The Foundations of the British Labour Party: Identities, Cultures and Perspectives, 1900-39. Edited by Matthew Worley.

Abstract

In 1900, the Labour Party’s presence in parliament consisted of two Welshmen: Keir Hardie, often resplendent in tweed suit and deerstalker, and the rather less exotic Richard Bell. Yet, within a quarter of a century, Labour had established itself as a serious party of government. How are we to make sense of this remarkable advance? For Matthew Worley, the answer lies in understanding the ‘multiple character of Labour’ (p. 3). While three of the twelve essays in this volume focus chiefly on the familiar subject of Labour’s relations with the trade unions, contributors also analyse the party’s relationships with women, religion, intellectualism, the co-operative movement and European socialism, as well as its responses to anti-socialist propaganda. Such a wide-ranging approach has its merits. The reader cannot fail to be struck by the rich foundations which the Labour Party grew upon. Perhaps the evangelicalism of many of the party’s early activists should come as no surprise. As Jacqueline Turner shows, divisions between the political and religious functions of the labour movement were far from clear in the late Victorian period, when the Labour Church was able to draw significant congregations across urban Britain. The varied reasons why women chose to become Labour activists are explored in a perceptive chapter by June Hannam. Fortunately, we have come a long way since the days when Robert Skidelsky could describe Margaret Bondfield, the party’s first female Cabinet minister, as ‘typical of a certain class of spinsters who thronged the world of philanthropy’ and ‘a humourless and somewhat priggish person … with a voice that emitted a harsh cascade of sound’ (Politicians and the Slump, 1967, pp. 71–2). Hannam neatly side-steps this cruel caricature of the Socialist blue-stocking to demonstrate that women’s motivations for engaging in party activism were often rooted in material concerns which reflected the everyday needs of workers. And yet this was by no means a movement that forsook the intellectual, as Chris Wrigley and David Stack make evident. Labour drew heavily on new ideas emerging with European socialism. Exiles often acted as star speakers at May Day rallies in the 1890s and the Independent Labour Party published a range of translations of works by European socialists. Intriguingly, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 appears to have hampered such intellectual exchanges. As Laura Beers demonstrates, the popular appeal of Conservative anti-socialist scaremongering meant that Labour leaders took pains to dissociate themselves from the taint of ‘foreign’ Marxism after the Great War.