British Trade Unions and the Labour Government

Abstract

In order to understand the role played by British trade unions in the present political setup in Britain, it is necessary to go back some way into the history of the British Labour movement. Not many people in Great Britain besides specialist historians, and very few in the United States, realize that the British trade union movement of today is not the first but the second trade union movement to arise in this country. The first movement was revolutionary in the ordinarily accepted sense of the word. It was a reaction of the starving and downtrodden to the horrors of the second generation of the Industrial Revolution. Its best known names are Robert Owen the Socialist and the Chartist Feargus O'Connor; it thrived on secret ritual, torchlight processions, and mass enrollments which were political and even religious in their inspiration; and it was completely beaten by the triumphant bourgeoisie in the thirties and forties of the last century. The appeal of the Communist Manifesto, Workers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains! was in effect made to the British working class long before Marx had uttered a syllable; but those who listened to it--though their numbers ran into millions--were decisively defeated, first in 1834, when Owen's Grand National Union fell to pieces and the Tolpuddle Martyrs were sent to Botany Bay, and again in 1848, at the final Chartist fiasco on Kennington Common, only one year after Marx's manifesto had been drafted. (Author's abstract courtesy EBSCO.)