Labour Party

I

Introduction

Labour Party, political party in Great Britain, which was formed in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) but took the name Labour Party after the 1906 general election, when 29 Members of Parliament joined the hitherto very small independent Labour group in the House of Commons. The Labour Party began and—for much of its history—remained very dependent on the support of the British trade unions. This support was especially important at critical times in the party’s history, such as in World Wars I and II and after the electoral setback of 1931. The Labour Party has been the major party on the left wing of British politics since the crumbling of the Liberal Party between 1918 and 1924. Its greatest electoral support has come from the older industrial areas and from cities. After its poor electoral performance in the 1983 general election, the party’s policies and organization were overhauled and “modernized” under the successive leaderships of Neil Kinnock, John Smith, and Tony Blair.

II

Organization

The Labour Party’s main power groupings are (1) the leader and the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP); (2) the National Executive Committee (NEC); and (3) the Annual Conference, with behind these the constituency Labour parties and the affiliated trade unions, socialist societies, and cooperative organizations. Since Labour lost office in 1979 there have been various changes in the balance of power between them.

The leader and deputy leader are elected by an electoral college made up of the constituency Labour parties, the affiliated trade unions, and the PLP, with each constituent part’s vote counting for a third of the total poll. This system was approved at the 1993 Labour Party Conference and first used in July 1994, after the death of John Smith, when Tony Blair was elected leader and John Prescott deputy leader. Before 1981 the leader and deputy leader had been elected annually by the PLP. The introduction in January 1981 of an electoral college, where 40 per cent of the vote had been allocated to the trade unions, 30 per cent to the PLP, and 30 per cent to the constituency Labour parties, had been controversial, being seen as a major victory for the party’s internal left wing, and had been a decision that contributed to the formation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party.

The PLP elects annually a chair for its meetings. It also elects a Parliamentary Committee from its membership in the Commons: 18 have been elected annually since 1988. When in 1988 the number was increased from 15 (it had been 12 before 1981), three seats on the Parliamentary Committee were reserved for women. In 1993 this provision was changed, with those voting having to vote for at least four female candidates. Those elected become Front Bench speakers (and members of the Shadow Cabinet), when in opposition.

The NEC, which is second only to the Party Conference as the supreme body of the party organization, is elected each year at the party conference. Since 1937 there have been seven places for representatives of the constituency parties, elected by them separately. There have been 12 places for trade unionists and 1 for affiliated socialist or cooperative societies, elected separately by their conference delegations. There are also five places for women, which are filled by vote of the whole conference. Since 1972 there has been a Young Socialist place, elected by the National Conference of Labour Party Young Socialists. The Treasurer of the party is elected by the vote of the whole conference. The leader and deputy leader are ex officio members.

The annual party conference is the ultimate court of appeal within the Labour Party organization, at least outside Parliament. It elects the NEC and debates and votes on policy (though a two thirds majority of the votes cast is required to ensure decisions go into the party programme), and the NEC is answerable to it for the way it has implemented policy and supervised the running of the party in the preceding year. Historically, the votes of the party conference have been dominated by the block votes of the trade unions, a matter that Tony Blair has actively tried to change. In 1995 Tony Blair succeeded where Hugh Gaitskell (leader 1955-1963) had failed, in getting the party conference to remove Clause IV (see below) from the statement of the Labour Party’s aims, and to substitute it with less specifically socialist objectives. In 2002 party membership stood at about 280,000.

III

History

A

Labour Party Before 1914

The Labour Party was created after the Trades Union Congress, on September 6, 1899, voted to invite “all the cooperative, socialite, trade unions, and other working organizations” to convene a conference “to devise ways and means” for securing more Labour MPs. The foundation conference of the LRC took place in London on February 27, 1900. It set up an executive committee of 12, 7 places for trade unionists, 2 each for the Independent Labour Party (ILP) founded by James Keir Hardie in 1893 and the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and 1 for the socialist Fabian Society. In the general election of October 1900 the LRC endorsed 15 candidates, with 2 being elected.

British trade union support for the LRC was boosted by the Taff Vale Judgment of July 1901, which followed a legal action brought by the Taff Vale Railway against the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants. The judgment undercut the trade unions’ immunity from legal action by employers seeking compensation for losses arising by strikes, an immunity that had generally been presumed to have been conferred by trade union legislation in 1871. In the year following the Taff Vale Judgment, the number of trade unionists affiliating to the LRC roughly doubled. By 1905 all the larger trade unions other than the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain had affiliated. The miners did so in 1909, after two ballots in 1906 and 1908.

The electoral prospects of the LRC were enhanced by an electoral pact with the Liberal Party, made in September 1903. James Ramsay MacDonald, the secretary of the LRC, and Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal Party chief whip, agreed that the LRC should have a clear run in 30 constituencies and that elsewhere the LRC should “demonstrate friendliness” to the Liberals. The making of such a pact had been encouraged by the likelihood of an early general election on the issue of tariffs or free trade, after Joseph Chamberlain had spoken out for protection, and by LRC by-election successes, most recently at Barnard Castle in July 1903. Labour’s successes in 1906 (29 elected of 50 standing candidates, 32 of whom did not face three-cornered contests) and the building on it in the general elections of January 1910 (40 elected of 78 standing, 51 of whom did not face three-cornered contests) and December 1910 (42 elected of 56 standing, 45 of whom were either not in three-cornered seats or did not face only Liberal opposition) rested on the electoral understanding with the Liberals, hence compromising on pure independent political action.

After the sensation of the arrival in 1906 of a bloc of independent Labour MPs in the House of Commons, the PLP’s successes were initially few. In 1906 Labour succeeded in reversing the Taff Vale Judgment, and went further in providing the trade union movement with a favourable legal framework in which to operate than the Liberal Cabinet wished, with the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. Labour was also successful that year in securing a Workmen’s Compensation Act and the Education (Provision of Meals) Act. After 1910, when the Liberals’ mighty majority in the House of Commons had gone and the government depended on the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Labour Party, the PLP still achieved less than its supporters hoped, gaining payment of MPs in 1911 and a remedy for the Osborne Judgment of 1909 (which had found against the railwaymen’s union for levying funds for the Labour Party) with the Trade Union Act of 1913. Moreover, it was generally felt to be overshadowed by the radicalism and charisma of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. This was one consideration in moving away from a rotating chairmanship for the parliamentary party (held 1906-1908 by Keir Hardie, 1908-1910 by Arthur Henderson, and 1910-1911 by George Barnes) to longer-term leadership, as was intended by the charismatic Ramsay MacDonald (leader 1911-1914 and 1922-1931).

B

World War I and the MacDonald Governments

World War I transformed the Labour Party from being in effect an auxiliary party to the Liberals in Parliament to being a major contender for power. Before 1914 there had been some signs of growing Labour strength: trade union membership in Britain rose from 1,908,000 in 1900 to 4,117,000 in 1914, and the ballots held to establish political funds in 1913 (under the Trade Union Act of 1913) suggested that a majority of trade unionists were moving towards the Labour Party; and in local government in some parts of the country Labour had considerable strength. However, it took the war to shatter the old political patterns. The needs of a war economy strengthened labour in general and the trade union movement in particular. Trade union membership in Britain rose to 6,461,000 in 1918 and to 8,253,000 before the end of the post-war boom. Trade union finances and trade union organization gave the Labour Party considerable advantages in the 1918 election, when it fielded 361 candidates.

While the Labour Party did divide over the issue of support for World War I, there was no schism in the labour movement of the dimensions in Germany, Russia, and other continental European countries. MacDonald resigned as chair, but his successor, Arthur Henderson, succeeded in ensuring that the breach between MacDonald and his ILP intellectual supporters was not beyond healing. Henderson entered the Cabinet in the coalition government of Herbert Henry Asquith (1915-1916), and Lloyd George’s small War Cabinet (1916-1917), with other Labour MPs taking lesser posts from 1915 to 1918. Henderson in office was in practice a troubleshooter for the government on labour matters. Henderson left office in August 1917 as a result of a quarrel with Lloyd George over Henderson’s wish to help the government of Aleksandr Kerensky in Russia by participating at an international socialist conference. The result was that while Henderson and the Labour majority remained pro-war, he was free to reconstruct the Labour Party’s organization, to supervise the Labour Party’s policies for post-war social reconstruction at home and its international policies for the 1918 peace conference, and to unite the party for a post-war general election. The Labour Party also adopted a new and socialist constitution. Its most famous part, Clause IV, provided a flexible statement of long-term aims:

Clause IV remained the party’s statement (with the words “distribution and exchange” added to “means of production” in 1929) until 1995, in spite of Hugh Gaitskell’s attempt to remove it in 1959.

With the Liberal Party divided, and with Lloyd George and his supporters in a coalition government with the Conservative Party, Labour became the obvious alternative government. After the 1918 general election Labour had 63 MPs (counting allies such as the Cooperative Party), whereas the Asquithian Liberals had only 28, but there were 133 Coalition Liberals. In 1922 Labour had 142 MPs to the combined Liberal total of 116 and, in 1923, 191 to the Liberals’ 159. Thereafter, Labour won far more seats than the Liberals, retaining 151 in the 1924 general election and securing 288, and for the first time becoming the largest party in the House of Commons, in 1929. Labour’s growth continued during the 1920s, in spite of a decline in trade union strength after 1920 and lacklustre leadership (William Adamson, leader 1917-1921, and John Clynes, leader 1921-1922) before MacDonald’s return.

After the Conservatives lost the 1923 general election on the issue of tariffs, MacDonald formed the first Labour government, which lasted from January to November 1924. It was a minority government, relying on Liberal support. It was notable for successful housing legislation by John Wheatley and foreign policy successes by MacDonald, who combined the post of foreign secretary with the premiership.

MacDonald later formed a second Labour government, which lasted from June 1929 to August 1931. It also was a minority government, depending on Liberal support or Liberal abstentions. Arthur Henderson as foreign secretary and MacDonald were deemed to be successful in dealing with issues such as naval disarmament. However, Labour’s unemployment and economic policies were inadequate to cope with the rapidly worsening world economic conditions of the Great Depression. When the Cabinet divided over proposed cuts in unemployment benefits, MacDonald resigned as Labour prime minister, but promptly formed a coalition government with the Conservatives, most Liberals, and a few Labour figures. In the ensuing election, Labour (under the leadership of Henderson from 1931 to 1932) was crushingly defeated. Its number of seats (52 including independents) was worse than its percentage of the vote (30.6 per cent), which fell back to the level of 1923 and its first government. The unification of its opponents did the damage. In the 1935 general election there was some recovery, with 154 MPs elected (and 37.9 per cent of the vote).