Co-operative News, 29 April 1905, 493

Abstract

[Philip Snowden (1864–1937) was born into a family of weavers in the Yorkshire Pennines, working his way out and up by means of teaching and the civil service. He joined the Independent Labour Party soon after it was founded in Bradford in 1893, though his views remained rooted in the causes and culture of liberalism, including nonconformist religious belief, temperance and free trade. [Frank Trent-mann, Free trade nation: commerce, consumption, and civil society in modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)] Snowden was elected Labour MP for Blackburn a year after he made the presidential address to the ILP conference held in Manchester, reproduced below from the co-operative press. In it, he discusses moves to create better understanding between the socialist and co-operative movements. He makes a plea for the continuing unification of “the forces of democracy” that has been successful regarding trade unionism, which has now renounced its earlier non-political stance. However, as yet the two other great working-class associations, namely the co-operative movement and the friendly societies, remain aloof, jealously guarding their independence. Snowden believes that it is vital to get them on side and convince them of the necessity of applying “the principles of co-operation through legislation”. State action for Snowden is necessarily superior to voluntary, as it represents a “wider and more useful and more effective sphere”. In a wildly optimistic flourish, he prophesises that before the next ILP conference is held in Manchester the co-operative movement and Labour will be allies. It is quite clear from Snowden’s address who he thought would be the senior partner in an alliance that failed to materialise before the First World War. Despite his filiations with liberalism, highlighted within the recent historiography, it is important to note Snowden’s belief in the superiority of statist methods of reform, a belief that sat uneasily with the majority of co-operators.]