Out of the bowels of the Movement: The Trade Unions and the Origins of the Labour Party 1900–18

Abstract

The brutal realism displayed by the most powerful British trade union leader of the inter-war years may have upset the sensitivities of many rank and file members of the Labour Party during the 1930s but Bevin’s words expressed a harsh and abiding truth. Without the initiative and sustained financial and political support derived from the trade unions there would have been no Labour Party at all. And yet too often in labour history the vital role played by the trade unions in the party’s formation and early development has been ignored, underplayed, derided or merely taken for granted when compared to the intellectual contributions made by the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society and even the Social Democratic Federation.2 However, as Egon Wertheimer, London correspondent of Vorwarts the German Social Democratic newspaper, explained in his 1928 classic account of the Labour Party, its ‘fluctuations in strength and organisation have always been dependent upon the fluctuations in trade union membership and to all intents and purposes on that alone’.3