The Labour Party’s history clearly illustrates that it was set up as the
party of the working class in this country, with the trade union movement as its
bedrock. From the adoption of Clause 4, in 1918, the Party had a socialist
constitution which reflected the aspirations of the membership of the Party. It
was its class roots and socialist vision which motivated the commitment of
thousands of working people to build the party, into what became the major
vehicle for change in Britain in the 20th century.
Within twenty years of its foundation Labour had become the main opposition
party, replacing the Liberals, and four years later had formed a minority
government. The 1945 Labour Government led the reconstruction of Britain after
the Second World War, with a programme of selective nationalisation and the
establishment of the welfare state.
The Labour Representation Committee, which was to become the Labour Party was
set up by the Trades Union Congress in 1900, as a means of securing trade union
representation in Parliament. This was after two decades of class struggle in
which trade unions had successfully organised unskilled workers, changing the
face of the TUC from a body which represented respectable skilled working men
defending their relatively privileged status in the economy to an organisation
which was coming into conflict with the capitalist class. Trade unions which had
operated like friendly societies were being outnumbered by those which organised
strikes and picket lines. At the same time there had been a reawakening of
socialist ideas, which had laid dormant since the 1840s. Political parties such
as the Social Democratic Federation attracted thousands of members.
Demonstrations and mass meetings not seen since the days of the Chartists took
place in the 1880s. In this situation the TUC general council was coming under
pressure to break from their alliance with the Liberal Party. The franchise was
gradually being extended to working class people. So that the two main
capitalist parties -the Liberals and Tories had to appeal to working class
voters for the first time. This had led to concessions such as legislation
upholding the right to picket peacefully in industrial disputes.
By the end of the 19th century the economic conditions for an independent
labour party had ripened in Britain. The economy was increasingly controlled by
monopolies. This meant the beginning of a massive concentration of wealth in the
hands of a few and increasing division and conflict between capitalists and
workers. It was revealed that only two-fifths of the national cake was consumed
by wage earners. A quarter of the population lived in poverty. At the same time
the heyday of British capitalism was drawing to an end. British industry now
competed with Germany, France and American for markets and raw materials and
investment abroad. Victorian expansion and unbridled prosperity for industry was
over – the economy was faced with one crisis after another. From 1889-1913 real
wages declined by 10%. This was the economic background to the political
upheavals.
The ruling class had grown used to the craft unions of the mid 19th century
economic boom. These unions of skilled men had few quarrels with the bosses.
They sought to better themselves by using their skills to restrict entry to the
union, in order to maintain wages and in setting up Friendly Societies. These
men like Broadhurst who was secretary of the TUC supported the Liberal Party.
The political climate was changed in 1886, when John Burns and Henry Hyndman,
two leaders of the recently formed Marxist Social Democratic Federation, began
organising the unemployed. They led demonstrations of 75,000 people through the
West End of London to oppose factory closures. Attacks by police with batons on
demonstrators brought about rioting, in which several people were killed. The
ruling class, horrified by broken windows in London’s West End, believed that
a war had broken out between the haves and have-nots. The poor were now regarded
as a menace and a threat, no longer ‘the deserving poor’ of Victorian
England. The class struggle had begun in earnest.
John Burns, together with socialist trade unionist Tom Mann organised the
Eight Hour League with the aim of reducing unemployment. This campaign rapidly
gained support amongst the unskilled workers and was adopted by the London
Trades Council, as a means of reducing unemployment and giving the workers more
time for his family. Sections of workers like the Ayrshire miners who had been
committed to supporting the Liberal Party and had the tactic of restricting the
output of coal in times of recession, now took up the campaign for the 8 hour
day. Increasingly employers were using the unemployed to break strikes and
enforce wage cuts. The unskilled workers were particularly vulnerable as ‘they
could be replaced by a hungry fellow from anywhere’. Scottish miners were
threatened that union members would be replaced by the Glasgow unemployed. One
miner who was recruited to socialism was Keir Hardie.
From the ‘Eight Hour League’, Mann and Burns went on to organise the
unskilled workers, such as the dockers and the gasmen, the ones whom craft
unions had left out in the cold. Deskilling was also to take place in industries
such as engineering and shipbuilding and skilled workers had the task of
organising the unskilled and semiskilled in their industry. There was a basis
now for industrial or even general unions, rather than unions based on skills
and crafts. Methods of organisation had to be different. Membership was liable
to fluctuation. During the 1890s for instance, only 3% of dockers were unionised.
Membership was difficult to sustain through slumps. The use of unemployed
workers to break strikes inevitably brought the trade unions into conflict with
picketing and property laws.
Unskilled
During the 1880s the main unions of unskilled worker were formed. The
gasworkers led by Will Thorne won the 8 hour day. Some women workers – the
matchgirls of Bryant and May – were organised, their atrocious working
conditions became famous world wide. Women in the East End were consistently
being disfigured by the use of phosphorous in the match industry. As far as the
ruling class were concerned these people were an ‘underclass’ -on the
fringes of humanity But the early socialists took up their cause and attempted
to organise them into the trade union movement. Inroads were made into the
organisation of agricultural workers, ‘railway servants’ as they were then
called and textile workers. All this was overshadowed by the dock strike of
1889. The dockers, one of the most exploited sections of the working class went
on strike for six pence an hour – the dockers’ tanner as it became known.
Oppressed for years by the system of casual labour, by which the employers hired
and fired at will, the dockers came out and demonstrated through the streets of
London for their rights. They carried red flags, and stinking fish heads to show
what they had to live on. Their victory was gained from the support they
received from the labour movement in this country and internationally.
It is in struggles like these that the Labour Party had its roots. There was
nothing respectable or ‘Blairite’ about it at all. The rise of the unskilled
unions raised the need for a party of labour. Their tactics were completely
different to the old craft unions. They could not restrict entry to the trade,
they relied upon strikes and picketing. The use of scabs was backed up with
police and sometimes army protection. This caused widespread violence in
industrial disputes, arrests and jail sentences for trades unionists. That is
how the battles of the new unions became political. There were conflicts with
the law and the state. Not since the days of the Chartists in the early part of
the 19th century had the issue of political power been so sharply posed, or had
society been so polarised along class lines. Increasingly socialists linked the
trade union struggles with their political goals of changing society. The call
for an independent party of labour was campaigned for within the trade union
movement. Engels wrote as follows to the Labour Standard in 1881: "the time
is rapidly approaching when the working class of this country will claim… its
full share of representation in Parliament… the working class will have
understood that the struggle for high wages, and short hours, and the whole
action of the trades unions as carried on now, is not an end in itself but a
means towards the end, the abolition of the wages system altogether."
The setting up of an independent party of labour was opposed by the old guard
of the TUC, those who like Broadhurst represented the craft workers, the labour
aristocracy and who wanted to maintain links with the Liberals. They declared
that the time was not ripe! But the campaign was maintained. Some socialists
from groups like the Social Democratic Federation were also reluctant to support
a party of labour on the grounds that it would be limited to labour
representation in Parliament and would not be socialist! Others, like Engels
believed that a party based on the labour movement would inevitably move towards
the adoption of socialist policies as the parties of capitalism and what they
stood for, became discredited. Finally in 1899 the Trades Union Congress voted
to set up an independent Labour Representation Committee. After a decade of
attacks upon the trades union movement and little support from the Liberal Party
it was time to act independently. At the beginning this Labour Representation
Committee did not gain the affiliation of the whole trades union movement. But
that was set to change at a later stage. Also middle class reformers in the main
did not give their wholehearted support to the Labour Representation Committee
at this stage.
Reforms
They still had hopes that the Liberal Party would carry out social reforms,
modernising British society and overcoming the growing gulf between labour and
capital, whilst leaving capitalism intact. It was only later that they jumped on
the bandwagon, when the Labour Party was clearly poised to replace the Liberals
as the opposition to the Tories in Britain, and the labour movement looked like
a better bet for carrying out social reforms. The same can be said of the ‘socialist
think-tank’ – the Fabian Society, whose ‘socialism from the top downwards
approach’ had also led them to consider the possibility of influencing the
Liberal Party before the founding conference of the Labour Representation
Committee. Without the trade union affiliation therefore, the Labour Party would
not have existed.
So what of the socialist groups which had existed before the Labour Party?
The aforementioned Social Democratic Federation had been in existence for over
fifteen years. It is important to note that the term Social Democrat meant
Marxist in those days. The model Social Democratic party was the German Social
Democratic, which was soon to abandon its commitment to Marxism. Then socialists
tended to abandon the term ‘social-democrat’, in favour of ‘socialist’
or ‘Marxist’. The term was later to be used by a group of Labour MPs who
left the Labour Party, attempting to split it in the 1980s and formed the SDP.
However the Marxism of the Social Democratic Federation was like that of the
German Social Democratic Party. They believed that socialism was inevitable. The
movement would continue to grow and the majority of the population would see the
light. Hyndman, a conservative who had converted to Marxism did not see the
connection between militant trade unionism and socialism, on one occasion
condemning strikes as a waste of time because they left the capitalist system
intact. The activities of party members however drew them into practical
politics – some into trade unionism, others into the municipal socialism of
school boards and health boards. But they did not see this activity as raising
workers’ consciousness. Tom Mann and William Morris eventually left the SDF
because of its political sectarianism. William Morris went on to set up another
organisation called the Socialist League. Nevertheless the SDF gained a sizeable
following with 43 branches in London alone. It popularised the spread of
socialist ideas through propaganda and won recruits to Marxism who were later to
play a role in the foundation of the Labour Party, but it failed to make the
breakthrough of becoming a mass party and forming an alternative to the Liberals
and Tories. A party was needed which had links with the trade unions and which
would challenge the Liberals and Tories in the parliamentary arena. By the 1890s
the SDF was declining in favour of the Independent Labour Party.
The Independent Labour Party had more success in the North of England. It was
founded in Bradford in 1892 It had the backing of Bradford Trades Council and
was formed in the wake of the defeat of a strike at the Manningham mills which
had involved 5,000 workers against the local mill owners. The trade union
movement had suffered declining membership and attacks during the 1890s.
Unemployment in shipbuilding rose to 20% and in Hull in 1891, one thousand scabs
recruited by the employers broke a shipping strike under the protection of
police, troops and gunboats. Of the towns magistrates, four were shipowners, and
nineteen others had shares in major shipping companies.
Blatantly
This was how blatantly the forces of the state were arranged against labour.
Many of these employers were Liberals as well as Conservatives, showing that the
trade union movement could have little confidence in the representatives of
these capitalist parties. Scab organisations like the National Association of
Free Labour were set up to recruit strikebreakers on a national scale. The trade
unions were becoming more in need of political representation, which
strengthened the case of those who argued for the Trades Union Congress to
launch a party of labour. As well as the ILP, th e Scottish Labour Party added
its voice to this campaign. This party had the backing of the Scottish miners
recruited after a long strike in Ayrshire in 1886-87. The first independent
Labour MPS like Keir Hardie were elected to Parliament. Advice given to the
first ILP MPs was as follows : "A working man in Parliament should go to
the House of Commons in his workday clothes..he should address the speaker on
labour questions, and give his utterance to the same sentiments, in the same
language and in the same manner that he is accustomed to utter his sentiments,
and address the president of the local radical club. Above all he should
remember that all the Conservatives and Liberals joined together in the
interests of capital against Labour."
Keir Hardie was famous for arriving in his working clothes to Parliament,
accompanied by a brass band from his constituency. In 1901 he submitted the
following resolution:
‘That considering the increasing burden of which the private ownership of
land and capital is imposing upon the industrious and useful classes of the
community, the poverty and destitution and general moral and physical
deterioration resulting from a competitive system of wealth production which
aims primarily at profit-making, the alarming growth of trusts and syndicates,
able by reason of their great wealth to influence governments and plunge
peaceful nations into war to serve their own interests, this House is of the
opinion that such a state of matters is a menace to the well-being of the Realm
and calls for legislation designed to remedy the same by inaugurating a
Socialist Commonwealth founded upon the common ownership of land and capital,
production for use and not for profit, and equality of opportunity for every
citizen.’
But a growing number of Labour MPs were not as determined as Keir Hardie and
the other founders of the labour movement. Many deserted their roots and
succumbed to the pressures of the state as represented in Parliament. The 1890s
had not been a good decade for the labour movement. The slump had seen setbacks
and this was reflected in the founding conference of the Labour Party, which had
the affiliation of less than half of the trade union movement and did not adopt
a formal commitment to socialism. However the breakthrough had been made. This
was to change in the first decades of the twentieth century.
From the outset there were two pressures upon the Labour Party, from the
trade union working class base of the Party and from the ruling class itself by
means of attempting to integrate the Party into the arena of capitalist state.
This was done by alliances with other parties, such as the Liberals, and
elevating Labour MPS and trade union barons into the circles of the bourgeoisie.
But in a situation when the British working class could no longer be seen to
benefit from Britain being the workshop of the world this became more difficult,
but all the more essential for the ruling class. As the first industrial nation
Britain had the strongest working class and strongest trades union movement at
the beginning of the century. It was because of this that the party of the
working class was based on the trades union movement.
Europe
This was not the case on the continent of Europe, where the Socialist parties
in France and the German Social Democratic Party were stronger than the trade
union movement at the time. The construction of the labour movement in Australia
and New Zealand, and now in the USA, is on the Anglo-Saxon model however.
After nearly a century the Labour Party is still in existence. It has
remained throughout that time a classic ‘united front’ of socialists,
social-democrats and trade unionists. It has helped to perpetuate the reality of
class politics by maintaining, for most of this time, electoral opposition to
the party of British capitalism – the Conservatives. It has been capable of
winning elections without alliances, and has achieved much in the way of
carrying out reforms which have benefitted working class people. The 1945 Labour
Government was instrumental in implementing the welfare state.
It is important for socialists in the Labour Party and the unions to fight
for the genuine history and traditions of the British labour movement, and in so
doing ensure the next Labour government acts in the interests of the working
class.
