The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  The inaugural conference of the Labour Representation Committee was held in the Memorial Hall in London’s Farringdon Street on 27 February 1900. It was attended by delegates who spoke on behalf of less than half the TUC’s total membership. Despite the presence of delegates from both the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation (Marxist despite its name) it was certainly not a gathering of socialists – a doctrine which many of the trade union leaders dismissed as a continental affectation. The real problem, at the turn of the century, was that some trade unionists were equally sceptical about the need for parliamentary representation. Inevitably, the running was made by the full-time politicians, not the full-time trade unionists.

  Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, acting on behalf of the Independent Labour Party, sent the Conference Standing Committee what they hoped would be the basis of the LRC’s constitution. They realised that partisan origins would prejudice some of the unions against their draft. It was, however, a practical, not an ideological, document and they assumed that general secretaries, used to the formalities of organised debate, would welcome a statement around which the discussions could be built. The ILP paper made three basic proposals.

  1. That candidates be run by Trade Unions, Socialist and other labour bodies and have no connection with either Liberal or Tory parties.

  2. That each party (to the agreement) run its own candidates and find its own money.

  3. That a joint committee of the organisations running candidates should co-ordinate the various campaigns.

  The Steering Committee proposed that the Conference consider seven separate resolutions. The ILP proposals were included among them. But the full Parliamentary Committee insisted on debating a new resolution of their own composition. The idea of nominating and supporting ‘labour’ candidates was common to all the proposals. The differences arose over how the nominees should be chosen and who should finance their campaigns. Halfway through an afternoon of discursive debate, Keir Hardie moved the amendment which changed the nature of English politics by creating a party based on the social class of its supporters. He proposed the establishment of ‘a distinct group in parliament who shall have their [sic] own whips and agree upon their policy which must embrace a readiness to co-operate with any party which, for the time being, may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interest of labour and be equally ready to associate themselves with any party in opposing measures having an opposite tendency’.5 It was carried, despite the opposition of the Lancashire miners.

  As an indication of the moderation which was to characterise British (as distinct from continental) trade unions and working-class politics, George Brown of the Engineers – a member of the ILP and once thought to be a follower of Tom Mann, a suspected syndicalist – moved a resolution which confirmed that the Representation Committee would not limit its patronage to working men. To confirm its permanence, the LRC appointed a general secretary. James Ramsay MacDonald was on his way.

  MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Lossiemouth domestic servant, had moved his way across politics from the Liberal Party, through the Scottish home rule movement and Marxist SDF, to the Independent Labour Party. His progress had been motivated more by intellectual curiosity than either ideological promiscuity or opportunism. He impressed his colleagues by both his confident manner and his imposing appearance, but his real attraction was not, as he would have wished in his early days, his philosophic originality but his natural aptitude for strategic thinking. He was a pragmatist and, perhaps because of him more than any other one individual, Labour became a pragmatic, rather than a doctrinaire, party.

  The Labour Representation Committee got off to a slow start. In 1900, the year of its foundation, it claimed the affiliation of trade unions which represented 353,070 members. The affiliation fee was ‘ten shillings per thousand members or part thereof’. In 1900, one-sixth of the total income of £180 was devoted to supporting general election candidates. The £30 did not prove a fruitful investment. Fifteen candidates were formally endorsed, eight of them after they had been nominated by the ILP. Will Thorne (the founding father of the gas workers’ which became the Municipal and General Workers’ Union) was the unsuccessful nominee in West Flam. Richard Bell of the Society of Railway Servants stood in the railway city of Derby and was elected. Keir Hardie, as was common at the time, stood in two constituencies. He lost in Preston but won in Merthyr Tydfil. They were the only two victories that the LRC could claim. Trade union candidates were never likely to prosper in a ‘khaki election’.

  There is no way of knowing if the unhappy electoral experience of 1900 world, without any other stimulus to action, have inspired the trade unions to greater political activity or driven them to the gloomy conclusion that the parliamentary route was not for them to tread. But the Taff Vale Judgement – and the menacing precedent it created – left most trade union leaders in no doubt that they must change the law through Parliament. In the two years which followed the Farringdon Street meeting, the LRC’s affiliated membership rose only to 455,450. But the lesson of Taff Vale was being gradually learned. A new wave of support for parliamentary representation, led by the United Textile Factory Workers, was sweeping through the British trade unions. By 1903 membership had risen to 860,000. Perhaps more important, at least in terms of increased confidence, the big (and previously antagonistic) unions began to join the LRC. First the Engineers. Then the Lancashire Textile Workers. In 1901 the Labour Representation Committee spoke for forty-one unions. By 1903, the total had risen to one hundred and thirty.

  Emboldened by its new strength, the Committee decided to extend its powers and clarify its constitution. In early Edwardian Britain, Members of Parliament needed a private income to survive. The LRC set up a fund, financed by a levy of one penny from every member of each affiliate, to make reality of its promise to pay its members. The figure on which the delegates eventually agreed was £200 a year. A national organisation needs a purpose as well as a bank account. The Glassworkers believed that the Committee should set out its ideological boundaries and defend them against infiltration. That union therefore proposed that ‘members should strictly abstain from identifying themselves with, or promoting the interests of, any section of the Liberal and Conservative parties’. It went on to assert, ‘Labour representatives in and out of Parliament will have to shape their own policy and act upon it, irrespective of other sections of the political world.’6 The resolution was carried by a large majority. The Labour Representation Committee had become a political party.

  Trade unions depend for their success on solidarity and trade unionists are instinctively faithful to comrades and brothers. The creation of an institution which was made up of old friends but demanded new loyalties inevitably produced friction among men who had worked together for years. Activists within the Boilermakers Society tried, without success, to remove James Cranley from the list of potential candidates on the grounds that he was a Liberal. After some argument he retained his membership of both the party and the parliamentary panel.7 And, in the summer of 1903, Ramsay MacDonald wrote to the Lancashire Miners to suggest that their nominee in Accrington stand down in favour of the Liberal nominee. The miners declined and their candidate opened his campaign with what must have been a painful justification of his conduct. He could not possibly be accused of splitting the anti-Tory vote. Most Lancashire miners always voted Conservative.8

  The Taff Vale Judgement had established the trade unions’ legal status (and in consequence their obligations and liabilities) under the law, but the public debate about their place in society continued. Clarence Darrow – the American labour lawyer who had defended Eugene Debbs, the socialist leader of the Pullman Carmen’s strike, and achieved worldwide fame by representing the Tennessee school teacher who had been prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution – wrote passionately about the need to avoid ‘incorporation’. Once unions had a legal existence, strong and ruthless employers would impose their will on their
workforce by action through the courts. The British unions, thanks to Taff Vale, were ‘incorporated’ already.

  There then emerged a theory of British industry decline which was to be repeated, irrespective of the evidence, time after time during the following hundred years. The Times published a series of articles which argued that British companies were losing business to their American and German competitors because the unions were too strong. ‘The Crisis in British Industry’ claimed that both the low quality and high prices of British exports were due to the malign influence of restrictive practices. To the alarm of the TUC, the article went on to insist that the only hope of improvement lay in creating a contradiction. The labour market should be completely unregulated, but the powers of the unions should be circumscribed by law. The leaders of the TUC chose to comfort themselves with the belief that both the prognosis and the prescription were the work of William Collison, the founder of the National Free Labour Association and a man of such extreme views that he rarely represented influential opinion. In fact, the series was written by E. A. Pratt, the paper’s regular industrial correspondent. Intellectual reinforcement for the trade unions was, however, at hand. Alfred Marshall, the great Cambridge economist, laid the blame for Britain’s economic failure on masters, not men.* Party politics were taking on a new dimension. Conflicting ideologies were taking the place of rival interests. The trade unions had become a force to be reckoned with. Capital and labour glowered at each other across the House of Commons and the two great parties – Liberal and Conservative – fought out their battles on the factory floor while a third waited, nascent, in the wings.

  The unions expected help from the Liberals but could not wait for an election. So in 1903 they decided to promote a private member’s bill in the Tory-dominated House of Commons. It aimed to legalise peaceful picketing, amend the law on conspiracy so as to absolve union officials from responsibility for the actions of their members, and protect union funds from claims for damages. The bill’s Second Reading was defeated by the surprisingly small margin of 228 votes to 258. Asquith, Lloyd George and the enthusiastic new recruit to the Liberal Party’s ranks, Winston Churchill, all voted in favour. The government responded by setting up a Royal Commission to examine Trade Disputes and Trade Combinations. Its members included Sidney Webb, already a distinguished political scientist as well as a founding member of the ILP, but there was no representative of what, in the jargon, was called ‘organised labour’. So the TUC recommended that its members refuse to co-operate with the enquiry.

  In the following year, the TUC tried again to change the law. A second bill was drafted in terms almost identical to the first. Balfour decided that it had to be taken seriously and wrote to the King with an explanation of the dilemmas which he faced. The letter began with a philosophical comment on the bill.

  It has to be observed that peaceful picketing is, or may be, a most serious form of intimidation and as such can scarcely be permitted unless surrounded by precautions which the bill does not contain. As against trade union funds, it may be perfectly right that the portion of those funds which is devoted entirely to charitable purposes (pensions and so forth) should not be liable to seizure, but it can hardly be right that funds promoting strikes should possess privileges which no other corporate funds in the United Kingdom are allowed to enjoy.9

  The merits of the bill were not, however, the Prime Minister’s only concern. The Labour Representation Committee had still to establish an effective bridgehead in Parliament. Its members were, however, beginning to make their voices heard and their votes count. Balfour confessed to the King that ‘although the bill ought not to pass … It seems impossible to defeat its second reading … Members are afraid of the trade union elements in their constituencies.’ Cynical as ever, he went on to explain that, realising that shortage of time would prevent the bill from becoming law, MPs who deeply opposed it might feel entitled to placate trade union opinion by abstaining. He therefore ‘did not propose to make the subject a government matter’, though he would certainly speak (and probably vote) against it. Balfour’s prediction proved correct. The Second Reading was carried by a majority of thirty-nine. Thirty-one Conservatives voted in favour. Like so many private member’s bills it was then buried at the Committee Stage and forgotten.

  The TUC, motivated by a combination of fear and fortitude, announced that it proposed to sponsor a third bill during the 1905 Parliament. On 11 November 1904, the Cabinet discussed ‘certain demands for legislation made by the TUC’ as if they had only just been made aware of the judgement which had concerned the nation’s unions for four years. ‘The fact is that the House of Lords, acting as Court of Appeal, has made one or two decisions which, though excellent law and excellent sense, are very distasteful to the trade unions.’10 The causes of the TUC’s concern and the remedies which they hoped to incorporate in legislation had been reported to the King in Balfour’s letter on the day before the 1904 bill received its Second Reading in the House of Commons. Despite that Balfour thought it necessary to write again, explaining the government’s objection to the TUC’s proposals. The letter was written in the language of a child’s guide to the Taff Vale Judgement. The Lords’ decision, he explained, ‘puts the Trades Unions in the same position as every other company or corporate body … and makes them subject to the ordinary law of the land. Mr Balfour has no doubt that this is substantively right and that the singular freedom of this country from unnecessary trade disputes is largely owing to it.’

  The subsequent explanation of Unionist MPs’ reluctance to vote against the bill differed from previous accounts of trade union power in one important particular. The Prime Minister admitted that he faced a personal dilemma. ‘It will no doubt put those members of the Unionist Party who have a large trades union element within their constituencies (as Mr Balfour himself does) in considerable difficulty.’ But the patriarch prevailed over the populist. ‘The Cabinet was very clearly of the opinion that, in spite of the electoral considerations, it was our duty in the interests of the country at large to resist any demands which we conceive to be contrary to the interests of justice and sound policy.’11 That pious statement of honourable intent hid the fact that the government thought it necessary to resist the bill by stealth.

  In March 1905, the Second Reading of the third trade union bill was carried on a free vote. Once again the legislation was bogged down in the morass of the Committee Stage. Then damage was added to delay by the incorporation of emasculating amendments. After three months of discussion, the bill’s sponsors decided that there was no point in wasting time on legislation which no longer met the TUC’s needs. The bill was abandoned.

  After the House of Commons rejected what the TUC called ‘elementary justice’ for the third time, the demand for the unions to be directly represented in the House of Commons was accepted by the whole trade union movement. Indeed the sudden enthusiasm for parliamentary power grew so fast that the General Federation of Trade Unions (a loose association which promised to support each other during strikes and lock-outs) announced that it would nominate parliamentary candidates without reference to the Labour Representation Committee.

  Fearful that competition would reduce the impact of its advance into parliamentary politics, the TUC called a special conference for February 1905. The agreement not to nominate rival candidates which the delegates supported took its name from the place in which the conference was held. The Caxton Hall Concordat was not as important as its grandiose title suggests. Both parties agreed to support every candidate who was nominated by either the Labour Representation Committee or the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC. But, unbeknown to the General Council, back in 1903 Ramsay MacDonald (the Secretary of the ILP) had made a compact with Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal Chief Whip. Whatever candidates were nominated by trade unions, the ILP would always support ‘Lib-Lab’ nominees.

  When the general election came in January 1906, organisations affiliated to the LRC nominated fifty candidates.
The ILP sponsored ten of them and the unions which had chosen to go it alone ten more – most of them members of one of the regional miners’ federations. Together with an assortment of independents who claimed trade union support and boasted socialist sympathies, they made up the first effective working-class assault on parliamentary power – and began a transformation of British politics for which only the visionaries among them could have hoped. Halfway through the long Edwardian afternoon, the working classes awoke.

  The Tories had resigned office in December 1905 and, as an affronted Times chose to describe the consequence, ‘Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman succeeded in forming a ministry.’ Balfour’s worst fears, described in his letter to the King, proved justified – he lost his seat in Manchester. The Irish Nationalists enjoyed a pyrrhic victory, winning seats but losing influence. Mr Asquith did not need them to sustain his judgement, so the prospects for Home Rule could not be improved by threatening to bring the government down. In 1906 it was the success of Labour candidates which showed the world had changed. The paradox that the new party provided did not become clear for another ten years. Because of its emergence – 29 Labour MPs supported by 24 ‘Lib-Labs’ – the great Liberal victory of 1906 also marked the beginning of the Liberals’ terminal decline. The Labour Representation Committee, which changed its name to the Labour Party, was to brush it aside.