Labour and the Unions: After the Brighton Conference

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joni Lovenduski ◽  
Pippa Norris
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Communication Strategy ◽  
Candidate Selection ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Electoral Strategies ◽  
British Labour

A Discussion of Last Autumn's Debate over Candidate selection in the British Labour Party and a consideration of the party's links with the trade unions may seem inappropriately provincial in an international journal of comparative politics. However, when viewed as an example of the continued search for political relevance by socialist parties in opposition, the issues raised by Labour's struggle to modernize take on more general interest. During long periods in the wilderness parties characteristically try to revive their fortunes by reforming organizational structures, ideological platforms and electoral strategies. For Labour, this started under the leadership of Neil Kinnock and continued with John Smith. The party has moved cautiously towards the centre ground, streamlined its election machine, modernized its communication strategy, and produced a more unified and moderate image. Labour's reforms of its relationship with the union movement are clearly part of this general attempt to reverse its electoral fortunes.

At the crossroads: the Labour Party, the trade unions and the choices of direction for the democratic left

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Wrigley
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Comparative Data ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
British Labour ◽  
The Status

Wrigley provides a vital sweeping overview of the path the British Labour Party took during the war. Utilising comparative data highlighting the labour movement across Europe, Wrigley shows how the trade union movement played a key role in the growth of Labour Party in a much needed transnational context. Here we see Labour moving from the status of a client of the Liberals in the summer of 1914 to one where it could meaningfully compete to form a government of its own in under a decade.

The National Free Labour Association

1976 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Alderman
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
British Labour ◽  
The Right ◽  
Crucial Part

The origins of the British Labour Party are many and complex. They have formed the subject of innumerable works of historical scholarship and of journalism, for it is possible to tell the story equally forcefully in terms either of political theory or of personalities. But no matter how much weight may be given to the role of political ideas, and no matter how much importance one may attach to the appearance of the “right” men and women at the “rightrd; time, the crucial part played by the trade-union movement cannot be denied. It was the growing support derived from the trade unions which breathed life into the Labour Representation Committee after 1900, and this in spite of strongly-entrenched hostility from within the trade unions to socialism and all its works. The stages by which the unions became reconciled to, and then enthusiastic supporters of, the Labour Party are well known. Self-interest, not socialism, prompted the unions to support separate labour representation in Parliament. Until January 1901 only 29 per cent of those unions affiliated to the Trades Union Congress had decided to back the Labour Representation Committee. In the space of two years that proportion rose to over 56 per cent.

scholarly journals The Formation and the Evolution of the British Labour Party

2018 ◽  
pp. 50-62
Author(s):  
Olha Buturlimova
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Development ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Party System ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Labour ◽  
The Individual

The article examines the processes of organizational development of the British Labour Party in the early XXth century, the evolution of the party structure and political programme in the twentieths of the XXth century. Special attention is paid to researching the formation of the Social Democratic Federation, Fabian Society and Independent Labour Party till the time of its joining to the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and adopting the “Labour Party” name in 1906. The author’s aim was to comprehensively investigate the political manifests and activities of those organizations on the way of transformation from separate trade-unions and socialist groups to apparent union of labour, and then to the mass and wide represented parliamentary party. However, the variety of social base of those societies is distinguished, and difference of socialist views and tactics of achieving the final purpose are emphasized. Considerable attention is paid to the system of the individual membership and results thereof in the process of the evolution of the Labour Party’s organization. The reorganization of the Labour party in 1918, Representation of the People Act, 1918 and the crisis in the Liberal party were favourable for the further evolution of the Labour Party. It is summarized that the social base, the history of party’s birth, the conditions of formation and the party system had influenced the process of the evolution of the ideological and political concepts of Labourizm.

Activists against “Affluence”: Labour Party Culture during the “Golden Age,” circa 1950–1970

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
Intimate Association ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Material Interests

From its very foundation, most observers considered the ideas that motivated the British Labour Party to have been essentially empirical. As early as 1929 the German social democrat Egon Wertheimer famously remarked that, unlike his own party, Labour was “completely unencumbered by philosophy, theory and general views of life.” Over sixty years later, this opinion was endorsed by an academic survey of European social democracy that concluded that the party possessed a uniquely “practical brand of ideology.” Labour's apparent peculiarity is conventionally explained with reference to its historic role as the political arm of the British trade union movement and the privileged place held by members of the organized working class within party institutions. This intimate association supposedly gave rise to “Labourism,” characterized by many as a myopic preoccupation with the defense of male industrial workers' material interests. Labour's strong union link is also thought to have promoted a dominant “ethos” that directly reflected the proletarian experience of exploitation. Only in the 1970s, after many working-class members had left and been replaced by more bourgeois and marxist-inclined recruits, did scholars suppose that Labour became, albeit temporarily, more overtly doctrinaire.In challenging this entrenched view of Labour thought, the present article focuses on the period between 1950 and 1970, which began with the lifting of the last vestiges of wartime austerity and ended just before the onset of a world recession. These years have now assumed the glow of, as Eric Hobsbawm has put it, “a sort of Golden Age.”

The trade union contribution to the British Labour Party

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Thorpe
Keyword(s):  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Prime Ministers ◽  
British Labour ◽  
The Relationship

Andrew Thorpe examines the long-established and continuing relationship between the trade unions and the Labour Party. He argues that whilst both organisations have changed over the years, and despite the contentious nature of the alliance, the relationship has proved enduring and profitable because it has made them stronger together than apart. In particular, he examines the origins of this relationship, how it has introduced and how it has intruded into the policy, membership, party structure and parliamentary leadership of Labour Party. Only one of Labour’s six Labour prime ministers. James Callaghan, has come from a trade union background but the others, often coming from a socialist background, have had, as Callaghan did, come to an arrangements with the trade unions movement within the context of what Lewis Minkin referred to as a ‘contentious alliance’.

Labour united and divided from the 1830s to the present

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
The 19Th Century

Spanning a period which stretches from the 19th century to the present day, this book takes a novel look at the British labour movement by examining the interaction between trade unions, the Labour Party, other parties of the Left, and other groups such as the Co-op movement and the wider working class, to highlight the dialectic nature of these relationships, marked by consensus and dissention. It shows that, although perceived as a source of weakness, those inner conflicts have also been a source of creative tension, at times generating significant breakthroughs. This book seeks to renew and expand the field of British labour studies, setting out new avenues for research so as to widen the audience and academic interest in the field, in a context which makes the revisiting of past struggles and dilemmas more pressing than ever. The book together brings well-established labour historians and political scientists, thus establishing dialogue across disciplines, and younger colleagues who are contributing to the renewal of the field. It provides a range of case studies as well as more wide-ranging assessments of recent trends in labour organising, and will therefore be of interest to academics and students of history and politics, as well as to practitioners, in the British Isles and beyond.

scholarly journals The Political Activities Of A Trade Union, 1906–1914

1957 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
J. E. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Common Ownership ◽  
Union Leaders ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Liberal Trade

The British Labour Party was not explicitly socialist until 1918. In February of that year a Special Conference adopted a new constitution which stated that the ultimate aim of the party was:-“To secure for the producers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of common ownership of the means of production and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”Before this change, Ramsay MacDonald, writing in 1911, had said: “The Labour Party is not Socialist. It is a union of Socialist and trade-union bodies for immediate political work…” The new party, founded in 1900 as the Labour Representation Committee, was in many ways un manage de convenance of militant Socialists and Glad-stonian Liberal trade-union leaders. The “immediate political work” for which these groups came together was the representation of the working class in parliament. Of the need for such representation both sides were firmly convinced: the Socialists because they hoped to convert the trade unions to their own way of thinking; the trade-union leaders because they were disappointed by the failure of the official Liberal party constituency caucuses to adopt more working-class candidates.

The Knights of Labor and the British trade unions, 1880–1900

2018 ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Steven Parfitt
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Knights Of Labor ◽  
Trade Union Movement ◽  
Union Movement ◽  
British Trade ◽  
British Labour ◽  
Craft Unions ◽  
Set Up

This chapter charts the conflicts that erupted between those unions and British branches of the Knights of Labor. Between 1884 and 1894, an American working-class movement named the Knights of Labor set up more than thirty branches across Britain and Ireland. In that time the Knights organised more than ten thousand members, and contributed to epochal changes in the British trade union movement and in British labour politics. They also faced serious opposition from British unions that resented the Knights’ incursion into their trades and industries. Knights suffered first from battles with craft unions, and then, after the so-called “new unionism” brought large numbers of hitherto unorganised workers into the British union movement, from battles with many of the “new” unions. This chapter argues that the Knights lost these battles because their organisational model, and their reliance on help from an ailing movement in the United States, cut against the sweeping changes that transformed the British labour movement in the late nineteenth century – the growth of national unions and local labour federations in particular. In some cases, the Knights were undone by the very organisations that they had inspired or helped to create.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document