Abstract
In 1899 the annual Trades Union Congress debated a resolution, proposed by the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), calling on the parliamentary committee of the TUC to organize a joint conference with socialist and co-operative bodies to discuss Labour representation. The motion was passed by the narrow margin of 546 000 votes to 434 000. The conference met in London on 27 February 1900, and agreed to establish ‘a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy’; to support it financially through affiliation fees; and to elect Ramsay MacDonald, a leading member of the Independent Labour party (ILP), as the secretary of the new organization, which was to be known as the Labour Representation Committee (LRC).1 After winning 29 seats at the 1906 general election, it was renamed the Labour party. But by 1914 its successes had not been all that striking, and it faced a somewhat uncertain future.
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Notes
Labour Party, Labour Party Foundation Conference and Annual reports, 1900–1905 (1967), pp. 18, 23, 16.
H. Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (4th edn., 1987), p. 73.
D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–1918 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 102.
D. Hamer, Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery: A Study in Leadership and Policy (Oxford, 1972), pp. 307–8.
W. Lancaster, Radicalism, Co-operation and Socialism: Leicester Working-Class Politics 1860–1906 (Leicester, 1987 ), p. 109.
A. J. Reid, ‘The Division of Labour and Politics in Britain, 1880–1920’, in W. J. Mommsen and H. G. Husung (eds.), The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880–1914 (1985), p. 150.
J. Benson, The Working Class in England, 1875–1914 (1985), p. 68.
D. Blaazer, The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals and the Quest for Unity, 1884–1939 (Cambridge, 1992 ), p. 47.
R. Price and G. S. Bain, ‘The Labour Force’, in A. H. Halsey (ed.), British Social Trends since 1900: A Guide to the Changing Social Structure of Britain (1988), p. 186.
See N. Thompson, The Market and Its Critics: Socialist Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1988), esp. pp. 281–6.
See e.g. A. J. Reid, ‘Old Unionism Reconsidered: The Radicalism of Robert Knight, 1870–1900’, in E. F. Biagini and A. J. Reid (eds.), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991 ), pp. 214–43.
H. Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party, 1880–1900 (2nd edn., Oxford, 1965 ), p. 230.
D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (1977), p. 51.
D. Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party 1888–1906 (Manchester, 1983), p. 22.
F. Bealey and H. Pelling, Labour and Politics 1900–1906: A History of the Labour Representation Committee (1958), p. 132.
See e.g. F. Williams, Fifty Years’ March: The Rise of the Labour Party (1948), pp. 148–58.
D. E. Martin, ‘Ideology and Composition’, in K. D. Brown (ed.), The First Labour Party, 1906–1914 (1985), pp. 17–37.
C. J. Wrigley, Arthur Henderson (Cardiff, 1990 ), p. 63.
J. Harris, Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy, 1886–1914 (Oxford, 1972), pp. 242–4.
J. Schneer, Ben Tillett: Portrait of a Labour Leader (1982), pp. 133–6.
R. Gregory, The Miners in British Politics, 1906–1914 (Oxford, 1968), p. 29.
R. I. McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (Oxford, 1974 ), p. 1.
M. G. Sheppard and J. L. Halstead, ‘Labour’s Municipal Election Performance in Provincial England and Wales, 1901–13’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 39 (1979), pp. 39–62.
S. Boston, Women Workers and the Trade Union Movement (1980), pp. 73–8.
See e.g. H. Mitchell, The Hard Way Up (1977);
C. Collette, For Labour and For Women: The Women’s Labour League, 1906–1918 (Manchester, 1989 );
P. Thane, ‘The Women of the British Labour Party and Feminism, 1906–1945’, in H. L. Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 1990 ), pp. 124–43.
M. Pugh, ‘Labour and Women’s Suffrage’, in K. D. Brown (ed.), The First Labour Party, 1906–1914 (1985), pp. 233–53.
R. Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism (1977), p. 121;
W. Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900–1921: The Origins of British Communism (1969), esp. pp. 28–31, 45, 63–76;
M. Crick, The History of the Social Democratic Federation (Keele, 1994), pp. 222–60.
J. White, ‘Syndicalism in a Mature Industrial Setting: The Case of Britain’, in M. van der Linden and W. Thorpe (eds.), Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot, 1990 ), pp. 101–18.
See G. D. H. Cole, The World of Labour (1913);
A. Wright, G. D. H. Cole and Socialist Democracy (Oxford, 1979).
C. Howard, ‘MacDonald, Henderson, and the Outbreak of War, 1914’, Historical Journal 20 (1977), p. 872; McKibbin, Evolution p. 76.
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© 1997 Andrew Thorpe
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Thorpe, A. (1997). Creation and Early Years, 1900–14. In: A History of the British Labour Party. British Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25305-0_2
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