Must Labour lose? Lessons from post-war history

Kevin Jefferys addresses the long-standing question of whether ‘Must Labour Lose?’ This has been an intriguing political question ever since it was first posed in 1960 by Mark Abrams and Richard Rose. Examining the post-war record of the Labour Party, alongside that of the Conservative Party, Kevin Jefferys questions the inevitability of Labour’s decline through a detailed examination of the political results since 1945. Instead of Labour’s inevitable decline he suggests that there is a pattern of the Labour Party success and defeats that are conditioned by the economic circumstances, the performance of the Conservative party, and the leadership of the Labour Party. In the end, he argues that Labour may not always lose but that, given the gap between the opinion about the leadership in the party and the electorate in the country, it may be some time before Labour regains power.

Introduction

This essay examines the life and work of Professor Chris Wrigley, a leading historian of British labour history, modern biography, and the modern industrial relations. It suggests that he has not only been a prolific researcher and writer but that he has also influenced a whole generation of historians, including all the contributors to this volume. In particular, it suggests that his work on industrial relations, trade unionism, and biography has been seminal in shaping current thinking. Chris Wrigley has widened our understanding of how British industrial relations have worked since the nineteenth century and examined the increasing democratisation of trade unionism. He has also examined British history through the prism of biography.

Voices in the wilderness? The Progressive League and the quest for sexual reform in British politics, 1932–59

The Progressive League which was first formed in 1932 by progressives, socialists and Liberals, such as Cyril Joad, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and H. G. Wells. Relatively little known, and rising to a membership of only 600 at its height, the Progressive League was primarily concerned to promote the cause of sexual revolution in Britain in the mid-twentieth century, raising issues such as birth control, eugenics, abortion reform, marriage reform, the legalisation of homosexuality and the reform of the obscenity acts. Committed to the idea that its supporters should support measures that would improve the happiness of all mankind it also advocated the individualist view that all those who supported it should also make their own judgement of what was right. Disunity was often evident in their actions but Janet Shepherd feels that they were more than simply voices in the wilderness. Indeed, she argues that they contributed significantly to the debates, particularly in the 1950s, about marriage, homosexuality, abortion and what constituted obscenity, many of which came to some type of more progressive conclusion in the 1960s. Indeed, their willingness to challenge existing sexual conventions, and willingness to act as Daniel in the Lion’s den, meant that they exerted some influence.

The trade union contribution to the British Labour Party

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’.

Transforming the unemployed: trade union benefits and the advent of state policy

The introduction of state insurance for the unemployed, under the 1911 National Insurance Act, forced the trade unions to make adjustments to their visions of how they treated the unemployed. Before the 1911 Act there was immense diversity and variation in how the trade unions supported their members and controlled the labour market through providing benefits for the unemployed. However, the 1911 Act, imposed a rigidity on unemployment, defining it by imposing a limit of benefits for 15 weeks per year, with those falling out of benefit being unfortunate rather than long-term unemployed. Since many unions ran the new state scheme it was their previous flexibility in providing benefits to a more liberally defined unemployed, and allowing local branch variation, was replaced by the state’s insistence on uniformity and centralisation.

A question of neutrality? The politics of co-operation in north-east England, 1881–1926

The Co-operative Party was formed in 1917, though its obvious links with the Labour Party were not formalised until the 1920s. Whilst this development has often been seen by historians, such as G. D. H. Cole, as an immediate to conditions in the Great War and lacking in any real sense of class consciousness, Joan Allen sees it as a much more as a long-term product of the radicalisation of a membership which was gradually unwinding its links with Liberalism much along the lines suggested by Sidney Pollard. Examining the Co-operative branches in the north east of England, she argues that whilst there might have been some disagreement about establishing a political party for the co-operative movement, and difficulties with the local constitutions of co-operatives which were not geared to providing money for political activities, it is clear that was, for a long time, the direction that co-operative societies in the north east were drifting towards in a region where working-class solidarity always counted. There was not the diffidence towards political action and class consciousness in the co-operative movement which some writers have suggested.

The appointment of Herbert Gladstone as Liberal Chief Whip in 1899

Herbert Gladstone was much denigrated by his contemporaries, such as David Lloyd George, as a lightweight figure, a dwarf in politics very much in the shadow of his famous father. However, this chapter reveals that others have recognised Gladstone’s qualities and that he was the right person to be Liberal Chief Whip in 1899 at a time when the Liberal Party was, as he was, in something of a political wilderness. Faced with a divided Liberal Party, with declining income, as well as his own family responsibilities, Gladstone emerges as the right person to revive Liberal fortunes - especially as he was one of the few prominent Liberal politicians of the 1890s to recognise the importance of independent Labour representation in Parliament. Ultimately, of course, he was an important figure in brokering a secret parliamentary pact with Ramsay MacDonald, of the Labour Representation League in 1903, which paved the way for Labour winning 29, soon to be 30, parliamentary seats and the revival of the Liberals to 400 seats in 1906. This might have led the Liberal Party to accept a cuckoo in the nest but the action seemed right at the time.

Women at work: activism, feminism and the rise of the female office worker during the First World War and its immediate aftermath

Focussing upon one group of workers, Nicole Robertson deals with the Association for Women’s Clerks and Secretaries (AWCS), which emerged in 1912 from earlier roots to become an all-female trade union representing lower middle-class female clerks. Concentrating upon the First World War and the immediate post-war years she establishes that female clerkship was already well established before the Great War, that the AWCS fought against inequalities unemployment and the inequalities of pay but gradually became much more involved in the fight for equality and justice, and was part of a feminist movement which did not, as many writers have suggested, fall away during the Great War and afterwards. Above all, Robertson’s work challenges the view that there was a lack of collective identity and action amongst the lower middle classes in early twentieth-century Britain.

Working-class culture in Britain and Germany, 1870–1914: a comparison

Dick Geary, in a wide-ranging essay, contrasts the lives of the British and German working classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He poses the notion that there were marked differences between the two lifestyles. Britain emerges as a more liberal society in which in religion, societies and leisure brought the working classes and the middle classes came close together. The standard of living of the British working class was higher than the German, their housing provision better – encouraging domesticity – and their absorption of the growing leisure industry more marked. In contrast the German state was far more interventionist and presided over the workers living in seriously overcrowded tenement in a low wage economy in which consumption taxes, in the absence of an effective income tax, which bore deeply upon them. In this climate the German Social Democratic Party throve and produced its own range of independent, rather than commercially-run, leisure activities. Although seriously challenged by the Catholic Church and employers, the SDP became much more class conscious than their class status and political concerns, as driven from a home life their aired their grievances in the pubs, which Karl Kautsky referred to as ‘the solitary bulwark of proletarian freedom’. In the end Dick Geary contrasts that he difference a class-conscious tension in Germany against the more liberal, and less class-conscious culture of Britain.

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

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.