CHAPTER ONE

Divided Beginnings

The Labour Party was founded by socialists, but it was not a socialist party they founded. From its conception, Labour was a broad church designed to represent the entire labour movement. As such, it was a party born of contradictions.

Capitalism inevitably generated popular movements seeking to counteract the excesses of the system and to attempt to reform or even replace it. Trade unions and cooperatives were becoming increasingly common even in the early nineteenth century. Chartism was the first major political expression of the demands of working people in Britain; it was a movement that used revolutionary methods and petitions to demand political reform, until it was repressed during the 1840s.

The early cooperative movement underwent an evolution. Starting with utopian projects of building villages of cooperative producers (which had all failed), the movement turned to setting up cooperative businesses to compete with established companies on the high street. While some of these businesses initially thrived, they came into intense competition from the growing monopolies run by exploitative capitalists, a competition they would gradually lose over the next hundred years.

By the mid nineteenth century the workers’ movement was dominated by guilds and craft unions made up of a privileged section of well-paid skilled workers who had gained the vote after 1867. Their strategy took the form of a Lib-Lab pact, with the workers supporting Liberals in elections to further their aims in Parliament. In fact, some of the union leaders went on to become Liberal MPs themselves. They believed firmly in a gradualist approach to politics, whereby things would slowly improve if one applied a little friendly pressure – the Whig View of History as inevitable progress.

But as capitalist growth began to slow down, the old methods proved inadequate. A decline in Britain’s world trade in the 1890s, and its loss of manufacturing strength to other countries, led to bosses attacking workers over pay and the length of the working day in order to claw back profits. Many industries saw wages lowered for the mass of unskilled, precarious workers. This led to an upsurge in class struggle centred on the ‘new unionism’: mass unions organising on an industry-wide basis. These unions chalked up impressive victories in the fight for the eight-hour day and higher pay.

The economic slowdown meant Parliament was increasingly hostile to workers. The response to the new unionism was to ban picketing in 1896. At this point the Liberals could no longer be relied upon to advocate for workers’ interests. Many Liberals were even supportive of anti-union measures, acting less as fair-weather union allies and more as representatives of Britain’s industrial class. Workers began to talk about needing their own people in Parliament, representing their own interests.

In 1893 an ex-miner named Keir Hardie was elected as an independent MP for West Ham South. He was the first explicitly working-class candidate elected on a platform of supporting the workers’ movement. Accompanied on his march to Parliament by a procession of cheering workers and their families, the press subsequently falsely reported that the crowd had attempted to force their way into the Commons. It seems Labour has rarely had friends in the media even at its founding. Hardie advocated independent working-class representation and called a conference in Bradford to launch a new national party to take workers’ issues into Parliament. The result was the Independent Labour Party. Dismissing any alliance with the untrustworthy Liberals, the ILP’s programme called for the ‘collective ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange’, alongside immediate reforms such as the eight-hour day, a welfare state and an extension of voting reform. The ILP looked to Parliament to implement its transformative agenda. This turn to parliamentary politics, alongside the cooperatives and trade unions, created the modern workers’ movement.

Within a few years, the ILP had gained several thousand members, among them Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden. Key women’s rights activists and Irish freedom campaigners also flocked to the ILP, including James Connolly and Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst. The formation of the party was a significant step forward for the class consciousness of workers, enabling them to represent themselves independently of a wing of the capitalist class. The ambitious founders of the ILP wanted a real, mass party of the working class and believed that such a party needed to be based on the largest workers organisations, which in Britain meant the trade unions. Hardie called this the ‘Labour Alliance’: the unity of the socialists in the ILP with the industrial and financial resources of the unions. The one could not succeed without the other. With the Lib-Lab strategy failing, the unions and socialists needed to work together to create a new mass party of the workers.

However, arraigned against the ILP and others advocating for labour representation were many officials in the Trade Union Congress who were profoundly hostile to the idea of a separate class-based party. Many union leaders still saw the Liberals as their best bet for ameliorating the worst excesses of the system. These ‘loyal, but disheartened Gladstonites’¹ had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the new class party. Some trade union leaders felt that a separate party would jeopardise years of collaborative work and could introduce a dangerous destabilising factor into British politics. In opposing the officials, the socialists narrowly won a motion at the TUC (546,000 to 434,000) calling for a specially convened conference to ‘devise ways and means of securing an increased number of Labour members in the next parliament’. A narrow win, but enough to establish a new electoral alliance, known as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), in 1900.

The conference that met to launch the LRC was attended by union delegates representing around 545,000 people, alongside socialist societies including the ILP (13,000 members), the Social Democratic Federation (9,000) and the Fabian Society (861). As the conference delegates gathered to found the LRC, they knew that by taking steps towards the creation of a party of the working class they were raising the stakes considerably. Despite its parliamentary character and the clear intention of most of its founders to play by the rules of parliamentary democracy, it was then and remains now a scandal for the capitalist class that the workers have their own party. Having committed to establishing a party of the working class, the conference debated how to achieve material gains for that class. It is tempting to say that the history of the Labour Party is a footnote to this founding conference, since the arguments raised and the political divisions that emerged in 1900 continued to reverberate down the years as contending social forces played themselves out over motion papers and policy documents.

It was the unions, not the socialist societies, who really mattered in Labour’s political and social make up. By 1900, powerful networks of full-time officials had been established across the trade unions, forming a caste who saw themselves as negotiators and mediators on behalf of their members. Even today, the structural role of trade unions and their officials in the bureaucracy mean that they are usually averse to more militant forms of action, preferring the negotiating room to the picket line. The Labour Party was from the start a product of the desire of the unions for a political extension of their negotiating power. The point of unity between the ILP and the unions was that both sought to realise their goals through Parliament – the ILP as a route to socialism, the unions as a way to secure social reforms. It is also the point of unity for the integrationist approach – the material basis of MPs and union full-timers lends itself to incorporation into the existing state structure.

In the initial constitutional arrangement there was no individual membership or branches, only affiliations from trade unions, trades councils and socialist societies. Outside the unions, the ILP made up the LRC membership on the ground, their branches acting as the local branches of the new party. Of the three socialist groups present, the political lines of difference were clear: the ILP’s was the dominant line, flanked by the Marxist left and the Fabians on the pro-liberal right. The ILP brought together traditions of municipal socialism, ethical romanticism, radical trade unionism and local activism. The SDF were led by H.N. Hyndman, an eccentric ex-banker who fancied himself a Marxist, though of a somewhat sectarian and doctrinaire sort. The Fabians attracted intellectuals (including George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb), artisans and academics. The Fabians initially remained aloof from the party, their strategy being to ‘permeate’ the Liberals and Tories with left-wing ideas, convincing the establishment to support the plight of the poor through rational and moral argument. Their fear was that a new party might damage that long-term goal by sowing divisions.

The debate at the founding conference was largely between the SDF and everyone else. The SDF wanted Labour to be an explicitly socialist party. Their motion to the meeting argued that ‘the representatives of the working class movement in the House of Commons shall form there a distinct party ... based upon recognition of the class war, and having for its ultimate object the socialisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange’. Keir Hardie opposed this, arguing instead that the remit should be more limited, to seek to form ‘a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour’. Hardie’s version was not socialist and rejected the idea of class struggle – it was just about independently ‘promoting’ working-class interests. This position was far more palatable to the trade union leaders and the gradualists in the Fabian society. Hardie’s own view of socialism was a thoroughly gradualist one, focused on parliamentary legislation. As he explained in 1904: ‘I can imagine one reform after another being won until in the end socialism itself causes no more excitement than did the extinction of landlordism in Ireland a year ago.’² Hardie also believed that for the Labour Party to succeed, it shouldn’t look to foreign political movements like communism or even social democracy – in his view it was necessary to ‘have done with every ism that isn’t Labourism’.³ This was a direct swipe at the Marxists in the SDF, as well as a warning shot to any other radicals inspired by wild continental politics. It was Hardie who thus stamped his own ideas on the fledgling party, backed by the majority of the ILP. The SDF, unwilling to make the same compromises as the ILP and defeated on the crucial questions at conference, declared the new party to be insufficiently socialist and left in 1901.

The early Labour Party also debated the nature of capitalism and socialism. Ramsay MacDonald had an organicist view of society: we are all part of one social body and the role of Labour should be to ensure that neither bosses nor workers became too greedy or disruptive to the smooth functioning of the economy. Both had to know their place. MacDonald preferred to agitate around how capitalism was inefficient and how Labour could improve the functioning of the economy through social ownership. Ethically minded, he despised the atrocious living and working conditions of the poor and saw legislation as the primary means for reform. Others favoured the introduction of socialism as an entirely new economic system, because exploitation was built into the very nature of capitalism.

At this stage, no one involved theorised on the nature of the British state or whether it was amenable to being used as an instrument for socialism. Most were convinced, as the Fabians had argued, that ‘Parliament, with all its faults, has always governed in the interests of the class to which the majority of its members belonged … And it will govern in the interests of the people when the majority is selected from the wage-earning class.’⁴ They saw no distinction between Parliament and the wider state and political-economic establishment.

Even after helping to found it, most unions remained sceptical of the LRC until the threat of the British ruling class to break the workers’ movement forced them to look again at the political question. The Taff Vale judgement of 1901, which opened the door for businesses to sue striking unions for loss of earnings, meant that the ability to strike was under threat (along with the salaries of union officials). Lacking any clear support from the wavering Liberals, a number of unions switched their financial and political backing to the LRC. At the 1906 election, the number of Labour representatives in Parliament rose from two in 1900 to 29.⁵ At the first gathering in Parliament the MPs met and agreed to call themselves the Labour Party.

Creative Revolutions

One of the major tests for the new party was how to respond to the growing demand for women’s suffrage. The working class was split on the issue – many supported votes for women, but there was also a conservative tendency in many parts (often inspired by religious reaction) against suffrage. They feared that it might break up families or lead to social anarchy. Among the left there was disagreement with the slogans of some of the suffragettes. Did they back equal voting rights (which pre-First World War meant only middle-class women getting the vote) or universal suffrage whereby working-class men and women could vote? The women’s question was also a class question. The issue was made more complicated for the Labour Party by the tactics of many radicals in the suffrage movement who turned to militant direct action as a way of forcing the issue into the national debate.

Women’s suffrage leaders Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst had joined the ILP alongside their parents. Sylvia and other campaigners demanded that Labour MPs – who in theory supported votes for women – vote against all government bills until their demands for suffrage were granted. Only Hardie and George Lansbury accepted. Lansbury circulated an appeal across the labour movement which led to criticisms from the party leadership. With little support from the other Labour MPs, he resigned his seat in 1912 and stood on a platform of women’s suffrage. Despite a huge East End campaign and mass rallies, the by-election ended in a narrow defeat by just 600 votes. Lansbury was out of Parliament for another 12 years. His defeat was seized upon by some to argue against throwing support behind the women’s movement, especially if it meant decent Labour men might lose seats. In some cases the MPs refused to support women’s demands in Parliament. Arthur Henderson argued at the 1907 conference on the suffrage question: ‘I have the strongest desire to respect the feelings of conference. I must, however, have some regard to those I directly represent in parliament.’⁶ Labour didn’t support universal suffrage until 1912.

The ILP supported women’s suffrage but was not immune to backwards attitudes towards women: when Sylvia and Christabel’s father Richard Pankhurst died in 1898, the ILP in Salford raised money to build a hall in his name. Sylvia Pankhurst, a well-known artist at the time, was asked to decorate the hall, only to discover on opening night that the local branch did not want to admit women.⁷

Angry at the initially cool response from the Labour Party to the cause of women’s suffrage, Emmeline Pankhurst called a meeting to establish the Women’s Social and Political Union. The success of organisations like the WSPU (which terrified the establishment by taking a militant turn towards street actions, including smashing windows and blowing up post boxes) undermined the peaceful constitutional approach of the mainstream of the Labour Party. Left intellectuals and some workers were horrified at the attitude of the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith when he imprisoned many suffragettes. Calls grew for a ‘creative revolution’ to challenge the state.⁸ The militancy of the suffragettes, in particular among working-class women, opened up new possibilities for radical politics. The Labour left found inspiration from the radical actions of the women’s movement.

Alongside the fight for women’s suffrage, the years leading up to the First World War saw a dramatic increase in unofficial strikes and militant direct action by workers. The idea of using strikes as ‘an offensive weapon in a war against class society’⁹ gained traction in parts of the country. The left found themselves at the centre of a nexus of issues that could help cohere a working-class party as well as a strong transformative agenda.

Despite this space opening up, Labour’s fortunes were initially poor. During this period, the most militant workers were dismissive of Labour – its parliamentary nature meant that it had little connection with the mass strikes that broke out. The strike wave between 1910 and 1914, known as the Great Unrest,¹⁰ saw growing distrust by workers of both their union leaders and their MPs, who were often one and the same person. The official leaders of the movement looked conservative, cautious and uninspiring, which created space for more radical grassroots action. Alongside this militancy the Labour Party in Westminster was faced with a reforming Liberal government that left little space for a distinct Labourite agenda. Writing in 1913, G.D.H. Cole noted that ‘the Labour Party has ceased to excite enthusiasm’.¹¹

What was exciting enthusiasm was the growing numbers of strikes. In 1911 railway workers struck for higher pay; in response the employers de-recognised four rail unions. The Liberal government used the army and police to break the strike and keep a skeleton timetable of trains running, leading to pitched battles being fought between strikers and the police. Outrage spread across the labour movement concerning the political use of the military in industrial disputes by a Liberal government that had been in a formal alliance with the unions just over a decade ago. Hardie spoke at meetings of railway men and their families and helped to convene a meeting between the union leaders, Labour and the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC. They pledged their support to the strikers and condemned the use of violence – something that became even more urgent when four workers were shot dead by soldiers.¹² But not everyone agreed. Men like MacDonald and Arthur Henderson were nervous about the growing militancy; they saw lurking behind it the threat of anarchy and revolutionism.¹³

The stark difference in attitude between Hardie and Henderson exemplifies the contradictory nature of the Labour Party. Both were from working-class backgrounds, religious, and temperance campaigners. But Henderson was a union leader who rejected strikes as a means of resolving disputes. He was chair of the conciliation board established in the north-east and intervened to prevent strikes, always emphasising reconciliation between bosses and their workforce.¹⁴ He had secured and enjoyed the patronage of powerful rich Liberals, and initially rejected the calls by the ILP and trade unionists for an independent working-class party.¹⁵ In contrast, Hardie was a man with a feel for the rank and file. He threw himself into local strikes and actions by workers – often over the heads of party leaders. When the socialist Jim Larkin organised a strike in Dublin that turned violent, Hardie was quick to visit and pledge the solidarity of the Labour Party to the striking workers, even though he had not secured the leadership’s permission. In response to the killing of the railwaymen in 1911, Hardie wrote a pamphlet accusing the Liberal government of murder. Henderson – who was sitting on the Royal Commission into the crisis and mediating the dispute – complained that ‘the Hardie episode will exercise a damaging influence upon our deliberations’.¹⁶ For conciliators, it is not the done thing to accuse a government of murder when unarmed workers have been shot dead campaigning for higher wages. Henderson went as far as to table a bill in Parliament to make strike action illegal without a 30-day notice period.

During this contradictory period one MP caused significant controversy in the Labour ranks. In 1907, Victor Grayson was elected MP for Colne Valley in West Yorkshire at the youthful age of 27. He was a relatively inexperienced outsider, but the local ILP activists valued his independent opinions. They put him forward despite a formal agreement between Labour and liberals not to stand against each other. Receiving no official endorsement from Labour, he won with a majority of only 150 votes. Grayson’s mixture of revolutionary rhetoric combined with Christian socialism made for an eccentric election campaign, with local parsons working alongside militant trade unionists.

In Parliament he immediately clashed head-on with the leaders of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). His speaking style was histrionic but he was a gifted mass agitator and a natural rebel. He fell out of favour with MacDonald and Hardie. MacDonald did not like Grayson’s politics; Hardie was envious of his youth. In his maiden speech he attacked the imperialism of the Liberal government in India, causing some consternation among fellow MPs. A few months later he disrupted Parliament by demanding a debate on unemployment and refusing the instructions of the speaker.¹⁷ Upon being marched out by the ushers he turned to his fellow Labour MPs and denounced them as traitors to the working class, declaring Parliament ‘a house of murderers’. He wanted to use his position as an MP to challenge gradualism and to put working-class demands at the heart of Parliament, something that chafed with the party establishment who saw him as a wrecker who misused his oratorical skills. These defiant acts meant that Grayson, though shunned and isolated by the establishment, was adored by many, building up a following in the ILP even though he refused to join the party formally. However he rarely attended Parliament, preferring to tour the country speaking to large crowds. He lost his seat in 1910 and went on during the First World War to back the British imperialism he had previously vociferously denounced.¹⁸

Though individuals may have shifted their positions, as war loomed the battle lines within Labour were already deeply entrenched.

The Labour Left in the First World War

The prospect of war occupied the thoughts and activities of many socialists in the early twentieth century. They saw in the growing inter-imperialist rivalries an inevitable military conflict to decide who would control the world markets. Labour was a member of the Marxist-initiated Socialist International and sent delegates to its Stuttgart Congress in 1907. Ramsay MacDonald sat with socialists from around the world, including Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, to discuss the International’s position on militarism, war and women’s rights. Delegates voted for a motion that committed their social democratic parties to opposing war and, if it did break out, ‘to use the political and economic crisis created by the war to rouse the populace from its slumbers, and to hasten the fall of capitalist society’.¹⁹ Despite supporting this motion, Labour never translated it into a consistent anti-war strategy. Instead the party sent out a questionnaire to its affiliated organisations asking for their opinion on how to implement such a position, but few bothered to reply.²⁰

Labour and the TUC organised anti-war demonstrations in the months prior to August 1914, with Hardie taking a principled stand, but this did not amount to a strategy. As soon as war was declared, jingoism swept the country and most of the working-class movement fell into line, rallying to the cause of Britain’s war machine. Considering that working-class parties with ostensibly revolutionary positions throughout Europe also joined their own national ruling classes in waging war on their comrades abroad, it is hardly surprising that the less radical Labour Party did the same. The TUC issued a public appeal for young men to join the army and many long-standing socialist leaders including Hyndman and Robert Blatchford came out in support of the war.²¹ The Fabians supported the trade union leaders in their efforts.

The ILP was the only organised force in Labour still opposing the war in principle. When war was declared they issued a manifesto to the British and German working-class movement: ‘out of the darkness and the depth we hail our working class comrades of every land. Across the roar of the guns, we send sympathy and greetings to the German Socialists ... They are no enemies of ours, but faithful friends.’²² The anti-war position of the ILP was arrived at by many routes: MacDonald and Hardie believed the war was caused by a diplomatic blunder and that imperial designs were leading to Britain demanding irrational outcomes like unconditional surrender; Snowden opposed the war on the ethical grounds that violence was simply evil; and Fenner Brockway and others put the case that the war was the result of market competition spilling over into military conflict.²³ For their principled stance many ILP members were beaten up by angry soldiers, and their meetings were attacked by pro-war thugs.

The ILP also helped form the Union of Democratic Control, the largest anti-war organisation in Britain. The UDC demanded an immediate end to the fighting, autonomy for the smaller nations of Europe, and a peace which would exclude national humiliations that might cause future wars. Many of its members were arrested and imprisoned for anti-war sedition; James Maxton was arrested for speaking against the war to a crowd of 2,000 in Glasgow in 1915, and was imprisoned in 1916 for agitating in favour of a strike in the city. David Kirkwood was arrested for sedition and deported (twice!) from Glasgow to Edinburgh. ILP members were also active in the No-Conscription Fellowship; Clifford Allen and Fenner Brockway were key organisers. When the call up was issued they helped men who were charged with desertion or who were conscientious objectors. Of the 1,191 trials for conscientious objection, 805 of them were ILP men. The UDC organisation distributed a million leaflets and organised constituents to demand MPs withdraw support for the Military Service Bill. The Liberal government discussed banning the UDC for its anti-war campaigning amongst soldiers. The agitational work helped build support for a mass demonstration of nearly 100,000 people in Glasgow on May Day 1918, at which Maxton spoke, receiving huge applause.

Unlike Labour, the ILP adhered to the spirit of the Stuttgart Congress. They launched a campaign around housing rights in Glasgow, targeting parasitic landlords who charged soaring rents as workers flooded into the city to work in munitions. ILP members like Helen Crawfurd helped organise a rent strike which culminated in a 20,000 strong protest and the introduction of the Rent Restrictions Act which capped rents for the rest of the war. The ILP members on the ground threw themselves into the campaign, defying the commands of the official Labour and trade union movement. The campaign was a success, boosting local support for the ILP.

It is difficult to stand against the patriotic tide during war, and the nationalist pressure broke even some prominent members of the ILP. Due to the party’s pacifist position being in conflict with the agreed position of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald resigned as chair of the Parliamentary Party. However, a month later he was quoted in the Daily Chronicle saying: ‘I want the serious men of the trade unions, the brotherhoods, and similar movements, to face their duty. To such it is sufficient to say, “England has need of you”, and to say it in the right way.’²⁴ ILP member Manny Shinwell later wrote that MacDonald was ‘a man who loathed past wars, regarded future wars with abhorrence, but carefully evaded giving his opinion on the basic question of the current one’.²⁵ Concerned about potential industrial unrest and keen to ensure the incorporation of the trade unions’ party further into the war effort, the government offered Labour MPs places in the wartime coalition after 1915. Henderson – always a safe pair of hands for the establishment – joined the War Cabinet.

When in 1916 news came through of the Easter Uprising in Dublin, against the continued British occupation of Ireland, the Labour response in Britain was that it was a ‘calamitous’ act of an unrepresentative minority. And when reports came of the execution of the revolutionary leader James Connolly (an ex-ILP member) in Ireland by British troops, it was rumoured that Henderson led Parliament in a round of applause.²⁶ The ILP too distanced itself from the national liberation struggle, declaring that: ‘We do not approve of armed rebellion or any other form of militarism and war.’ Its conflation of an armed rebellion against a military occupation with an outright war meant that it couldn’t differentiate between force as a means of liberation and as a tool of oppression.

As the war dragged on, 1917 saw a revival in the fighting spirit of the masses. Although the TUC had declared itself in favour of an industrial truce at the start of the war, faced with spiralling prices, a housing shortage and back-breaking overwork, many workers were growing restless. Unofficial strikes rocketed as fights over wages and working time shook industries. Politically things also began to move. The Labour Party agreed to send delegates to an international peace conference in Stockholm, and were only prevented from doing so by pressure from the US government.

Then, in February 1917, the Russian revolution fundamentally realigned left politics across the world. When news of the revolution reached Britain, socialists organised a series of mass rallies and meetings, including 20,000 tickets sold for a rally at the Royal Albert Hall.²⁷ The ILP and other socialist groups called a conference in Leeds, with many from the Labour left attending in solidarity with the working-class uprising in Russia.²⁸ Chaired by Robert Smillie of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), the meeting heard speeches hailing the February revolution and the overthrow of the Tsar and condemning Parliament (‘It will do nothing for you!’ thundered one delegate). It passed a motion calling for ‘the constituent bodies at once to establish in every town, urban, and rural district, Councils of Workmen and Soldier’s Delegates for initiating and coordinating working-class activity ... to work strenuously for a peace made by the peoples of the various countries, and for the complete political and economic emancipation of international labour’ – calling, in effect, for soviets. This motion and others on international peace, defending civil liberties and supporting the democratic revolution in Russia, were all passed almost unanimously.

This alliance of different forces on the left fractured when the second, October, revolution established a soviet government in Russia. Some of the delegates at the Leeds conference condemned the actions of the Bolsheviks in what they saw as an usurpation of democracy. Those that supported Lenin and his comrades went on to form the Communist Party of Great Britain.

After 1917 the ILP reaped the reward for its anti-war work: from 499 active branches at the start of the year it registered 659 by the end of the fighting.²⁹ The position of the ILP in the wider party was, however, far more precarious for two reasons: its lack of patriotism made it many enemies across the movement; and its formal anti-war position meant that it had vacated the leadership of Labour, being replaced by more conservative trade unionists. This shifted the balance of power towards the right. At the TUC congress in 1917 the Dock Labourers Union put forward a motion for the ILP’s expulsion from the Labour Party. That motion was defeated, but the Party leadership and the TUC conspired to keep the ILP out of consultations on war aims and found a way to exclude ILP members from leadership positions after the war – by establishing Labour as a formal party.

The 1918 Constitution

The demands of political leadership during the war proved too much for the Liberals, who split in 1916 into two parliamentary factions. As a result they suffered badly when the war came to an end, and the Labour Party secured a much larger vote in the 1918 general election, almost wiping out the Liberals in Wales. Facing the prospect of becoming the official opposition to the Tories, the party leadership needed to find ways to contain the left.

Many in the ILP had become notorious for their anti-war agitation and open backing of strikes during a time of national emergency. The impact and activities of the ILP and other socialists were untenable for the union leaders who needed to appear responsible and moderate. The ILP had to be bypassed so individual members could instead join the Labour Party directly. The intention was to fatally undermine the socialist societies, especially in the post-war period, where although there was an armistice on the continent, there was increasingly open class war in parts of Britain. The labour movement establishment looked to the post-war conference to centralise the Labour Party through a new constitution which transformed the ‘Labour Alliance’ of Hardie (who had died in 1915) into a genuine party. On one level, the 1918 constitution appeared to be a radically democratic step forward. Co-authored by Sidney Webb and Arthur Henderson, it recognised Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) and the trades’ councils as the basis of the party. Trade union members were considered affiliates. Labour became a membership organisation. In principle the annual conference was sovereign. The constitution introduced the famous Clause IV: ‘To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.’³⁰ The Manchester Guardian commented at the time that this was ‘the birth of a socialist party’, adding that ‘the changes of machinery are not revolutionary, but they are significant ... these principles are definitely Socialistic’.

The constitution also had another intended outcome – fostering the illusion of grassroots input to hide the reality of undemocratic practices that ensured the right of the party stayed in control. Despite enfranchising members to be delegates to conferences the reality of the trade union leaders wielding their block vote meant that the mass of members had no real power when it came to adopting policy. Each trade union delegation claimed to represent the views of many thousands of workers – even though in most cases the workers had never been consulted on the voting intentions of their representatives. These passive affiliates were described by Tom Nairn as the ‘dead souls of Labourism’.³¹ Giving the majority of votes to the affiliate organisations and not the actual members of the party was a happy deal made between Webb and the union leaders, who distrusted the lay members for their own reasons. The union leaders saw Labour as their property and at the same time were suspicious of an actual party with its own internal dynamics potentially beyond their control. Webb’s snobbish elitism meant that he put it more bluntly: he reviled most of the members of the party, later describing the CLPs as ‘frequently unrepresentative groups of nonentities dominated by fanatics, cranks and extremists’³² Richard Crossman summarised the approach of the new constitution as follows:

since it could not afford, like its opponents, to maintain a large army of paid party workers, the Labour Party required militants – politically conscious Socialists to do the work of organising the constituencies. But since these militants tended to be ‘extremists’, a constitution was needed which maintained their enthusiasm by apparently creating a full party democracy while excluding them from effective power. Hence the concession in principle of sovereign powers to the delegates at the Annual Conference and the removal in practice of most of this sovereignty through the trade union block vote on the one hand, and the complete independence of the Parliamentary Labour Party on the other.³³

The party also adopted their first programme in 1918, Labour and the New Social Order. Labour’s new programme outlined the principle that the party would play no role in reconstituting or defending capitalism. It committed the party to a fundamental redistribution of power from the bosses to the working class, including control of industry and production. Profit would be turned over to the public good as capitalism was gradually eradicated by a Labour government. But these weren’t the politics of its authors Henderson and Webb. On one level it was a response to the Russian revolution and the international advances of socialism. As its central arguments appeared to vindicate the radical policies of the ILP, this was to some degree a sop to the left just as they were being ousted from any position of strength in the party. Behind the radical rhetoric, the intentions of the Labour leaders were really to use nationalisation to promote economic growth. For them socialism simply meant a ‘scientific reorganisation of society’. The labour historian Ralph Miliband concluded that the 1918 programme ‘was a Fabian blueprint for a more advanced, more regulated form of capitalism’.³⁴ When contrasted with the kind of struggles that workers and suffragettes had waged before the war, it was a purely parliamentary document and lacked any wider application.

The Communists and Labour

The British invasion of Russia in 1920 saw Labour unite with workers in opposition. Although Labour had been hostile to the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, the thought of another war so soon after the last – coupled with the invasion of a sovereign country which had been a war ally until recently – was too much. Reminiscent of the radicalism of the 1917 Leeds conference, a joint meeting of the TUC and Labour leaders issued a statement condemning military action and calling a conference which established councils of action up and down the country to organise workers to defy the actions of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government. The electric mood among workers, which was at least partly the result of sympathy with an explicitly socialist government taking power after a revolution, meant even right-wing trade union leaders like J.H. Thomas of the railway union got swept up in it.

The Daily Herald, which Lansbury had edited since losing his parliamentary seat, agitated strongly against the invasion on grounds of national self-determination and opposition to British imperial bullying. The paper published a confidential War Office Circular to officers inquiring if their regiments were up to fighting the ‘reds’. The circular outlined a procedure for identifying troublemakers among the troops – for instance was there any sympathy for trade unions or would the soldiers make good strike breakers? Memories of the 1911 rail strike and of troops being sent into the Clyde in 1919 against a trade union demonstration whipped up a lot of anger among workers – the normally constitutional approach of the labour movement seemed to be at odds with the flagrant use of the army as a political weapon against working people.

Outside of the ranks of the Labour Party, the post-war wave of class struggle resulted in the gradualist vision losing some appeal, and this was reflected in new political movements. In 1920, inspired by the revolution in Russia and committed to the overthrow of capitalism by means of class struggle, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was established. A debate about the new party’s relationship to Labour inevitably occurred. Different experiences brought different attitudes; some members had been in the Labour Party, whereas the majority had not and were implacably hostile to it, seeing it as a party that supported imperialism during the war. Initially very reluctant to affiliate, they were finally instructed to apply to do so by Lenin himself. He argued that revolutionaries should be in Labour as it was a mass party of working people, and that is where socialists needed to be. Reluctantly the CPGB leadership agreed. When they met with Arthur Henderson, they presented their case for entry in the frankest possible terms: the CPGB wanted ‘to be inside the Labour Party in order to meet its enemies face to face and to expose in front of the rank and file of the Labour movement the political trickery’.³⁵ The affiliation motion was defeated, but the 1.1 million votes of the railway union only narrowly went against affiliation – a result of the respect shown to communists in that embattled sector over the previous years. Despite their rejection, many communists remained members of Labour, often as delegates from their trade unions. Their vision of a self-organised working class and strikes as a weapon directed against capitalism appealed to many on the Labour left as a welcome change from the growing conservatism of the leaders of their own party.

Despite the determination and activity of its members, the young communist movement remained small, never achieving the success or organisational strength of its sister parties in France or Italy. The pacifism of the British working class remained a strong ideological tenet, reflected by and reinforced in the Labour leaders. Figures like George Lansbury were firmly convinced that ‘Great Britain is the one country in the world within which it is possible to change fundamentally the existing social and industrial order without the horrors of a bloody revolution’.³⁶ Although the violence of the British state when faced with the general strike of 1926 would give many Labour members pause for thought, the general preference of the left of the party was for non-violent direct action backed by what they saw as common-sense ‘socialist’ principles.

The East London Fight Against Poverty

Some Labour left figures became household names due to the principled stand they took. Lansbury had been voted in as the mayor of Poplar in East London two years earlier. Poplar was an incredibly poor area which was suffering in the post-war unemployment spike. Social deprivation was rampant and socialists in the Labour Party had been agitating for action to alleviate the suffering, leading to the election of a majority of socialists on the local council. They argued that there was effectively a flat tax across the London boroughs: each borough paid the same amount in precepts even though they had different social compositions and problems. Demanding equality, Lansbury proposed to withhold the payment of precepts to the Metropolitan Police and the London County Council (LCC). The Labour argument was simple – they were dealing with a social crisis not of their making, and since there was no money from Westminster to relieve the situation, they would divert their funds locally into relief programmes for the poor.

Enraged by Poplar’s defiance, the LCC initiated legal proceedings to get their money. Upon being summonsed the 43 Labour councillors marched from Poplar to the law court, followed by several thousand trade unionists and local people. They were instructed by the judge to hand over the money or face prison. Lansbury was adamant that no money would be paid, and 30 members of the Labour group were sent to prison. Massive demonstrations of support were organised and the incarcerated local politicians became a cause célèbre for the workers’ movement. Prime Minister Lloyd George sent emissaries to meet the prisoners to attempt to broker a deal, but there was no change of heart from the Poplar rebels. Lansbury continued editing The Daily Herald from Brixton Prison, and the councillors there still met to conduct some council business, and made speeches to the crowds outside the prison windows. After a couple of months the LCC backed down, the councillors were released and a fund was set up that all boroughs would pay into to redistribute money to areas that needed it the most – a triumph for popular resistance.

It was no surprise that, after activism like this, the 1922 general election saw Labour establish itself as the primary opposition. The Liberals collapsed, hopelessly split and unable to relate to the pressing concerns of working people. The turn to Labour was not an automatic process – it took time and political argument to win the workers over to Labourism. But it was often transformative, radical struggles like Lansbury’s that encouraged them to flock to Labour. This explosion of class consciousness was rarely reflected in the upper echelons of the PLP, but, with established branches across the country, the party was becoming a more active participant in the lives of working-class communities.

The Consolidation of the Left and Right

The main radical tendency in the party was still the ILP, which remained a heterogeneous organisation, including everyone from revolutionaries to Christian socialists. It had both radical and gradualist wings as well as a sizeable passive membership that met in ILP halls and was active in social pursuits like playing whist and hiking. Many ILP members were also part of the temperance movement and were attracted to the idea of socialism creating the ‘new man’: ethical, rational and community spirited. Members organised book clubs, hiking holidays and bicycle rides. The introduction of Labour Party branches in the 1918 constitution changed the political composition of the ILP. Moderately inclined members could join Labour directly, rather than affiliate through the ILP. As the membership became self-selecting it generally moved left. The ILP increasingly saw itself as the principled socialist wing of Labour pitted against a timid gradualist leadership.

The leftward drift of the ILP was accelerated in 1922 by the election to Parliament of the ‘wild men’ from the Red Clyde. Glasgow had seen an exciting campaign of class-struggle actions, including mass strikes, demonstrations of 90,000 waving red flags, and pitched battles with the police. Eventually the government sent 10,000 English soldiers to the city, fearing a revolution and doubting the loyalty of some of the Glaswegian soldiers who might be thinking of joining their brothers and sisters on the streets. The ILP continued to grow and leading militants James Maxton, John Wheatley and Manny Shinwell (who had been sent to prison for leading the 1919 strike for the 40-hour week) became MPs.³⁷ These rough men with thick Glaswegian accents who planned to take the class struggle into Westminster were a shock to the establishment. The left generally welcomed disruptive, morally intransigent MPs, but MacDonald baulked at the sight of the new Members singing the Red Flag outside Parliament.

Despite the gains in Scotland, elsewhere the right sought to isolate the left. After the backlash following the defeats of the three largest trade unions in 1921,³⁸ they seized the opportunity to launch a vicious counter-revolution in the party. As Labour was reorganised after the war into an integrative party fit for the establishment, the need to drive the radical left out of the movement grew ever more urgent. Frank Hodges, the General Secretary of the MFGB, whipped up xenophobia when he argued that the CPGB were ‘the international slaves of Moscow – taking orders from the Asiatic mind’.³⁹

The communists however, were only a minority. The main problem facing the right was the growing socialist anti-capitalism of the Labour left. They were determined to control their more radical comrades. For his part, MacDonald boasted to various Tories of his role in ‘bringing the wild socialist Labour members to heel’.⁴⁰ The right, many of whom were still formally ILP members, would brook no talk of radicalism. The idea of Labour being ‘the party of the working class’ became less and less prominent the closer it got towards power. Brockway later summed up the effect of Westminster on his fellow MPs: ‘I have spent three years in prison and three years in Parliament and I saw character deteriorate in Parliament more than in prison.’⁴¹

MacDonald and John Clynes went to great lengths to downplay the class nature of Labour’s mass support and to promote the party as a trustworthy and reliable instrument of the status quo. Clynes declared that ‘Labour, if entrusted with the power of government, will not be influenced by any consideration other than that of national well-being. No class or sect or party could govern the British nation on narrow class lines.’⁴² Who determined the ‘national well-being’ would not become entirely clear to Labour members until the second MacDonald government, which we shall deal with in due course.

But it was not just from within Labour that the wild ones had to be tamed. In several ways the wider establishment too sought to incorporate the radical left from Clyde into the respectable company of civilised Westminster society.⁴³ Many Labour MPs were seduced by the glamour of parliamentary life and the society occasions organised by the rich wives of powerful men. This institutional seduction was played on by the Lords and the gentlemen from the well-to-do backgrounds who patronised the working-class Labour MPs. Men like MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a domestic servant, were susceptible to the charms and flattery of those who specialised in corruption. When he first met King George, MacDonald described how ‘overwhelmed he was by the king’s gracious attitude’.⁴⁴ Understandably, many marvelled at the fact that they were in such grand places at all. Clynes summed up the feeling in 1924:

As we stood waiting for His Majesty, amid the gold and crimson magnificence of the Palace, I could not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel, which had brought MacDonald the starveling clerk, Thomas the engine driver, Henderson the foundry labourer and Clynes the mill-hand to the pinnacle beside the man whose forebears had been kings for so many splendid generations.⁴⁵

The result was the sight of Labour MPs getting drunk – often literally – on the culture and amenities provided for the political representatives of the exploiting class. Beatrice Webb referred to this as the ‘aristocratic embrace’ and mocked Wheatley, the strike-leading Red Clydesman, as a ‘revolutionary – going down on both knees and actually kissing the King’s hand’.⁴⁶ Webb must have been pleased that the planned permeation of socialism into the establishment was a two-way street.

The First Labour Government

The 1923 election produced a shock result – a hung parliament. Neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals wanted power under such circumstances, so it fell to Labour with its 191 MPs to form its first government. As the Tory and media propaganda insisted they would prove to be a disaster, the core of MPs around MacDonald convinced themselves that they had to be moderate to be respectable. Symbolically, MacDonald’s ministers wore traditional formal dress to the opening of Parliament. With governmental power, the need to restrain the radical left became even more acute. The right’s strategy required appeasement of establishment powers who held the reins of economic or social influence, including the civil service, the City of London, the media barons and trade union leaders. This approach was clearly articulated by Philip Snowden, writing about the gathering of ‘reliable’ Labour MPs who met to discuss their conduct in government. His description is worth quoting in full because it exemplifies the fear the Labour right had of the Labour left, a fear that has hung over the party ever since:

The conversation turned upon what we might be able to do in the first session. There would be two courses open to us. We might use the opportunity for a demonstration and introduce some bold socialist measures, knowing, of course, that we should be defeated upon them. Then we could go to the country with this illustration of what we could do if we had a socialist majority. This was a course which had been urged by the extreme wing of the party, but it was not a policy that commended itself to reasonable opinion. I urged very strongly to this meeting that we should not adopt an extreme policy but we should confine legislative proposals to measures that we were likely to be able to carry ... It was no use getting swelled heads and imagining that we were omnipotent. We must remember that we were less than one-third of the House of Commons. We must show the country that we were not under the domination of the wild men.⁴⁷

Quite what this could mean was demonstrated by the ministerial leadership of J.H. Thomas, who had been put in charge of ‘the colonies’. On his first day in the Colonial Office he demonstrated the reflex reactionary views of the Labour right concerning Britain’s imperial role when he declared to his assembled civil servants: ‘I am here to make sure there is no mucking about with the British Empire.’ Continuing the RAF bombing of unruly tribesmen in Northern Iraq was an unequivocal sign of his commitment to Rule Britannia.

Faced with this slide to the right, the ILP saw itself as fighting to hold the line on party policy. Its programme at this stage was for a minimum standard of living secured through higher wages and increased welfare provision, alongside the nationalisation of ‘the pivots of capitalism’ – not so different from the 1918 Labour programme.⁴⁸ The question was how to overcome the inherent conservatism of the party leaders and hold them to the party’s socialist goals. Brockway put the case for the increasingly radical perspective of the ILP, which advocated that a minority Labour government should implement ‘a socialist programme’ and ‘stand or fall by it’:

The party should concentrate at first on the more urgent needs of the workers and win their support … [then] the bankers would also begin the game of sabotage. Good: Then would come the moment for challenging capitalism itself by a measure to nationalise banking and finance: a better opportunity for raising the slogan: ‘The People versus the Bankers’.⁴⁹

The ILP left anticipated reaction from the entrenched powers-that-be to undermine the democratic mandate, and urged Labour to stand firm. Brockway argued such a course of action would doubtless lead to the ousting of a minority administration, but it would allow Labour to present itself to the working class as being uncompromisingly on their side. The alternative was clear – it was to do only those things ‘which the Tories and Liberals would allow us to do, to go from compromise to compromise, and finally to face humiliation in a defeat which would thrust the Party into the political wilderness for a decade, while the membership recovered from disappointment and disillusionment’.⁵⁰

There was a debate in the ILP over how best to get its perspective across. ILP Chairman Clifford Allen favoured a friendly engagement with MacDonald, believing he could make him see the logic in the ILP’s approach. Allen would have weekly lunches with MacDonald in the hope of influencing the Prime Minister. However, Brockway recorded that Allen was upset when MacDonald thunderously denounced the ILP programme, incredulous as to why MacDonald seemed immune to reason.

When Maxton effectively manoeuvred Allen out as chairman, it represented a significant shift left for the ILP, and set it on a course that would inevitably lead to a decisive clash with the Labour leadership. The ILP was not revolutionary but it increasingly looked to class-struggle politics, to direct action by workers, and to bold socialist policies that were anathema to the ‘respectable’ Labour men. Although they did not succeed in winning leading positions in the Labour Party during this time, they did record one major success: John Wheatley – in his capacity as minster for housing in the first government – introduced an ambitious house-building programme, securing homes for cheap rent by threatening to commandeer the builders’ materials if they did not comply.

The first Labour government proved to be a false dawn. It lasted only nine months and was terminally undermined by being a parliamentary minority, beholden to the votes of Liberals. Other than Wheatley’s houses, the MacDonald government’s legislative programme was stillborn. Labour limped along until it was brought down by an establishment offensive designed to raise a red-baiting panic. MacDonald had begun a prosecution against John Campbell, the editor of the communist Workers’ Weekly, for publishing an article in which he urged soldiers to disobey orders if they were told to shoot striking workers. In solidarity, trade union activists protested against the prosecution. George Lansbury spoke at a 10,000 strong rally at Albert Hall and read out the offending article, calling on the police to arrest him for breaking the same law. The pressure grew to the point where MacDonald dropped the prosecution, which left him open to attacks by the Tories and Liberals for being ‘weak’ and undermining the army. After losing a vote of confidence in Parliament, MacDonald called an election to try and prop up his support. Then a ‘leaked’ – and fake – letter appeared in the press, allegedly written by the head of the Communist International Gregory Zinoviev, instructing British communists on how to take over the Labour Party and use it for the cause of revolution. Every expert and Labour MP declared it to be a fake, but MacDonald took the precaution of writing a public letter of complaint to Zinoviev, which in the eyes of many seemed to confirm that the original letter represented a genuine threat. The reaction of the Labour leaders demonstrated to the British establishment how fragile a working-class party was in the face of determined red-baiting. It galvanised the Tories and Labour lost the election convincingly.

The PLP leadership didn’t follow Brockway’s advice to go down fighting, they merely collapsed. But the brief period of governance was a litmus test for the capacity of the ILP to perform the role it had set itself – as the conscience of the party and the natural home of those with the clearest appreciation of socialist politics. The only conclusion can be that the ILP failed in its task. It went into government with 129 out of 192 MPs as formal members of its group, including five Cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister himself. It launched repeated attempts to influence the Cabinet and MacDonald, but all were frustrated, rebuffed or ignored. The complete lack of discipline or loyalty to the ILP displayed by its MPs was breath-taking. They were using the ILP to secure their nominations, but once elected they entirely ignored the organisation’s policies and calls for a socialist backbone. Was this merely a case of cowardice and careerism, or did it reveal a deeper malaise within the party, something that was eating away at it from inside?

The General Strike of 1926

In 1925 the MFGB, backed by other unions, forced the mine owners to increase miners’ wages. As the months passed, it became clear that the bosses would launch a counter-attack to reduce the miners’ pay and conditions. The attack came on May Day 1926, when the bosses locked out the miners. The union leaders, apart from A.J. Cook (an ILP sympathiser) and Herbert Smith of the MFGB, desperately wanted to avoid a strike and sought a compromise. None was forthcoming – the Tory government had refused to intervene any further to subsidise the miners’ wages. The TUC was ready to accept longer working hours in exchange for higher pay, but the miners were intransigently opposed. It was now an all-out fight and the TUC had to be seen to do something. They called a general strike of three million workers in solidarity with the locked-out miners.

Despite the warning signs of an impending almighty clash with the mine owners and the government, the TUC had done nothing to prepare for it, even though there was considerable sympathy for the miners across the union movement. Tellingly, when faced with the first general strike in British history, the response from the Parliamentary Labour Party was muted. MacDonald sympathised with the poverty of the miners but repeated his long held opposition to strikes, arguing ‘I don’t like General Strikes. I haven’t changed my opinion ... I don’t like it; honestly I don’t like it; but honestly, what can be done?’⁵¹ Hardly a ringing endorsement from the leader of the party of the trade unions about to go into battle against their bosses.

The Labour right’s fear of the strike was not just due to their dogmatic focus on Parliament. When faced with an actual general strike by industrial workers, it was clear that the question of social power would be posed: namely, ‘who runs the country?’ That question had already been raised only a few years earlier in 1919, when a huge transport strike gripped the country and the Triple Alliance of miners, railway and transport workers’ unions brought the country to a standstill. The government was hopelessly on the back foot until Lloyd George summoned the union leaders to Downing Street and frankly explained to them what was at stake:

Gentlemen, you have fashioned, in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon. Trouble has occurred already in a number of camps … In these circumstances, if you carry out your threat and strike, then you will defeat us. But if you do so have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state, which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state, or withdraw and accept the authority of the state. Gentlemen have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?⁵²

With the logic of the class struggle and their understanding of their own power laid out before them, the union leaders realised the implications of the general strike. Robert Smillie, the leader of the miners’ federation present at that meeting, grimly concluded that ‘from that moment on we were beaten and we knew we were’.⁵³ Mass, independent action posed a threat to the union leaders’ own existence as mediators of class struggle – they became afraid of their own members. The 1919 movement collapsed and the government triumphed because the inherent transformative dynamic of a general strike posed too great a threat to the position of the union leaders and their bureaucracies, fearing that ‘behind every strike lurks the hydra of revolution’.⁵⁴ Had anything changed by 1926?

The Tories, keenly sensitive to the demands of ruling-class interests, were certainly aware of the implications of a general strike themselves. As Baldwin commented on the eve of his own clash with the most powerful unions: ‘The General Strike is a challenge to parliament and is the road to anarchy and ruin.’ Tellingly, the TUC’s modest reply – that ‘The General Council does not challenge the constitution’⁵⁵ – exposed the limitations that the trade union leaders imposed on themselves, limitations that the government would have no hesitation in ruthlessly exploiting.

Despite the ill-preparedness of the General Council and the wider labour movement, when the strike was declared at midnight on 3 May workers took it into their own hands. Huge assemblies and protests happened in every major city, many attended by Labour Party members with their branch banners. Mass pickets shut down workplaces and brought other workers out in solidarity. Councils of Action were set up to coordinate activities and build the strike – in many parts of the country work stopped completely and the Council of Action or strike committee became the de facto authority in the area. Because the press was shut down, local strike bulletins appeared, communists working alongside ILP members and others to produce and distribute them. The various ILP halls across the country became staging grounds for organising distribution. As such they were frequently raided by police. Vic Featherstone, who went on to become General Secretary of the TUC, narrowly avoided arrest at an ILP hall in Shipley by hiding in a cupboard.⁵⁶ The ILP also provided couriers, canteens and entertainment, throwing their entire organisation into solidarity to support the strikers and their families.

Many Labour MPs concurred with the equivocal attitude of MacDonald, concluding that the strike was a tragic event that should be brought to a swift end. They were nervous of the potential power of three million workers on strike, of how they might shift the balance of forces in Britain towards ordinary workers and the poor. The transformative nature of the struggle terrified them as it disrupted their carefully cultivated gradualist parliamentary strategy. While the socialists threw themselves into solidarity work, the official Labour Party structures remained paralysed in the face of the strike. The ILP wrote to the TUC to offer them the use of their entire staff and headquarters in London to help support the strike. The TUC took three days to respond.⁵⁷

Meanwhile, in Tredegar in Wales, a young miner by the name of Aneurin Bevan was put in charge of organising the local Council of Action. After shutting down production in the valley, the only work that took place there was under the instruction of Bevan in his role as chair of the committee. Locals referred to him as the ‘King of Tredegar’. His quasi-royal ascension was no accident; from a young age Nye Bevan had been brought up on radical ideas and literature by his father, a miner, and his mother, a dressmaker. The hard work of the mining community and the suffering it wrought on the people left an indelible mark on him, and he was inspired by his father to want to change things for the better. He attended school but didn’t like it, leaving to go down the pit at 14 with his father. Making regular trips to the Tredegar working men’s library, he read the works of Karl Marx, Daniel DeLeon, Eugene Debbs and Lenin, falling in love with the cut and thrust of socialist debate.⁵⁸ During the First World War he refused to be conscripted, arguing ‘It’s their bloody war not ours.’ He joined the ILP and became a trade union activist before standing for the local council in 1922. He was widely respected in the area, a leading spokesperson for the Labour Party, his union and his class. Bevan was compelled by his situation – he knew the tragedies that befell the working people in his part of the world. Shortly before the general strike, his father had choked to death in his arms, a victim of pneumoconiosis – also known as miner’s lung.⁵⁹ When Bevan eventually became active in the Labour Party on a national level, he saw a chance to right the wrong inflicted on working people by an uncaring elite.

The ninth day of the general strike had more strikers out than on any previous day. Pickets clashed with the government-run Supply and Transport Organisation, a strike-breaking mobilisation of middle-class students and the well-to-do. Faced with the obstinate approach of the bosses and the Baldwin government, the strike leaders could either push the logic of the class struggle further into a fight to win – or surrender. They chose the latter and the TUC called off the strike, abandoning the MFGB. Brockway, who was in Manchester editing a northern daily strike paper, read out the TUCs telegram to the assembled newspaper staff. They responded in anger, accusing him of lying or being in the pay of the bosses. Another ILP member in Scotland recollected:

I was in the thick of the General Strike ... I was the only Socialist Town Councillor in Montrose ... and we had the whole area sewn up. One of my most poignant memories was of how, when the news of the great betrayal came through, I was addressing a packed meeting mainly of railwaymen. When I told them the terrible news most of them burst into tears – and I am not ashamed to say I did too.⁶⁰

Socialists were left numbed by the actions of the TUC, knowing that the miners would be left to battle on alone.

The ILPs involvement in the strike had been limited, hamstrung by the conservatism of the TUC and the wider party, but over the following months as the miners’ continued to fight the lock-out, the ILP did considerable work. Their most significant contribution was the joint production alongside the MFGB of the bulletin The Miner, which had a distribution of 100,000 copies. In some parts of the country, when miners were starved into submission and began to return to work, ILP activists were dispatched with money and food and took miners’ children in for the duration of the lock-out.⁶¹ After nine months the miners were starved into submission and forced back to work. The ILP excoriated the union leaders for failing their members, prompting Ernest Bevin, head of the powerful Transport and General Workers’ Union, to condemn the ‘superior class attitude [from] people in your category in the movement’ shown towards the ‘trade union leader who comes from the rank and file’.⁶² Not for the first time working-class leaders who had led a struggle to defeat lashed out at the supposedly middle-class left. That these ‘middle-class socialists’ had led huge strikes on the Clyde and gone to prison for the cause was lost on a bureaucrat like Bevin.

The trade union movement sunk into malaise after the defeat; strikes dropped to one tenth of their previous level. Walter Citrine – ‘the very soul of moderation and conciliation’⁶³ – was elected as General Secretary of the TUC. Concessions and a ‘new deal’ between industry and the unions was the order of the day for the union leaders. The TUC embarked on a new conciliatory turn which saw them working with captain of industry Sir Alfred Mond on ways to reorganise the economy and improve productivity and profitability. The demoralisation of the wider movement made it hard for the left to mount a serious political challenge to this retreat. Amid the disillusionment, moves to isolate the left gathered pace, involving the usual strategy of co-option where possible and expulsion where necessary. In the post-strike atmosphere in which radicals and communists were blamed for ‘stirring up the workers’, the moderates in Labour were desperate not to be associated with communism or revolutionary activity.

The party leadership went into overdrive to purge Labour of reds. An edict was passed requiring local branches to expel known communists. When branches refused they were expelled wholesale, 23 in 1926–7. As the number of expelled branches grew, attempts were made by communist sympathisers to organise themselves into what became known as the National Left Wing Movement (NLWM). Coordinated around the Sunday Worker – a CPGB-funded paper ‘open’ to the wider movement and which by 1926 had a circulation of 100,000 copies – the NLWM argued that it was not an alternative to Labour, and was trying to be supportive, but it wanted to move the party ‘nearer to the heart’s desire of the rank and file’.⁶⁴ Radical figures like A.J. Cook from the MFGB backed them, and nearly 100 Labour organisations and local parties supported the 1925 NLWM conference.

Many grassroots Labour members were sympathetic to the communist movement, either through exposure to Marxist education, support for the Soviet Union or because of regular collaboration with CPGB activists in the unions. A considerable number of members shared the revolutionary left’s criticism of the actions of the party leaders in the general strike. At the NLWM conference in 1926, the call to ‘cleanse the Labour Party of the agents of capitalism’ was well received.⁶⁵ Inevitably the Labour right were hostile. To stifle the left mood a strategy of co-option was adopted. MacDonald and R.H. Tawney produced a new programme for the party, Labour and the Nation, which committed Labour to ‘transforming capitalism into socialism’. The hope was that a clearer socialist statement of intent would accommodate the desires of the restive left-wing, frustrated and appalled by the defeat of the general strike and looking for a clearer commitment from their party and leaders to fundamentally change the world, not tinker around at the edges of the economy. The programme was a solid piece of Labour socialist rhetoric, but like other such statements it would not survive contact with government. However it was enough to project a left turn, which abated some of the criticism.

It was not the Labour right but the communists themselves who finally sundered their connections with the Labour left. The rise of Stalinism in Russia, a consciously anti-revolutionary force that bureaucratised and killed the revolution, saw a new orientation for the CPGB. As the Stalinist influence spread across the Communist International, the CPGB was instructed to break all ties with the Labour left and denounce them as ‘social fascists’ – in essence as bad as Hitler in Germany because they were not consistently anti-capitalist enough. The CPGB began a campaign of vilification and even violence against Labour activists, ending any sympathy they may have had within the party. This was a godsend for the Labour leadership, who no longer had to worry about the influence of communists in their ranks. The editorial board of the Sunday Worker suddenly declared that the NLWM was being shut down and that its members should join the CPGB or face the consequences, causing a tidal wave of protest from activists across the movement.⁶⁶

The new political line from Stalin (known as the Third Period) equated the Labour Party with fascism because they both propped up capitalism; they were essentially ‘two sides of the same coin’. The Labour left were considered even worse, since like a Pied Piper they lulled radical workers into the orbit of fascistic social democracy. Some within the communist movement, including followers of exiled revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, sought to oppose the Stalinist policy of socialism in one country and the Third Period, but they were in a minority internationally.

In 1928 the Labour Party moved into its famous headquarters at the newly built Transport House – the offices of Bevin’s TGWU. Bevin had travelled a long way from his younger days, when he had addressed the Leeds Soviet conference in 1917 and made a speech for revolution and the independence of the colonies.⁶⁷ Now, from his plush office, he saw himself as the lynchpin between the political and industrial establishment of the labour movement. At Transport House, Labour had a floor dedicated to its administrative operations, providing meeting spaces for the NEC and other relevant bodies. It was also a venue for the TUC to meet. Bevin appreciated being able to keep the centre of the party – indeed the labour movement – close to his union. But it was not just organisational control he craved, he also consolidated his ideological grip through his chairmanship of the board of The Daily Herald, for which he secured a deal to improve its printing presses and increase its circulation to over a million. Transport House came to represent not just the unity of the industrial and political wings of the movement, but also the growing power of the bureaucracy over party management, control and discipline.

First Time as Tragedy...

The failure of the first Labour government led to serious soul-searching among the left. Starting in 1926, the ILP had been developing a deeper criticism of the gradualism of Labour, culminating in their manifesto Socialism in our Time. The ILP left was already in open opposition to what they saw as the timid nature of the party leadership and their lack of a radical perspective. Their response was to double down on key principles and objectives after the defeat of the miners and the counter-revolutionary backlash of the Trade Union Disputes Act.⁶⁸ Socialism in our Time made the case for a living wage, arguing that the working masses had the primary claim on the nation’s wealth. The policy was radically redistributive and aimed at ending poverty. If employers would not pay the living wage then they would be forcibly nationalised. The big industries – coal, banking, rail and electricity – would be nationalised directly, others such as engineering and agriculture would be aggregated and run under state direction. The entire thrust was markedly different to the 1918 programme The New Order, which had called for state direction to rebuild the economy on the assumption that a mixed, state-led system could revitalise capitalism.

At the 1928 Labour conference the motion for a living wage was diluted into a motion calling only for a commission of inquiry into the possibility of such a policy. By the time this had worked its way through the conference machine it had established an inquiry to look solely into the issue of family allowances, dropping the living wage policy entirely. The demand for the living wage was not helped by the almost universal hostility of the unions, licking their wounds after 1926 and afraid to raise ‘extreme’ demands in the face of a Tory government that had already broken their organisations once. The union leaders also rejected the idea that Labour should interfere in the wage question in such a way as to reduce their own central role as negotiators in industrial matters. The ILP were predictably furious with the union bureaucrats for sabotaging their central policy.

Understandably frustrated, some ILP leaders took matters into their own hands. Without consultation, James Maxton launched a joint manifesto with the miners’ leader A.J. Cook and began a speaking tour around the country. Others in the ILP were outraged – the manifesto had been agreed behind closed doors with no wider consultation, in a very undemocratic act move by Maxton.⁶⁹ Others were more sanguine, appreciating it as a bold, ambitious and provocative move from the left. The Cook-Maxton manifesto differed quite considerably from the Socialism in our Time strategy. In opposition to the moral and political collapse of the TUC after 1926, Cook-Maxton offered a more radical class-struggle outlook, advocating militant trade union action, uniting with the unemployed and creating cooperative societies, nationalising the banks, land, railways and mines without compensation, and getting rid of the monarchy. Maxton had concluded that the defeat of the general strike by state repression would radicalise the workers, ‘making revolution inevitable’.⁷⁰ However, the accompanying speaker’s tour attracted only limited numbers, and mid-way through it the CPGB’s new Third Period ‘social fascist’ line led to their members denouncing the manifesto as the work of a ‘pseudo-left’.⁷¹