Origins of Labour
A quick history of British Labour
Things can only get better!
After 14 years of balatronic Conservative rule in Britain, Keir Starmer’s Labour heads to the polls with a commanding lead.
Obviously there is a long way to go yet, and recent politics warns us to expect the unexpected. But with the overwhelming likelihood at this stage of Labour winning government from opposition for the first time since 1997, I thought it would be fun to look at the foundation of Labour in the UK and how it was similar, and different, to the development of the ALP.
British Labour was founded in 1900 as the Labour Representative Committee at a meeting initiated by unions. It rebranded itself as the Labour Party in 1906.
At its inception, the party was organisationally flimsy, with the party composed of affiliated organisations (mostly unions and socialist groups) rather than individual membership within a branch structure.
Its primary function was to coordinate support for labour-aligned candidates. At its first electoral bout the Committee sponsored 15 candidates, with only 2 being elected. One of these was the famed Keir Hardie, a leading force in the creation of Labour.
Hardie was also a leading figure in the Independent Labour Party (ILP) –a membership-based socialist organisation that affiliated to the early LRC/Labour Party.
The ILP had been founded in 1893 with the pledge to ‘secure the collective ownership of all the means of production, distribution, and exchange.’Â
In the mould of most workers’ parties at this time, it was not a hegemonic organisation, with a wide array of different influences shaping the politics of its members and leaders, such as Keir Hardie, Tom Mann, and Ramsay MacDonald. Hardie and MacDonald had a defining influence over the Labour Party after its foundation.
MacDonald helped engineer one of the most significant leaps forward for the Labour Party when he secured a (secret) agreement with the Liberals in which the two parties cooperated to avoid splitting the anti-conservative vote. This helped Labour win 29 seats at the 1906 election. Hardie was elected as the new Labour leader (technically Chair of the party).
Labour’s prospects were transformed after the First World War.
The old imperial order was clearly over, though it was uncertain what would take its place. This was an era of new thinking, in which labour intellectuals from across the ideological spectrum questioned and debated the type of future the movement should seek to create.
This was underpinned by an upsurge of industrial militancy. Workers had long sacrificed for the war effort on both the European battlefields and the home front. As the war ground to a halt accompanied by economic crisis, worker militancy grew.
In 1918 the Representation of the People Act vastly expanded the franchise – it was difficult to tell the many millions of working-class soldiers who had sacrificed for their country that they had no right to determine its political future.
The new Act extended the right to vote among working-class men, and women over the age of thirty.
In 1918, the party’s secretary Arthur Henderson engineered a number of structural changes to the Labour party to equip it for the new order – and to ensure it was capable of winning government, and governing effectively when it did so.
Across a series of conferences that year Labour was reconstituted.
Organisationally, Henderson’s changes saw the introduction of individual membership, while ensuring union affiliates retained control over the decision-making bodies of the party, most notably its conference and executive.Â
This went alongside attempts to cohere Labour’s ideological outlook.
The most famous articulation of Labour’s vision of a reconstructed future was Labour and the New Social Order, the well-received pamphlet of the party’s National Executive that outlined a far-reaching vision of social-democratic transformation.
The party’s new constitution also included the famed Clause IV pledge to work towards "the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange"
Similar to Australian Labor’s socialist/socialisation objective, the full meaning and significance of this Clause has been debated ever since.
It is best seen as a statement of aims in the context of negotiation and compromise within a party that sought to represent the outlook of a movement which constituted a broad range of political perspectives. Often, it has been extracted from its context by opponents and supporters alike.
Significantly (and in a dividing line with communists at the time) it was an explicit pledge to achieve social change through parliamentary means.
The structural changes in the constitution strengthened the union bloc-vote, ensuring the party would have a distinctive labour character. While the British far-left often points to this as the moment in which moderate perspectives were entrenched at the core of the party, it could be more reasonably said that this structural change ensured that the reality of working-class experience was embedded directly into party life through the conduit of the British union movement.
These transformations set the basis for Labour’s first experience of government in 1924 under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald (feted at the time, but who broke with Labour in 1931).
Labour’s early story is one of change and adaptation – adjusting to transforming circumstances while pursuing the mission of labour representation to better the lot of working people.
Hopefully, it won’t be seen as antipodean arrogance to point out that Labour in Britain has always lagged that little bit behind the ALP.
The formation of Labor Parties in the 1890s, the first Labor governments (Queensland in 1899, Australian in 1904), and even our splits (!) have tended to predate those of British Labour. In more recent history, Hawke and Keating served as direct models of modernisation for Blair and Brown.
Hopefully the return to government after a long period of inept conservative administration is another precedent we have set!