. The 1909 Osborne judgement meant trade unions could no longer directly fund the party from their coffers; instead individual trade union members had to ‘contract in’ in order to support Labour financially. This was not dealt with until the Trade Union Act (1913), which ensured that individual trade union members now had to ‘contract out’ of paying their union’s ‘political levy’. But the 1913 Act also demanded that every union hold a ballot of all members to establish their ‘political fund’. Still, while the voting margins varied considerably – as did turnout and the conditions in which the ballots were held – the memberships of only three of sixty-three unions actually voted against establishing a fund specifically for political purposes. Meanwhile, the Liberal government continued pursuing its reforming agenda with Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ (1909). Recalcitrance in the Conservative-dominated House of Lords resulted in two general elections in 1910 that the Liberals won, albeit at the cost of their commanding majority. The Lords dealt with, government reforms continued, with the National Insurance Act (1911) and Payment of MPs (1911). Labour’s small parliamentary grouping of rather varied ideologies and abilities seemed to be in no position to benefit from the Liberals’ problems; the party did not fare well in the 1910 general elections and the Liberals instead turned to the larger Irish Nationalists for parliamentary backing in pursuing their legislative programme. The promise of Home Rule for Ireland ensured continued support for the Liberals among Irish immigrants and their descendants in many significant industrial centres, hampering Labour’s development in places like Liverpool, Glasgow and the north-east of England.

While the LRC had been born of trade union weakness, Tillett’s 1908 missive seemed prescient in the explosion in trade union growth and industrial militancy from around 1910. In the fifty-five months before the outbreak of the Great War, the initial phase of what became known as the Great Labour Unrest saw union membership almost double to over four million. With this came thousands of strikes on an unprecedented scale, with millions of working days lost. It hardly seemed to matter that Labour had secured the affiliation of more than 50% of British trade unionists (approximately 1.75 million) by 1912; industrial action was coming into its own, seeding further doubt about the utility and efficacy of Labour’s parliamentary project. In 1911, Tillett’s newly formed 250,000-strong Transport Workers’ Federation won a national strike. The railwaymen held a successful national strike the same year, and the London dockers struck in 1912. The MFGB demand for a minimum wage precipitated, in March 1912, the first truly national miners’ strike. With about one million participating, it was also the largest industrial dispute the world had seen. Thanks to this one strike, 1912 marked the peak of days lost to industrial action during the first phase of the Great Labour Unrest to August 1914.

The threat to Labour’s parliamentary project was greater still as into this volatile mix came syndicalism: essentially revolutionary trade unionism.² Syndicalists argued that the working class could win its demands by perfecting organisation, strategy and tactics in the industrial sphere. Syndicalists consequently posed a potential threat not only to established trade union bureaucracies, but also to the socialists of the ILP. National Labour leaders certainly took this threat seriously, with Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden and the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb all writing critiques of syndicalism.³ Indeed, the fears of many Labour leaders and activists that the extra-parliamentary and unofficial or even anti-official nature of a considerable proportion of the industrial unrest was undermining their parliamentary project seemed well justified. In Liverpool in 1911 prominent syndicalist Tom Mann (another veteran, like Tillett, of the ‘new union’ struggles) was invited to lead a local general strike that saw soldiers shoot dead two Liverpool workers. Mann had been an active syndicalist in Britain only since 1910, when he established the ‘Industrial Syndicalist Education League’ (ISEL). Immediately before this, he had visited comrades of the French syndicalist union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (Confederation of Labour, CGT).⁴ The French union was one of a number of influences, as syndicalism became the foremost revolutionary strategy across vast areas of the globe in the thirty years after the mid-1890s.

A second important influence on British syndicalism was that of the American Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or ‘Wobblies’). American Marxist Daniel de Leon and his Socialist Labour Party (SLP) were significant in the IWW’s founding in 1905. De Leon advocated a two-pronged strategy of working-class action. In the industrial arena, revolutionaries should create ‘industrial unions’, meaning that every worker in a particular industry would belong to the same union. The industrial unions, adopting a militant ‘class war’ policy, would initially work alongside existing trade unions, until they were powerful enough to supplant them altogether, a strategy called ‘dual unionism’. Crucially, de Leon saw the industrial union as not only the means to organise workers to maximum industrial strength and class identity in the struggle against capitalism, but also the best way to administer and operate complex industrial societies after capitalism had been overcome. In the political arena, socialists should stand for election on a revolutionary ticket. If they won a majority in parliament, they would abolish the State. While de Leon’s strategy became enshrined in the IWW’s founding preamble, its opponents (who included anarchists) eventually emerged victorious in 1908 with an amended preamble that explicitly ruled out any IWW involvement in the political process. The result was two American IWWs: a de Leonist organisation based in Detroit (which soon faded) and the far larger Chicago-based IWW. This schism reverberated in Britain and throughout the rest of the syndicalist world. A third source of specific influence in mainland Britain came from Ireland, and particularly from James Connolly and Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport Workers’ Federation (ITWF), formed in 1908. Though not a revolutionary union, the ITWF contained syndicalist elements and Larkin hoped that it would become the organisational centre of a future industrial union. The bitter Dublin lockout of the ITWF in 1913 stimulated considerable solidarity in Britain.

Three separate syndicalist strands developed in Britain, adopting different positions on the crucial issues of dual unionism and ‘political action’ (i.e. standing for elections) that altered over time. The longest-standing strand was represented by the (British) SLP, which ceded from the SDF in the so-called ‘Impossibilist Revolt’ of 1903 under the influence of Connolly (who was Scottish-born of Irish parentage).⁵ In 1909, the British SLP endorsed dual unionism. Strictly speaking, SLP activists self-defined as ‘industrial unionists’ and used the term ‘syndicalist’ pejoratively; they associated syndicalism with anarchism which, like de Leon, they spent considerable time attacking. The British SLP denounced the (self-defined) syndicalists operating within Mann’s ISEL umbrella organisation, as the latter were more critical of ‘political action’. Initially, the ISEL adopted a ‘bore from within’ strategy, focusing on reforming existing unions from the inside. It dropped this for dual unionism in 1913, precipitating a serious internal split.

A third syndicalist strand developed along anarchist lines. Organised around Guy Aldred’s paper Herald of Revolt, it began as broadly dual unionist. A grouping that rejected this approach emerged with the Voice of Labour paper, launched in early 1914. For the anarchists, Mann’s rejection of political action was not firm enough. Anarchists also criticised the ISEL policy of amalgamating existing trade unions, which forced them to work with trade union leaders, even such unpalatable figures as the anti-socialist leader of the Seamen’s Union, Havelock Wilson. The effect of the ISEL amalgamation policy, anarchists argued, could only be the further concentrating of trade union power in a few hands, when power inside unions needed decentralising. Organised anarchism was strengthening after 1910; Leeds hosted the first national conference of British anarchists in many years in February 1912, though by no means were all anarchists convinced syndicalists.

British syn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Map of the Durham coalfield, 1914
• 1 Historiographical introduction
• 2 Structures, agents and the ILP’s high tide
• 3 The Eight Hours Act and the Eight Hours Agreement in the Durham coalfield
• 4 ‘Not exactly the millennium’: the minimum wage campaign
• 5 ‘A capitalistic piece of legislation’: the launch of the Durham Forward Movement and the syndicalists’ high tide?
• 6 ‘Trade union questions were now political questions’: defeats, victories and new strategies
• 7 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index