The disaffiliation crisis of 1932: the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the opinion of ILP members

Abstract

The essay deals with one of the major turning points in inter-war British Labour politics, the disaffiliation of the Independent Labour Party from the Labour Party in 1932. Examining the tensions between the Labour Party and the ILP in the early inter-war years Keith Laybourn suggests that this was a product of tensions that had been building up since the beginning of the inter-war years was not simply a product of any last minute campaign by some prominent placed and leading members of the ILP driven by the concern to speed up the socialist revolution. They might have felt that a workers’ revolution was required to replace the Labour Party approach of administering capitalism and seeking its reform but this was not a view held by most in the Labour Party, or possibly the majority of ILP membership in 1932, which were ready to accept conventional and disciplined politics. In the end, however, petulance, rather than sensible decision making, drove the ILP out of the Labour Party in a brief moment when, as became obvious, a minority of disaffiliationists gained control of the ILP.