How Labour Wins E-Book

Douglas Beattie

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 569

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Labour's record in government shows that Attlee and Blair were in the top rank of change-making Prime Ministers, and Wilson not far behind. An inspirational history.' ALASTAIR CAMPBELL A fascinating history of how the unfolding drama of each election from 1900 to 2024 has shaped the Labour Party and modern Britain. This is an essential guide to how left-wing politics succeeds or fails through an accessible, highly readable and timely history of Labour's performance in the 33 British General Elections since 1900. There have been 8 hung parliaments resulting in coalitions. Labour has won power 12 times; the Conservatives outright on 14 occasions. The final chapter of the book analyses the landslide result of the General Election on 4th July 2024. HOW LABOUR WINS is a book about the pursuit of power for working people. In assessing the fortunes of the Labour Party at the ballot box, it asks a simple overarching question – how and why does Labour win and lose? When Rishi Sunak announced the 4 July 2024 General Election, the Labour Party had been out of power for almost fifteen years and lost four consecutive elections since 2010. These were turbulent times defined by austerity, a Scottish independence referendum, Brexit, and the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. Now, under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the Labour Party is back in government. How do the lessons of the past show us how Starmer can maximise his victory and deliver the change promised in Labour's manifesto? With exclusive insights from former leaders and Prime Ministers - including Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock - How Labour Wins delves deep into the secrets of long-forgotten campaigns, traces the Party's roots, examines the strategies, leaders, transformative moments and missteps which have defined Labour's success at the ballot box and shaped modern Britain. Each chapter assesses the state of the nation going into a general election, the issues that shaped that election agenda and the dominant leaders and personalities of the day. This includes analysis of the election result statistics from landslides to hung parliaments, starting with the Labour Party's first election with only 15 candidates in 1900, Labour first calling for the abolition of the House of Lords in 1910 and the first Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald. It includes party manifestos, such as 'The nation wants food, work and homes' (Labour, 1945), party political broadcasts (first televised in 1951) and the historical context for all the major political movements of 20th and 21st century Britain. At the end of every chapter there is an election recap such as the following example: 1923 General Election Result Date of Election: 6 December 1923 Turnout: 71.1% Labour candidates: 427 MPs: 191 Votes: 4,439,780 Labour % share of vote: 30.5% Result: Labour minority Highlight: James Ramsay MacDonald becomes the first Labour Prime Minister 'If Labour is to flourish in power, it needs to know much more about its history. Reading this book would be an excellent starting point for its leaders and followers.' Anthony Seldon 'A timely and brilliantly illuminating book that offers much needed context to the 2024 general election. A must read.' Steve Richards, BBC Radio 4 Week in Westminster and host of Rock and Roll Politics

Leseprobe

To my sons

Aidan and Keir

The nation wants food, work and homes.

Labour Manifesto 1945

CONTENTS

Introduction

Vote Notes: Key Facts on Labour’s History

Chapter 1:     1893 – A Distinct Labour Group

Chapter 2:     1900 – The Khaki Two

Chapter 3:     1906 – A New Party in Parliament

Chapter 4:     1910 (January) – Does Labour Count?

Chapter 5:     1910 (December) – Labour Clears the Way

Chapter 6:     1918 – Everything Changes

Chapter 7:     1922 – Unrest and Development

Chapter 8:     1923 – ‘Fail or Succeed’ – Labour in Government

Chapter 9:     1924 – Red October

Chapter 10:   1929 – Striking Back

Chapter 11:   1931 – Depression and Betrayal

Chapter 12:   1935 – The Rising Tide

Chapter 13:   1945 – Winning the Peace

Chapter 14:   1950 – A Sharp Kick in the Pants

Chapter 15:   1951 – Forward or Backwards

Chapter 16:   1955 – Fighting Snow White

Chapter 17:   1959 – The Struggle Continues

Chapter 18:   1964 – The New Britain

Chapter 19:   1966 – Time for Decision

Chapter 20:   1970 – Now Britain’s Strong

Chapter 21:   1974 (February) – Yesterday’s Men?

Chapter 22:   1974 (October) – A Bumpy Ride

Chapter 23:   1979 – Sea Change

Chapter 24:   1983 – The New Hope

Chapter 25:   1987 – The Dream Ticket

Chapter 26:   1992 – Well All Right!

Chapter 27:   1997 – A New Dawn

Chapter 28:   2001 – The Quiet Landslide

Chapter 29:   2005 – We Can Unite Again

Chapter 30:   2010 – A Privilege to Serve

Chapter 31:   2015 – On the Brink

Chapter 32:   2017 – The Many Not the Few

Chapter 33:   2019 – Cutting the Flowers

Chapter 34:   2024 – All Change

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Labour Leaders and their Constituencies

Index

Introduction

General elections deal in the pursuit of power and have the capacity to mark time and define eras. This was undoubtedly the case in July 2024, when Labour stormed back to power at Westminster with a victory which represented not so much a political landslide as an earthquake.

When I began writing and researching this book in 2021, things did not look so rosy for Labour. Then, the party’s leader, Keir Starmer, was thoroughly overshadowed by the dominant Tory personality of Boris Johnson.

Remarkably, Starmer is now prime minister at the head of a Labour government with a majority almost as large as that enjoyed by Tony Blair in 1997, and larger than anything Harold Wilson or Clement Attlee were able to conjure.

A political lifetime ago, in 2019, Labour suffered one of its worst results and I began to wonder about the party’s performance in general elections – how it wins and why it loses. It occurred to me that on paper, given the electorate is overwhelmingly working class, or at least a class of working people, Labour should always win. Clearly, though, that is not the case.

I wanted to better understand these triumphs and disasters for the main British party of the left, uncovering what has propelled it forward from the days of Keir Hardie in 1900 to Keir Starmer in 2024.

Labour’s history, after all, is very different to that of the Conservatives or any other party because Labour has sought, since its inception, to rebalance the country in favour of the many not the few, to borrow a phrase.1

I began to wonder about Labour’s place in the country and came to the realisation that across the decades the party has built modern Britain. Walk down any street as day breaks or as night falls, and the Labour Party is there. It is there in its members opening shops, driving trains and buses, or carrying out shifts in hospitals.

These are the people who keep the country running every day of the year in the good times and the bad, making sure the lights are on, and the schools, offices and factories are open. Labour is Britain and Britain can’t do without Labour.

Yet what now does the electorate know or care of past leaders and their achievements? People in their twenties are perhaps aware of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, but Jim Callaghan and Harold Wilson have faded from view, while Clement Attlee is barely known at all. Yet each made their mark, and we all continue to live with their political legacies.

I was fascinated by how all of this had come about: how Labour emerged, how the party had grown and supplanted the Liberals, how Ramsay MacDonald had taken Labour into government before coming to be seen as a traitor to the cause.

How was it possible that Attlee and his ministers had ejected Winston Churchill from office, revolutionised Britain at the end of the Second World War and then been thrown out of office just six years later? How had Harold Wilson won four times and Tony Blair scored a hat-trick of general election victories? All these stories and many more are told in the pages of this book.

Some of this is about capturing momentum and recognising the potential of the moment, especially when there is a demand for change, as was the case in 1945, 1997 and 2024. Labour is a party built on the empowering potential of change. But sometimes politics is simply about opportunity. Ramsay MacDonald grasped this with his two minority governments which came to office against the odds in 1924 and 1929. Similarly in 1974, Harold Wilson was best placed to seize the chance to return to Downing Street.

This book does not confine itself to the story of Labour, nor even the Conservatives, but out of necessity takes in the themes of modern Britain since 1900. In different guises, the strands of this story seem to wash back at us time and again – defining eras and shaping governments.

Unemployment, war, poverty, housing, the economy and Britain’s place in the world are prime examples. Battles once raged over free trade and tariffs, but in more recent times these have been redrawn to consider the UK’s trading position inside or outside the European Union.

Where Wilson and others struggled with Britain’s balance of payments and a changing economy in the aftermath of Empire, Gordon Brown battled the financial crash of 2008. Starmer, meanwhile, seeks to tame the economic dragons with ‘fiscal rules’.

Labour and the other parties fight on many levels other than UK general elections, in local councils and devolved governments of one kind or another. Despite those other political fronts, Parliament in London remains the seat of the British government and an inescapable concentration of power. For that reason, the focus of this book is on Westminster.

It was my feeling that Labour seemed bewildered to lose in 2010 after 13 years in office, unsure of its future and what might befall the country under a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition. This also signalled the beginning of a highly turbulent era defined by post-financial crash austerity, the Scottish independence and Brexit referendums, as well as the Covid pandemic and the short-lived Truss era of economic wildfires.

In that time, there have been five Conservative prime ministers and three leaders of the opposition. For the Labour Party, there was also the shock election of the left-wing backbencher Jeremy Corbyn as leader, followed by another change of direction under Keir Starmer.

Curiously, general elections are both national events and highly personal. I know this to be the case, having knocked on thousands of doors for the Labour Party, looked voters in the eye, been elected twice as a councillor and been defeated once while running for Parliament.

They can be oddly humorous too. On what other occasion do millions of us watch a public figure give a speech in the pouring rain without an umbrella, as Rishi Sunak did when calling the 2024 election?

Campaigning is fun, but it is brutal. It demands both mental and physical fortitude – in 2017, I covered 3,000 miles as a candidate in the Scottish rural seat where I grew up.

As a child I had watched the sitting Conservative MP touring my home town by car, hailing textile mill workers in an accent I recognised only from television news bulletins. Whenever Margaret Thatcher popped up on television, my churchgoing grandmother would wag her finger in admonishment. She was appalled at what she saw as the prime minister’s lack of compassion.

Generally, it was not a place where people showed their political colours, a Tory stronghold dominated by farming and the feudal Laird, though the town was packed with mill workers who produced some of the finest cloths in the world.

The jobs that sustained the town in the 1980s are gone now – much like the textile industry elsewhere on these islands, or the mining or the steel that once formed the nation’s industrial spine. You could not be a teenager at that time and remain unaware of the situation in the country: how Britain seemed to be tearing itself apart.

In 1983, a young MP called Gordon Brown made his maiden speech in the House of Commons. Thinking not only of 2024, but each era since 1900, his words remain all too prescient: ‘the grossest affront to human dignity and the gravest assault, on any view of social justice, is mass unemployment and its inevitable consequence, mass poverty’. 2

Around that time, it began to dawn on me that there were women and men fighting to do things differently, to alleviate this misery. Collectively, they were called the Labour Party. Though far too caught up with other pursuits (mainly playing football), I recall my indignation at being born a month too late to be able to vote in 1987.

The first election I voted in was the crushing defeat of 1992, which Neil Kinnock himself recalls in the pages of this book. Gordon Brown also explains here what it was like to oversee Labour’s general election campaigns, while candidates and advisors from the 1970s to the present day give their take, as does a former Cabinet minister from the Blair era. As I progressed with my research and writing, I came to feel that Labour figures from the past were reaching out from the pages of old books and newspapers to tell us that they are still here in the Britain of today.

I have tried throughout to give balanced accounts of Labour’s fortunes under successive leaders. This is not a book written from the left, the right or the centre; it is written simply in the hope of bringing greater understanding of Labour’s elections and telling the story of a party which has shaped Britain for almost 125 years.

Back in the 1980s, I could not have imagined being involved in elections in any kind of professional capacity but as a journalist, trade union official, Labour councillor and Parliamentary candidate, I have been fortunate to see the work of several senior Labour people up close.

Over the century, and the 33 elections described in this book, Labour has done best when it has been united and has had a leader able to calm the divisions which will always exist in political parties over the defining issues of the era (whether free trade, the balance between economic growth and personal economic security or Brexit).

Labour has prospered when it has read the mood of the country yet has used that to shape popular policies which emancipate people, rather than pandering to populism.

And it has done so, above all, when it has remained true to its roots. That means being faithful to the aspirations expressed over a century ago by Keir Starmer’s first predecessor and namesake, Keir Hardie, to nurture the hopes and ease the hardships of the least well-off, while offering opportunity for all through the ‘sunshine of socialism’, as Hardie put it. 3

Whether the opposing party is strong, well-led or in chaos, whether Labour is in power or opposition, whether grappling with economic crisis or international instability, it is remaining true to these values that provides the best chance for Labour to win.

Each leader has had their own approach, but all have tried their best to find the formula which would return Labour to power. Every election is different, but each carries the possibility of success – though the reader should know that in considering ‘How Labour Wins’, there are no magic wands readily to hand.

Labour’s is a story of dogged determination, remarkable men and women, triumph, treachery, tradition, modernisation and so much more in the never-ending battle to serve and to build a country which allows the entire population to live good lives.

Vote Notes:Key Facts on Labour’s History

• Labour’s first and present leaders are both called Keir – Keir Hardie and Keir Starmer.

• Harold Wilson was the youngest Cabinet minister of the twentieth century, aged just 31 on becoming president of the Board of Trade in 1947.

• Labour’s biggest majority was won in 1997 – a 179-seat advantage. Its lowest was in 1964 – just four seats.

• The highest proportion of the vote won by Labour was 48.8 per cent in 1951, when the party also received the largest number of votes ever cast for it: 13,948,883.

• The highest percentage rise in the Labour vote between elections since universal suffrage in 1918 was 10.0 per cent between 1935 and 1945.

• The largest percentage fall in the Labour vote between elections was 7.9 per cent between 1979 and 1983.

• In 2000, Tony Blair’s son Leo was the first baby born to a serving prime minister in 150 years.

• Labour has been led by two women – Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman – both in interim positions.

• Jim Callaghan is the only Labour figure to have held all four great offices of state.

• Labour has had five leaders with the first name James, but former prime minister Jim Callaghan is not one of them! James (Keir Hardie), (Ramsay MacDonald), (Harold Wilson) and (Gordon Brown). Callaghan’s first name was Leonard.

• Diane Abbott was the first black woman MP, elected for Labour in 1987 at the same time as Bernie Grant and Paul Boateng.

• Labour has won four landslide victories – 1945, 1966, 1997, 2001 and 2024.

• Labour has won a hat-trick of elections only once – 1997, 2001 and 2005, all under Tony Blair.

• Three of Labour’s seven prime ministers were born in Scotland – Ramsay MacDonald, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

• Labour has won back-to-back election victories in 1945 and 1950, 1964 and 1966, 1974 (Feb) and 1974 (Oct).

• Labour has an election pact with the Co-operative Party. This arrangement goes back to the 1920s.

• Every Labour general election manifesto must be agreed at a ‘Clause V’ meeting involving the leadership, unions, national executive and others.

• Labour has had 23 leaders (including those in an acting capacity), but Ramsay MacDonald was the first to be styled ‘leader’ rather than simply chairman.

• The first woman Cabinet member in Britain was Labour’s Margaret Bondfield, appointed minister of labour in 1929.

• Clement Attlee was the party’s longest-serving leader over 20 years from 1935 to 1955.

• Labour’s national logo is the red rose; this replaced a red flag motif in the 1980s, and before that the party used a symbol of torch, shovel and quill.

• The youngest Labour leader when taking the role was Ed Miliband, aged 40; the oldest was George Lansbury, aged 72.

• Jeremy Corbyn is the only former party leader ever to stand and win his seat as an independent candidate, becoming MP for Islington North in the 2024 general election.

• The largest ever Conservative-to-Labour swing in a general election was recorded in 2024, when former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss lost her South West Norfolk seat by a 25.9% swing.

• Prime Minister Keir Starmer has selected the highest number of women in key cabinet positions.

Chapter 1

1893 – A Distinct Labour Group

‘The Liberal and Conservative Parties in this country have long histories.’

Clement Attlee 1

Today, general elections in the United Kingdom unfold through weeks of intense campaigning in what has become close to a presidential race to enter 10 Downing Street. All this is a far cry from the era in which what would become the Labour Party emerged at the start of the twentieth century.

On its website Labour says that ‘its formation was the result of many years of struggle by working class people, trade unionists and socialists, united by the goal of [having] working class voices represented in [the] British Parliament’.2

This summary significantly understates how extraordinary it was for a new party to emerge and take on the might of the Conservatives and the Liberals – neither of whose primary aim was to speak for working people.

Both parties were long established – growing out of the Tory Party and the Whigs in the mid-nineteenth century. While Conservatives were seen as representing the land-owning classes and the British establishment in its numerous forms, the Liberals promoted the growth of Parliamentary democracy and free trade.

The Liberals came to be known as the party of ‘peace, economy and reform’ and were attuned to the growing sense in Victorian society that all was not well; that many citizens lived under conditions of great hardship.

Numerous studies confirmed this, most notably Life and Labour of the People in London by the social reformer Charles Booth. Written in the 1880s, it demonstrated that more than 30 per cent of the population of London – and in some areas up to 60 per cent – lived at or below subsistence level. Poverty, wrote Booth, had become ‘a national institution’. 3

Liberalism favoured broad social reform, and in this regard the Third Reform Act of 1885 was key in that it gave the vote to an expanded electorate of almost six million men. At the same time, trade union membership was growing rapidly, while what was termed the ‘new unionism’ emerged, capturing a broader range of workers such as those in the docks, railways, transport and mines. By 1892, over a million and a half workers were members of a trade union.

These new unions were significantly more radical than their older artisan counterparts and began to reshape industrial relations in high-profile battles. In 1888, a thousand women and young girls employed at the Bryant and May match factory in East London walked out over grievances relating to desperately poor conditions. Weeks later, they returned to work victorious.

This was a stunning victory for organised labour, and one that helped inspire the London Dock Strike of 1889 which brought the most important port in the world to a standstill over demands for guaranteed minimum working hours and better pay. Dubbed the ‘Dockers’ Tanner’, it won a deal of six pence an hour, and it had an electrifying effect, encouraging thousands of low-paid workers to join the trade union movement.

The industrial struggles did not always have such positive outcomes. The thousands of textile workers at Manningham Mills in Bradford, who walked out in 1891 to avert a 30 per cent reduction in their wages, were almost starved into submission in a five-month-long bitter dispute. During it, soldiers and the police were brought onto the streets with Liberal and Tory support.

It was an era when around 80 per cent of the adult population were manual workers, and the trade unions at this stage still supported the Liberals as the best means of gaining parliamentary representation. Although a small group of around a dozen working-class MPs known as Lib-Labs were backed by the unions, they took the Liberal whip while remaining free to speak out on labour issues.

As a result, there was a clear need for a political organisation which stood up for the rights and concerns of working people. The first major step towards that goal was taken in 1893, with the founding of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Hardly a party in the traditional sense, it was a loose grouping that advocated for the working classes among the trade unions.

The establishment of the ILP changed the political dynamic, as it provided candidates, a new political direction, focused more clearly on the interests of the working class, and personnel – most prominently Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald. It was one example of a growing sense among trade unionists and socialists that there were limits on the power of Liberalism to speak for the most oppressed in society.

Prompted by the Trades Union Congress, the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was formed in February 1900. Even so, this did not yet represent a break with the Liberals. While it was to be ‘a distinct Labour group in Parliament who should have their own whips, and agree upon their policy’, as Keir Hardie’s successful motion at the LRC’s formation pointed out, it was necessary to ‘embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interest of labour’. 4

Hardie’s stance in retaining ties with the Liberal Party was no accident: three of the men who would go on to lead Labour – MacDonald, George Lansbury and Arthur Henderson – had either worked for the Liberals or been members of the party, and those links would endure.

Chapter 2

1900 – The Khaki Two

‘The object of these measures is to enable . . . the Complete Emancipation of labour from the Domination of Capitalism.’1

Labour Representation Committee manifesto

Seven months after the Labour Representation Committee was formed, it was faced with fighting a general election called by the veteran Conservative prime minister Lord Salisbury to capitalise on the major issue dominating politics at the time – the Boer War. Now largely forgotten, the conflict was fought against the two South African ‘Boer’ Republics, which resisted the British Empire’s attempts to access gold mines and to incorporate them into a single British-ruled South African territory.

Though at the time Salisbury called the election it was thought the war was all but won, it would continue sporadically for another two years. In holding what came to be known as the Khaki Election (for the colour of the new British Army uniforms), the government hoped to benefit from a feeling of patriotic and pro-Imperial pride which dominated all classes.

With their main opponents, the Liberal Party, split internally over the war, the result was a landslide victory for the Conservative government, which won a 134-seat majority. They were backed by their Liberal Unionist allies, a faction which supported the war and opposed Irish Home Rule, a policy the mainstream Liberals strongly supported in the late nineteenth century.

For one rather straightforward reason the LRC could not win the election of 1900: it fielded only 15 candidates. Among these were Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden and Fred Jowett, all of whom would play prominent roles in the coming years.

The more important point was that this new group, with its aim of securing greater political representation for advancing the interests of the working class, had taken part in the election and had done so with a degree of success.

The poll of 1900 would be a testbed for whether the LRC had any chance of unifying and representing all those factions which had sent delegates from across the country to its founding conference in London the previous February. The attendees had come not only from numerous unions, but also from the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation and the Fabian Society.

As the Guardian put it at the time, the LRC existed to secure ‘the return of a much larger number of members of Parliament in sympathy with the labour cause and prepared consistently and persistently to advocate it in that assembly’. 2 To this end the LRC had an elected executive committee whose primary duty was to collect information about candidates and prospective candidates who were sufficiently aligned with its beliefs and could be given the support of the labour movement in an election.

This remained an embryonic endeavour in 1900, one with limited funds provided by unions and affiliated societies and a skeletal organisational structure. It was said that ‘the LRC could do no more for candidates than provide a small supply of leaflets and its best wishes’ – making it all the more remarkable that two of these men were returned to parliament. 3

The new LRC MPs were Keir Hardie, who won at Merthyr Tydfil, and Richard Bell at Derby. As Bell soon drifted wholly into the embrace of the Liberals, Hardie was essentially the only genuine LRC Member of the Commons. Both had triumphed in ‘Double Member’ constituencies, where voters could cast two votes, and in both Derby and Merthyr many split their ballots between LRC and Liberal candidates.

Hardie himself still viewed the LRC as nothing more than a pressure group for the rights of workers, rather than a fledgling party with its own set of policies. Indeed, in this election eight Lib-Lab MPs – who had the financial backing of trade unions but effectively took the Liberal whip – were also returned and this blurred the idea that the LRC was the only authentic voice of workers in the Commons.

Quite how the LRC had managed to gain two seats was a question Hardie had asked himself, writing ‘how was it done? I don’t know. My first clear recollection of anything is of scurrying across the station at Merthyr with a pork pie in one hand and a cup of tea in the other’. 4

Having spent only a few hours in the South Wales constituency prior to the election, concentrating more on Preston where he was also standing, Hardie was met as though an old friend, not least for his strong anti-war views which chimed with those of the large Welsh mining community.

The South Wales Daily Post called Hardie’s success ‘the greatest possible surprise . . . an astonishing result’.5 Still, there were obvious explanatory factors, not least the options open to electors in those constituencies, who were able to return two local MPs. In addition, the miners, though not yet affiliated to the LRC, would have known of Hardie’s long-standing links to trade unions and his advocacy of better wages, improved conditions and voting rights.

Especially in an era of growing class consciousness, he was a good fit for Merthyr, though his return to the Commons – having been an independent Labour MP for West Ham South between 1892 and 1895 – was recorded without fanfare. The significant exception to this was the Labour Leader, a newspaper which Hardie himself edited. It reflected that in Hardie ‘the party has absolute confidence’, as someone who had ‘never failed or faltered in his duty to the movement’. 6

Ramsay MacDonald, writing as secretary, felt that the startling progress which had been made was due to the existence of the LRC as a focus for all sections of the labour movement, as well as the policies set out in the one-page manifesto which the committee had offered to voters.

This short document reflects wider themes relating to the Boer conflict. It contained pledges to abolish the standing army and allow the people to decide on issues of war and peace. There was also a commitment which would allow ‘Legislative Independence for all parts of the Empire’, plus the ‘Nationalisation of Land and Railways’, ‘Better Houses’ and ‘Useful Work for the Unemployed’. 7

These policies demonstrate the LRC’s roots in liberalism, in the concerns over war and social improvements, but also highlight the differences – for instance, the LRC’s stated aim that the means of production should be in the hands of the people. Though this was impractical in 1900, such an ambition demonstrated that the LRC could act as a focal point for labour in Parliament.

A year later the Law Lords upheld a judgment that unions could be sued and made to pay costs incurred by an employer during a strike. This ‘Taff Vale’ judgment is still spoken of today as a byword for any concerted threat to legitimate industrial action, and at the time it made strikes all but impossible.

The ruling concerned the short but bitterly fought dispute in which the Taff Vale Railway Company in South Wales took the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants union to court and won a large sum in damages and costs. The judgment made the larger trade union movement realise that a strong presence in parliament was vital if they were to overturn Taff Vale and defend their rights more generally.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) now began working towards an arrangement uniting the Labour Representation Committee and other socialist bodies so that they would jointly endorse parliamentary candidates at future elections. They were pushing at an open door, as the LRC had already given a taste of the power workers could hold in the Commons through MPs representing their interests.

1900 General Election Result

Date of Election – 28 September–4 October

Overall Turnout – 75.1%

Labour

Candidates – 15

MPs – 2

Votes – 62,698

Percentage share of the vote – 1.3%

Result – Conservative and Liberal Unionist majority

Highlight – This was nicknamed the Khaki election at the end of the Boer War, reflecting the new colour of British Army uniforms.

Chapter 3

1906 – A New Party in Parliament

‘Organised labour as a political force is already a menace to the easy-going gentlemen of the old school . . .’1

Labour Conference report 1906.

The general election of 1906 is remembered as a great victory for the Liberal Party after long years of Conservative domination, but in the long term it was the accelerated progress of the LRC which would prove to be more significant.

Even at the time, journalists and politicians noted that the Liberal landslide had come about through a unique set of circumstances on which the party could not rely in future elections. While The Times made the case that the Conservatives (or Unionists as then known) still had a bright future, others did the same for Labour. Both sides predicted the demise of the Liberals, Keir Hardie himself declaring that it was ‘obvious to everyone who took the slightest interest in public affairs that the old two-party system [was] breaking up’. 2 Hardie had good grounds for his comments, not least that 29 out of 50 LRC candidates had been successful in the election, a sensational improvement on the showing just six years earlier.

The issue which defined the election and dominated the politics of the period more generally was the question of protectionism versus free trade. Although it though may seem a dry subject today, it was then a matter of huge concern, touching on the Empire, the functioning of the economy, taxation and the alleviation of poverty.

The principal idea behind protectionism was to place tariffs on imported goods, and so shield industry and agriculture while boosting the trading power of the British Empire as a single economic bloc. It was an argument that divided the Conservative Party, while Liberals were united in their desire for free trade as the best means of keeping prices stable and ensuring economic growth.

A minority Liberal government had taken office in December 1905 without an election, the Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour ceding power in the face of a divided party and a government all but paralysed over the proposed imposition of tariffs, a policy which he cautiously supported.

It may be strange that a prime minister should simply give up the seals of office, but Balfour had his reasons. Though his own government had been weakened over a controversial new Education Act and his long-running attempts to please both the Free Traders and pro-tariff figures in his party such as Joseph Chamberlain, Balfour felt that the Liberals faced greater problems.

He gambled that the formation of a Liberal government would highlight all their old factions and disagreements, particularly over Irish Home Rule. In the forthcoming election the voters would see these weaknesses, he hoped, and again turn to the Conservatives.

As a strategy, this turned out to be a grave miscalculation. Balfour had overlooked the core belief in free trade shared by all Liberals, including many of the Liberal Unionists, the Tories’ allies in government. The Liberals were quickly able to form a stable Cabinet led by Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and shortly afterwards he called an early general election.

It was held over a four-week period from January to early February, the Liberals pushed a consistent pro-free trade message, crystallised in their ‘Big Loaf, Small Loaf ’ campaign (which pressed their point that trade tariffs would cause prices to rise and so workers would only be able to afford a ‘small loaf ’). It was not a policy unique to them: free trade and cheap and plentiful food for the British working classes were just as important to the LRC, a point stressed in the party’s manifesto, which described protectionism as a ‘red herring’ and ‘no remedy for poverty and unemployment’. 3

The LRC manifesto, an appeal made in the name of a million trade unionists, did not represent a full-throated socialist programme and was not vastly different to its Liberal counterpart. There were LRC commitments to tackle unemployment, the slums, neglect of the poor and the aged and creating better schools, but there was no call for widespread nationalisation nor any great attack on capitalism. The most pressing matter was that labour be properly represented in Parliament and this – rather than free trade – was by some distance the issue most often mentioned by LRC candidates. It was noted, moreover, that speeches made by senior LRC figures, including Ramsay MacDonald, could just as well have been made in the name of Campbell-Bannerman.

The lack of radicalism in the manifesto, milder in its calls for reform even than its counterpart of 1900, suited both the Liberals and the LRC given that the two parties had forged a mutually beneficial electoral agreement which would in effect see them jointly take on the Conservatives. This pact had been agreed early in 1903 at the top of each party and was not widely known outside leadership circles. The Liberals hoped by working with the LRC they might be able to keep labourism under the Liberal banner.

There was also the not insignificant matter of the £100,000 election fund the LRC had amassed from the unions, which dwarfed the sum held in the Liberal coffers. By 1905, almost 160 unions, with a membership of over 900,000 workers, had affiliated and quickly made the LRC the strongest political body in the country. Unsurprisingly the Liberals saw the value in a united front, believing that many working men who voted Tory could be persuaded to switch to the LRC, but not to Liberal candidates, who were seen as representing establishment interests.

It was Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal chief whip, and MacDonald, as LRC secretary, who brokered the agreement. MacDonald knew that the LRC was powerful only on paper at this stage, and that it had little chance of making major strides against candidates from the two big parties. The negotiations between the two men yielded a free run for the LRC in up to 50 seats in double-member constituencies, mainly held by Tories and located in and around Birmingham, Lancashire, London and the South, plus parts of Wales and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

MacDonald ensured that the selection of candidates was controlled from the centre by the ruling National Executive Committee, which led to a candidate body which was not overtly radically socialist. Meanwhile, Liberal leaders leaned on local parties to halt any opposition to LRC candidates who supported ‘the general objects of the Liberal Party’, while the LRC was to ‘demonstrate friendliness’ to Liberal candidates in seats where they were likely to win. 4

Though advantageous to both sides, MacDonald clearly got the better of the deal. While the Liberals won the election and emerged into the ‘blissful dawn’ of a 128-seat majority over all other parties the LRC secured a much-enhanced group of MPs and an average of 37 per cent of the vote in these constituencies. 5

While Hardie was returned at Merthyr, he was now joined in Parliament by those who would be important figures in the party in the years to come, among them MacDonald (Leicester), Arthur Henderson (Barnard Castle) and Philip Snowden (Blackburn).

A few days after the election result, the LRC MPs met for the first time in Parliament. The minutes of that gathering, in MacDonald’s handwriting, show that the decision was taken to rename the organisation as the Labour Party. Officers and whips were appointed, a room was secured for the party’s exclusive use and weekly meetings were scheduled. Perhaps most notable was the decision to sit on the Opposition side of the Commons, rather than with the Liberals on the Government side.

The Labour Party also elected a chairman, or leader. At first Hardie had appeared reluctant to run, stressing that he saw himself as a pioneer rather than a leader. Eventually, though, he allowed himself to be nominated and on a show of hands was tied with David Shackleton, a trade unionist who would go on to become a leading civil servant.

It was only when a formal ballot was held that Hardie emerged victorious – 15–14 – after the two candidates and MacDonald had cast their votes. By a whisker the newly named party had chosen as its first leader someone who was identifiably a socialist.

Even so, it remained unclear whether Labour – a broad coalition of trade unionists, reformers and revolutionaries – would be the gravediggers or the handmaidens of the Liberal Party. David Lloyd George, then president of the Board of Trade, said he believed working-class voters would stick with the Liberals if they were bold enough to embark on a programme of steady social reform.

Labour had flourished at the ballot box because of the pact with the Liberals, but at the same time it was striving for independence. As Snowden put it, the future was about seeing Labour ‘strengthened to the extent of dominating if not directing the Government of the country’. 6

1906 General Election Result

Date of Election – 12 January–7 February

Overall Turnout – 83.2 %

Labour

Candidates – 51

MPs – 29

Votes – 329,748

Percentage share of the vote – 5.9%

Result – Liberal landslide

Highlight – This marked the last of the Liberal landslides, while Labour for the first time won large financial backing from the trade unions.

Chapter 4

1910 (January) – Does Labour Count?

‘The hopeless condition of the Tory Party is one of the most remarkable features of present-day politics’. 1

Arthur Henderson

The election of January 1910 is best remembered for the major constitutional crisis which was then enveloping Parliament and the monarchy. Yet it was Labour’s threat to Liberal Party dominance that was the catalyst for the entire drama.

The Budget of 1909 was the trigger: having been passed by the Commons in April, it was then blocked by the House of Lords. Known as ‘the People’s Budget’ the aim, as Chancellor David Lloyd George said, was ‘raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’. 2

Lloyd George had often spoken out about the condition of the poor. Now, he warned that if the Liberals failed to act ‘a new cry will arise for a land with a new party, and many of us will join that cry’. 3 It was a barely disguised warning of the emerging threat from Labour as the representatives of working people.

At this time the unelected Upper House was far from the revising chamber of today. The Lords saw themselves as being on a par with the Commons and were prepared to stand in the way of proposed Liberal reforms, either greatly modifying or sinking bills on education, the voting system, agriculture and rent reform in Ireland.

The peers had been outraged at Lloyd George’s proposed budgetary measures – among them an increase in inheritance tax (25 per cent on estates over £1 million), hikes in income tax, a new super-tax on annual income over £5,000 and taxes at 20 per cent on income from the sale of land. Those most threatened by these measures, the very richest in society, turned to the Lords, with its inbuilt Conservative majority, to defend their wealth.

Today, finance Bills move through both Houses of Parliament without much fuss, but in 1909 the Budget was debated almost continuously, taking up nearly 75 days of Commons business before being passed by MPs in late November. It was then overwhelmingly rejected in the Lords.

On the 2nd of December the government won a vote stating that the peers had committed ‘a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons’. 4 In effect, the Lords had not only rejected the Budget but brought about a general election which would end up reshaping the structures of British politics.

Long planned by Liberal ministers, the election was held from the 15 January to the 10 February. Labour’s pitch to the country – ‘The Lords must go’ – was unequivocal in its demand for democratic change. The question at hand, Labour said, was ‘whether the Peers or the people are to rule this country’. 5

It was no surprise to political observers that Labour supported the Liberals over such a crucial issue. The two parties had worked together in the election of 1906 via an electoral pact and the arrangement remained in place in 1910. The Liberals had also been as good as their word over a key issue for Labour. The 1906 Trades Disputes Act, for which Labour MPs had lobbied the Liberal government hard, had reversed the 1901 Taff Vale decision stipulating that a union would be liable for costs and damages during a strike. It was an important victory, and one which maintained good relations between the parties.

The Lords did not involve themselves in this legislation, but in 1909 they upheld another landmark legal ruling, one which directly hampered not only the unions but Labour. The so-called Osborne Judgement concluded that there was nothing in law to suggest unions had any right of ‘collecting and administering funds for political purposes’. 6 Outraged by this attack on their ability to fund themselves, it is little wonder that the Labour Party fell in behind the Liberals in taking on the powers of the Lords.

The election was called, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith said, to alleviate a ‘momentous crisis’, in which the Lords vetoed legislation when there was a Liberal government, but did not act likewise under the Tories. Getting to the heart of the matter, he added ‘the claim of the House of Lords to control finance is novel, and a mere usurpation’. 7

Over 1,300 candidates took part, battling for 670 seats, voted on by an electorate of seven and a half million men aged over 21 years. Labour fielded almost 80 candidates, the vast majority in single-member constituencies, under the cautious leadership of Arthur Henderson.

Again, it was impossible to win the election outright. Henderson’s hope was for measured progress. It may seem odd that Labour went into the campaign with 45 MPs, having won 29 seats in the 1906 election. The simple reason for this was that in 1908 the hugely powerful Miners’ Federation affiliated to the party allowing the Lib-Lab MPs sponsored by that union to take the Labour whip.

While Labour and the Liberals’ approach broadly overlapped, on housing, unemployment, taxation and more, the issue of the Lords’ behaviour was the key feature of the campaign. Here, backed in print by the Miners’ and ILP manifestos, Labour was alone in calling not merely for reform, but abolition of the unelected second chamber.

The outcome of the election was a near dead heat. The Liberal Party had a total of 274 MPs, with their Conservative (and Liberal Unionist) opponents just two seats shy of that tally. This was a disappointment for both the big parties – the Liberal gains four years earlier had been wiped away, while the Tories had failed to return to office despite winning the popular vote.

The Conservatives’ strong polling may seem surprising given that the other parties were defending the rights of the people against abuse of privilege, but the Tory warnings that Asquith’s party and their allies were set on destroying the constitution by abolishing the Lords, in what amounted to a revolution, proved effective. Moreover, it is often overlooked that at the previous election the Conservatives had polled 43 per cent and were only undone by their divisions over trade. In short, the Tories remained a strong political force in the country, especially among the middle classes.

Labour and the Irish Parliamentary Party, with 71 seats, would ensure the Liberals remained in power. At the suggestion of the Commons’ Speaker, the Labour MPs even crossed the floor to sit on the government side – although this was done to accommodate the different party groupings, not all of whom could sit on the opposition benches.

Labour lost eight seats and gained three in that January election, emerging with a total of 40 MPs. The votes came mainly from industrial areas with 120,000 votes in Lancashire and substantial support in the Midlands, Yorkshire, Durham, South Wales, Scotland and London.

Labour’s performance in January 1906 can be read either as steady progress or simply treading water. It was, though, a poll held in highly unusual circumstances in which voters were being asked to judge the parliamentary system and British democracy itself.

Still a small party, it is noteworthy that Labour polled half a million votes – a solid increase on the 323,000 four years earlier. Although Labour lost eight seats and gained three, its overall total showed a sharp increase from the previous election, helped by the addition of the mining MPs.

Labour had already come a long way since 1900, in terms of support and seats in the Commons. The party, though, remained somewhat under the wing of the Liberals. While this had been helpful in its first elections, it raised questions about Labour’s long-term future as an independent political entity.

Keir Hardie himself remarked that the Party ‘had almost ceased to exist’. 8 The coming years would tell whether this was fair comment or not.

January 1910 General Election Result

Date of Election – 14 January–9 February

Overall Turnout – 86.8%

Labour

Candidates – 78

MPs – 40

Votes – 505,657

Percentage share of the vote – 7.6%

Result – Liberal minority government

Highlight – The House of Lords triggers a constitutional crisis and general election by rejecting the ‘People’s Budget’.

Chapter 5

1910 (December) – Labour Clears the Way

‘Parliament has become the field upon which the great battles between capital and labour are to be fought’ 1

Labour Party leaflet

Labour’s immediate task following the election of January 1910 was to support the minority Liberal government to enact the constitutional changes which would reform the House of Lords. This was the issue on which the second election of the year would be fought.

The Lords passed the People’s Budget in April 1910 after the January election had given a popular mandate to the finance measures already agreed by the Commons. Yet that was not the end of the matter, as the Liberals then introduced a new Parliament Bill to curb the power of the second chamber once and for all.

Under its terms, the power of peers to block Finance Bills would be removed, and they would be able only to delay the passage of other legislation. The Lords in turn resisted, sparking a renewed crisis setting the unelected House of Parliament once more against the Commons members sent directly by the people.

Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government had already planned for this eventuality and proposed to create hundreds of new Liberal lords to guarantee a progressive majority in the Upper House. As the chancellor, David Lloyd George, put it ‘we repudiate the claim put forward by 600 Tory Peers that they were born to control the destinies of 45,000,000 of their fellow citizens.’ 2

This was unprecedented. For the new Lords to be created en masse, the government required the active support of the Crown and the king, George V, who had been on the throne only a matter of months, was reluctant to give his consent. Faced with Asquith’s threat of resignation, he relented, but there remained the problem of getting the Parliament Act through the Commons without a commanding majority. So, on 28 November, the prime minister was granted a dissolution of Parliament, meaning the second election of the year would take place over two weeks from early December.

The parties, Labour included, had been planning for this. In the aftermath of the January poll Ramsay MacDonald had written – ‘we ought to assume . . . that a general election will be forced upon us almost at once and we ought to keep a very watchful eye upon the trend of events’. 3

As in the previous election, Labour supported the overall Liberal position on the reform of the Lords, while taking a distinctly more radical line. The central message of its election posters was ‘Labour Clears The Way’, with images of the House of Lords being demolished by determined-looking shirt-sleeved men.

The party’s manifesto repeated the call made in January that ‘the Lords Must Go’, telling the voters ‘you are again being asked to return a majority pledged to remove the House of Lords as a block in the working of our Constitution. Do it, and do it emphatically’. 4

The manifesto also included calls to deal with poverty and for MPs to be paid, a measure which would greatly help working-class men. Labour, led by the Scottish engineer George Barnes, also campaigned to reverse the Osborne Judgement, which prevented unions from using money for political ends.

This was already having an effect. Even the strongest local party branches like Manchester and Leeds were badly hit and, in some areas, they collapsed or were mothballed. Labour chose to run just 56 candidates at the December election, 22 fewer than in January. The best available strategy was to concentrate resources in seats already held, and particularly those where a strong vote had previously been recorded.

The wider question for Labour’s leadership was its continued Liberal embrace. This troubled many, not only on Labour’s socialist wing, but the immediate political reality was that, though the Liberals had been helped by Labour votes in the two previous elections, the Parliamentary Labour Party had clearly benefited still more from the tacit alliance. The Liberals in turn continued to see Labour as a junior partner, and in his election address (the manifesto) Asquith did not trouble himself even to mention them.

The Tories’ message was striking by contrast. Their leader, Arthur Balfour, felt that Liberalism had been forced into its position against the Lords by ‘their Socialist and [Irish] Nationalist allies’ and that ‘behind the Single Chamber conspiracy lurk Socialism and Home Rule’. 5

The Conservatives were beginning to find their voice in attacking Labour, and would not have done so unless they thought there were votes to be won. It would be to no avail: across the two elections of 1910 Labour won 77 of 92 straight fights with the Tories and hardly any when a Liberal was on the ballot paper.

The Liberals again won the election in December, but only by a single seat, finishing with 272 MPs. It is not a result fondly remembered by any of the parties, having failed to shift the dial greatly from the position in January.

Labour’s campaign was a success, but a qualified one. The party gained five seats and lost three, a net gain of two taking its total in the Commons to 42 MPs. Woolwich was won again by Will Crooks, Bow and Bromley by George Lansbury, who triumphed after missing out in January, and Western Fife was won by William Adamson. The new Parliament also saw the party elect MacDonald, the long-serving secretary, as chairman in place of Barnes.

While the Osborne Judgement and relations with the Liberals would continue to create tensions inside Labour, with socialists and syndicalist union radicals worrying that the party was too timid and reformist, the party had now established itself as an important presence in Parliament. Liberalism had not simply melted away as some had hoped, but the Labour Party had clearly come a very long way since its formation just ten years earlier.

1910 – General Election (December) – Result

Date of Election – 2 December–19 December

Overall Turnout – 81.6%

Labour

Candidates – 56

MPs – 42

Votes – 371,772

Percentage share of the vote – 6.4%

Result – Liberal minority

Highlight – Labour calls for the abolition of the House of Lords.

Chapter 6

1918 – Everything Changes

‘The war has advanced state socialism by half a century’

J. A. Hobson 1

The 1918 election came at the end of the four years of the Great War, a vast collective trauma in which death touched every community in Britain. In a period of great pressure for Parliament and government, there were many significant changes, not least for the Labour Party.

An election had been due to take place in 1916, but it was postponed until the cessation of hostilities with Germany. Yet politics was not mothballed during the conflict, with matters continuing along party lines until May 1915. After that the Liberal government, headed by Herbert Asquith, came under intense pressure over the prosecution of the war, both on the Western Front and in the disastrous attempt to take the Dardanelles, a narrow strip of water off what is now Turkey.

As a result, the Tories demanded a coalition be formed. Into this new ministry came the Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, and others from his party. So too did Arthur Henderson, once more leader of the Labour Party, and two more Labour men in junior government posts.

This placed Labour at the heart of the British political establishment for the first time. The party was hugely important in the wartime crisis: it had an affiliated membership of close to two million workers and the backing of 130 trade unions, all of which were vital to the war effort.

Though Henderson, a solid trade unionist, was seen as a safe pair of hands, Labour had its own internal divisions, which had been intensified by the conflict. The right of the party vocally supported Britain’s involvement in the war; the left opposed not just this, but also the so-called ‘fight to the finish’ doctrine which had become mainstream.

The anti-war faction, which had its roots in the ILP group, was led by two great Labour stars: Ramsay MacDonald, who resigned as leader when the conflict began; and Keir Hardie. The intensity of feeling against those opposing hostilities with Germany led to MacDonald receiving much abuse, including letters addressed to ‘Herr MacDonald’.

However, the prolonged nature of the conflict began to change minds. Henderson, who had previously said he was not in the Cabinet to please himself but ‘to see the war through’, resigned from the government – and by extension from the party leadership – in August 1917 over what he felt to be the hampering of efforts to reach an international peace settlement. 2

His considerable energies were now focused on ending the war by advocating for a League of Nations and other levers for mediation in international disputes before they ran to conflict. Known as the Memorandum on War Aims it influenced not only British political leaders, but also the US president, Woodrow Wilson.

At the same time, Henderson pushed through the drafting of a new Labour constitution, at the heart of which was Clause IV and its commitment to ‘secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry’ based on ‘the common ownership of the means of production’.3

Clause IV was a deliberate strategy aimed to further bind the unions to Labour in the post-war period, but the constitution itself was important in establishing Labour as an independent and genuinely national organisation at the ballot box. Local constituency Labour parties would be created, allowing individuals beyond the trade unions and, notably, women to join. This was to prove a masterstroke, because when the country at last went to the polls in December 1918, the electorate had more than doubled in size since the election eight years previously.

The Representation of the People Act, which became law in February 1918, had extended the franchise to almost nine million women aged over 30 (who were either married or owned property), as well as all men aged 21. This huge shift, part passed to acknowledge the role of women in the war effort, appeared advantageous for Labour with the franchise now reaching much further into the working classes.

The other helpful step for the party was the passing of the Trade Union Act in 1913 which permitted unions again to collect a political levy from members. For Labour this meant a significant and consistent money stream it could devote to political purposes, electioneering and the support of candidates.

Externally too, events proved advantageous to Labour. David Lloyd George replaced Asquith as prime minister in late 1916, in what was effectively a political coup assisted by the Conservatives. Asquith remained Liberal leader but by the time of the election the two were in opposing camps and Liberalism had been decisively split.

By 1918 Labour had also left the coalition government, but only after Henderson and the National Executive demanded the parliamentary party do so. This period also marked a sea change in Labour’s electoral strategy with the ending of the pact with the Liberals.

Held on 14 December, little more than a month after the formal armistice with Germany, the general election was the first to take place on a single day across the country. However, counting was not completed until after Christmas so that ballots cast by soldiers could be included.

Though the Coalition seemed to be in a dominant position, Lloyd George had taken no chances. Tory candidates and Coalition Liberals toured their constituencies with a short letter signed by Lloyd George and Bonar Law, the Conservative leader. This endorsed the candidates, signalling they had supported the war, and in so doing appealed to the overwhelming patriotic sentiment of the day. It became known as the ‘coupon’, and it all but guaranteed the bearer success in what was termed the ‘Coupon Election’.

Labour’s manifesto was entitled ‘Labour’s Call to the People’, a recognition that much of the expanded electorate shared the party’s goals. Its stated aim was to ‘build a new world, and to build it by constitutional means [through] a programme of national and international justice’. 4

Much of the manifesto was designed to further marginalise the Liberal Party. It overtly claimed Labour as the women’s party, tied to the Co-operative Movement, which was dominated by women. At home, the focus was on land reform, and a million new houses for workers. On the international front there was the offer of reconstruction and peace, a contrast with the Coalition’s determination to make Germany pay for the war. Labour also called for freedom for India as well as Ireland.