Men Who Made Labour

Alan Haworth, Dianne Hayter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781135390471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Celebrating the centenary of the Parliamentary Labour Party, this fascinating book commemorates the twenty-nine founding Labour MPs elected in 1906, including Labour's first Prime Minister, first Chancellor of the Exchequer, first Minister of Labour, and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

With a foreword by Tony Blair, Men Who Made Labour focuses on the pioneers' origins, expectations, world vision and achievements in the context of early twentieth-century conditions, when the prospect of any Labour government was still a distant dream.

Drawing upon a vast array of previously unpublished material, and with obituaries primarily written by the twenty-first century successors to those original MPs, the text provides a unique insight into how today's politicians view their party's past – ensuring that it is an excellent resource for all politics and modern history students, as well as general readers with an interest in the area.

George Barnes: Labour MP for Glasgow Blackfriars and Hutchesontown, 1906–18, and for Glasgow Gorbals, 1918–22

Chapter 1

George Barnes

1859–1940

GEORGE BARNES is sadly a much neglected and underestimated giant of the trade union and Labour movement. He was a pioneer of old age pensions and national insurance, of minimum employment conditions for women and young people, and of industrial safety and the right of combination.

He was an MP for 16 years, Chairman of the PLP, served as Minister for Pensions, and was a Member of the War Cabinet and a negotiator at the Peace Conference of Versailles. He helped establish the International Labour Organisation (ILO) as an agency of the League of Nations.

Born George Nicoll Barnes on 2 January 1859 at Lochee in Forfarshire, he was the second of five sons of James, a mechanic at a local textile mill and a Yorkshireman by birth, and Catherine Adam Langlands Barnes.

The Barnes family moved to Liverpool in 1866 when George was 7 years old and then to London in 1867. George attended Enfield Church School for two years and at the age of 11 he began working at a jute mill in Ponders End, Middlesex, which his father managed. The family returned to Dundee in 1872. Barnes worked at Parkers Foundry of Dundee where he completed his engineering apprenticeship before moving to Barrow-in-Furness where he got a job at the Vickers Shipyard.

However, the widespread unemployment in ‘the black year of 1879’ drove Barnes to London where after weeks of unemployment he had a number of short-term jobs including work at the Millwall Docks and in the construction of the new Albert Dock.

A maintenance engineer, Barnes gradually improved his skills by attending classes in engineering drawing and machine construction at Woolwich Arsenal. In 1882 he was able to obtain better work at Messrs Lucas and Airds in Fulham where he worked for eight years, joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and met Tom Mann and John Burns. In 1882 Barnes married Jessie, daughter of Thomas Langlands of Dundee, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.

On 13 February 1887 Barnes attended a demonstration in Trafalgar Square that turned into the riot known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. It was at this demonstration that Barnes was badly injured when he was trampled on by a police horse. Barnes also attended meetings of the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League but rejected the idea of socialist revolution and refused to join either.

In the 1880s working-class political representatives stood in parliamentary elections as Liberal/Labour candidates. After the 1885 General Election, some socialists such as Keir Hardie began to argue that the working class needed their own independent political party. Barnes worked closely with other socialist trade unionists and in 1893 joined with Keir Hardie, Robert Smillie, Tom Mann, John Glasier, H.H. Champion and Ben Tillett to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP). The main objective of this party was ‘to secure the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. In 1895, just two years after its establishment, the ILP had 35,000 members and George Barnes had become a leading figure. However, all ILP candidates, including Barnes, who stood in Rochdale, were beaten in the general election that year.

In 1889 Barnes was elected to the Executive of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and was secretary of the powerful London Committee established on an ad hoc basis to promote the candidature of Tom Mann for the General Secretary of the union. Barnes acknowledged his debt to Mann on a number of occasions and once wrote: ‘But for my connection with Mr Mann I dare say I should never have come into prominence in Labour circles, and very possibly I should have been content to go on working in the “shops”.’¹ Just two years later this support was rewarded and Barnes was appointed Assistant General Secretary.

After three years, in 1895, Barnes resigned from the post to contest the position of General Secretary and was supported by a number of officials including Mann. He conducted a vigorous campaign and stood on a ‘policy of direct parliamentary representation for the Society, increased militancy in trade policy, federation of all kindred societies, the transformation of the Monthly Report into a Journal for discussion of Society problems and for fettering the powers of the executive council which he claimed “enjoys a position of practical irresponsibility”’.² The contest was close with John Anderson, the then sitting General Secretary, polling 12,910 votes against Barnes 11,603. However, Anderson was dismissed the following year for wilful neglect of duty and in the union election that followed Barnes gained 8,000 more votes than Anderson who came second of the eight candidates.

Barnes was now a full-time union official. As General Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (by now Britain’s third largest union), Barnes was one of the country’s most powerful Labour leaders. However, he had taken office at a time of great uncertainty for the engineering industry with the ‘machine question’ being the fundamental policy issue, this being whether the new machines would be operated by skilled workers. He led a national strike in 1897 in an attempt to win an eight-hour day but the strike ended in January 1898 without this having been achieved. Nevertheless, the strike was successful in establishing the principle of collective bargaining over conditions of employment. This changed the face of British industry, with much world industry being quick to follow. It is this that ensures his place in the history of the working classes.

In 1898 Barnes embarked on a fact-finding mission to Europe that convinced him that British engineers were the best in Europe but also that Britain was falling behind other industrial nations in wage levels and working conditions. He had long believed that real progress could only be achieved through working-class representation in Parliament.

On 27 February 1900, representatives of all socialist groups (the ILP, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Fabian Society) met with trade union leaders and, following a debate, the 129 delegates passed Keir Hardie’s motion, which Barnes in his autobiography recalled ‘I think I seconded’, to establish ‘a distinct Labour Group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy’.³ To make this possible, the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was established and was made up of two members of the ILP of which Barnes was one, two members of the SDF, one member of the Fabian Society and seven trade unionists.

It was at this same meeting that Barnes made a speech arguing that not only working-class men should be selected as LRC candidates in general elections but that people such as Frederick Harrison and Sidney Webb had valuable qualities to contribute to the Labour movement. This motion was passed by 102 to 3.

A month after the establishment of the LRC, a ballot of all the members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers produced only 2,897 votes in favour of affiliation and 702 against. This allowed the Society’s Executive Council to postpone the issue; at the same time a resolution was passed whereby officers of the Society could not be eligible to stand as parliamentary candidates with financial support from the union. It was not until the following year that the decision to affiliate was accepted by a delegate meeting. Thus the Amalgamated Society of Engineers did not affiliate to the LRC until March 1902.

By this time the Taff Vale judgement had been upheld by the House of Lords and Barnes himself was much more realistic in appraising its consequences than many of his trade union colleagues. He fully supported the efforts of the TUC and the LRC to convince the Labour movement of the need for new parliamentary legislation.

In 1906 the Labour Representation Committee changed its name to the Labour Party. Barnes was a member of the LRC Executive Committee in 1904 and of the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC in 1906, the year he was first elected to Parliament.

In 1903 Keir Hardie introduced Barnes to the Blackfriars and Hutchesontown (later Gorbals) constituency, which covered the central areas of the City of Glasgow, North and South of the River Clyde. This seat had many engineers in its electorate, although this nearly resulted in him coming a cropper at the first hurdle when he instructed the engineers to return to work against their wishes during an unauthorised strike. Thus his campaign was a lively one embracing not only the rough and tumble of politics but also a heated industrial situation.

He fought the 1906 General Election on an ILP platform. The constituency had a large Irish Catholic vote, which in the previous general election of 1900 had gone to Andrew Bonar Law, the Unionist candidate, who defeated the Liberal candidate who was unsteady on the question of Irish Home Rule. However, Barnes received the official support of the Irish Nationalist Party and this, coupled with having travelled the country for four years as Chairman of the National Committee of Organised Labour for Old Age Pensions pushing this popular social welfare reform, saw him win the seat by a majority of some 300 votes over Bonar Law (who went on to become Conservative Prime Minister in 1922).

The Labour Party won 29 seats in the 1906 Election and on 12 February the PLP met for first time. Barnes derived more pleasure than anything else in his public career from his extremely active campaign for old age pensions and in February 1906 he made old age pensions the subject of his maiden speech. In 1907 he moved an amendment to the King’s speech expressing his disappointment at the absence yet again of any reference to old age pensions.

In 1908 Lloyd George introduced the Old Age Pensions Act, which provided between 1 and 5 shillings a week to those over 70 and on incomes of not more than 12 shillings.⁴ At the second reading of this Bill, Barnes spoke in favour of such reforms and of the general principles of the Bill but argued that the levels of benefits were not sufficient and opposed the pauper disqualification clauses and what later became known as the Means Test aspect of the reforms. He also believed that pensions should be universal and paid as a civic right to all fully qualified citizens.

By 1909 many Labour MPs, including Barnes, objected to the strong support that the leadership was giving to the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the National Union of Women’s Suffragette Societies (NUWSS) in their fight for votes for women. Barnes argued that the party was being sidetracked from more important issues; it was this view that contributed to him replacing Arthur Henderson as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1910 after Henderson had been in the post for only ten months. During his period as Chairman, he had two outstanding questions to deal with. The first was the House of Lords with which Ireland was bound up and he believed that if the Irish Question had been settled the First World War might have been averted. The other was the King’s Civil List, which he proposed should be turned over to the Public Exchequer. He believed that ample provision should be made for the maintenance of the dignity of the Crown but that the Duchies ought to be nationalised. In 1911 Barnes, who had been ill for most of his time as Chairman, was succeeded by Ramsay MacDonald.

In 1914 Barnes strongly supported Britain’s involvement in the First World War. He believed that Britain had to defend its international obligations and uphold the authority of international law and the rights of neutral countries. During the first months of the war Barnes toured the country making recruitment speeches before going to Canada where he helped persuade trained mechanics to migrate to the UK to work in British industry replacing the skilled workers who had joined the army. He also took a special interest in the pensions and allowances being paid to families of recruits and demanded soldiers be paid a minimum of £1 per week.⁵

His youngest son, Henry, was killed fighting in the Battle of the Loos on the Western Front in September 1915 but this did not change Barnes views on the war. If anything, the death of his son reinforced his belief that, if such suffering and sacrifice were to be justified, the country had to unite. In 1916 he was one of only a small number of MPs to support military conscription.

Barnes was disillusioned with the way Herbert Asquith was running the country and in 1916 he helped David Lloyd George gain power. He was rewarded the same year by being made Minister for Pensions, making him one of only a few Labour MPs to attain a Cabinet post prior to a Labour government taking office. A condition of Barnes’ acceptance of the post was that the Royal Warrant for the Army should be revised; it was under Barnes’ leadership that improvements in the payments to disabled servicemen were made and a new system introduced whereby some men could qualify for a pension linked to their pre-war level of earnings.

At the end of the war the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee decided to withdraw from Lloyd George’s Coalition government and this was confirmed at a Special Party Conference on 14 November 1918. In the 1918 General Election Barnes was opposed by John Maclean, the famous red Clydesider who stood as the official Labour candidate. Maclean was in prison having been sentenced for making seditious speeches. Barnes submitted a memo to the Cabinet suggesting Maclean’s release which was forthcoming. Barnes defeated Maclean in a two-horse race by 6,811 votes.

Barnes subsequently resigned from the party in order to remain in charge of the Ministry for Pensions and formed the National Democratic Party with himself as its Leader. When Arthur Henderson went to Russia in 1917 to try to persuade the Kerensky government to continue in the war, Barnes replaced him as Minister without Portfolio in the War Cabinet where he remained until January 1920. Barnes believed that it was a mistake for the party to withdraw from the Coalition because it would mean relinquishing the opportunity to have some bearing on the Peace Conferences, the expectation of which had driven Barnes to fight for the continuation of the Coalition. Barnes was asked to attend the Paris Peace Conference as the government’s Labour Representative and was subsequently one of the signatories of the Treaty of Versailles.

Since 1916 Barnes had been a prominent member of the League to Abolish War and during the final years of the war became very keen to establish an international machine fully supported by international law that would ordain and uphold the rights of working men. Towards the end of 1918 Barnes, along with other members of the Ministry of Labour, drafted a list of proposals...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Turning Point in the History of Labour
• Labour’s Parliamentary Pioneers of 1906
• 1906: THE 29 OBITUARIES
• Voice of the People: 50 Years of the Parliamentary Labour Party (reprint)
• Labour’s Early Days (reprint)
• First PLP Minutes
• Appendix:
• Bibliography
• Index