Labour had become a national party with influence that spread far beyond the twenty-nine constituencies which it won. John Sandars, Balfour’s secretary and confidant, wrote to the defeated Prime Minister with his own analysis of the disaster. Chief amongst the reasons for so heavy a defeat was his theory that the pendulum (a predictable feature of nineteenth-century elections) which had been arrested in 1900, had only swung back harder in 1906. The organisation of the labour and socialist vote12 had influenced the results in constituency after constituency. All over the country working men had been urged to vote anything but Conservative. The working-class vote had begun to count.
The new Labour Members, euphoric as new Members always are, anticipated the early publication of a bill designed to set the Taff Vale Judgement aside. Their optimism was not entirely justified. Asquith, a lawyer as well as the real force in Campbell-Bannerman’s Cabinet, was opposed to a return to the status quo ante Taff Vale. He wanted to restrict the law of agency, offering some protection to trade union funds without discriminating explicitly in their favour.13 The case against complete reversion was increased by the report of the Royal Commission which had been published during the general election. It proposed the statutory recognition of trade unions as legal entities, an obligation (placed on union executives) to separate benefit, strike and general funds (allowing money raised for welfare and pensions to be protected against claims for damages) and the restoration of the right of picketing. The government accepted the report as a basis for action and drew up a bill to implement its principles.
The Cabinet cannot have been surprised that what by then was called the Parliamentary Labour Party was outraged. One of its members, Walter Hudson, introduced a private member’s bill which set out the reforms that the PLP had assumed would be implemented by the government. Campbell-Bannerman was so impressed by the argument which Hudson employed that, after a meeting with Labour MPs, he accepted (without consulting his colleagues) the case for absolute exemption from actions for damages and offered to amend the government’s bill so as to meet the TUC demand. Asquith, by then Chancellor of the Exchequer, took the unusual step of making a personal statement during the consideration of the Bill in a Committee of the Whole House. He was, he said, still dubious about offering the unions complete immunity, but, since the government’s proposals benefited associations of masters as well as men, he would reluctantly accept it. The House of Lords, believed to be in a mood to frustrate the new government at every turn, let the Bill pass into law. The Tory Party was still apprehensive about losing what, for the first time, was called ‘the trade union vote’.
The task which had given life and vitality to the Labour Representation Committee had been accomplished. Why, asked the Liberals within the TUC leadership, do we still need a Labour Party? That question was given added force in 1908 when the Liberal government introduced legislation to limit the working day in the pits to eight hours. The miners, with a political perversity which has often characterised their position, thanked the Liberals – and affiliated themselves to the Labour Party. The acceptance of the Labour whip by their Members of Parliament virtually destroyed the ‘Lib-Lab’ group within the Commons. The Labour Party remained inextricably intertwined with the trade unions, but it was no longer a TUC pressure group. It was a political party with a clear philosophy and work to do.
Labour’s emergence as a political force was the work of two Scotsmen – both illegitimate, both self-educated and both by turns worshipped and vilified. Keir Hardie was ‘the most abused politician of his time. No speaker had more meetings broken up on more continents than he …’14 Ramsay MacDonald, who slightly inaccurately described Hardie as Moses, was the man who eventually led Labour into the promised land of government. But, after he formed the National Government in 1931, he became the symbol of betrayal which haunted the party he helped to found – and prejudiced the rank and file’s relations with its leaders for the next fifty years.
Keir Hardie had entered the House of Commons in 1892. By then he had already made his name with an attack on the Liberal leadership of the TUC. A year later, he played a crucial part in the foundation of the Independent Labour Party. Defeated in the 1900 election, he failed to persuade the Ayrshire Miners (for whom he had been Secretary) to attend the inaugural conference of the Labour Representation Committee. Back in the House of Commons in 1906 he became, not least on the rule of seniority so beloved by the TUC, the Leader of the Labour Party in Parliament. His contempt for economics made him a limited spokesman for a party which believed in a radical change in the pattern of ownership, and his complicated private life – occasional flirtations with spiritualism and a regular liaison with the young Sylvia Pankhurst – might easily have destroyed his reputation as an incorruptible Christian Socialist. But he felt an instinctive passion for the Labour Party’s great causes – the battle against unemployment, colonial freedom, women’s suffrage and world peace. He was in many ways the least practical of politicians. One of his policies for alleviating poverty was the creation of a ‘workers’ colony’ on Hackney Marshes – an idea which he borrowed from William Booth’s In Darkest England. But he was a great House of Commons performer and that, together with the strength of his simple convictions, made him Labour’s undisputed leader. Without him, the party might never have been established.
Because of his apostasy in 1931 Ramsay MacDonald has become the authentic villain of Labour history. But the informal partnership he set up with Liberal radicals (before he became the Member of Parliament for Leicester in 1906) was crucial in securing the Labour Party’s early aims and establishing it in the House of Commons. Without the knowledge of the party, he maintained regular contact with the Liberal whips – first when they were in opposition and then during the years of Liberal government. The result was Labour support for the Insurance Act of 1911 – even though it was financed by what amounted to a poll tax. But his most important achievement, in those early days, was to provide a theoretical basis for a party which, then as now, despised political theory. He was not much of a philosopher and nothing of an original thinker – Socialism and Society, Socialism and Government and The Socialist Movement are books which boast little intellectual distinction. They did however offer the new radical party an alternative theory to the Marxism of the SDF. The man who pioneered the ‘Progressive Alliance’ with the Liberals and insisted that ‘Socialism retains everything of value in Liberalism’15 created the intellectual foundations for the party which, because it was more interested in practice than theory, pushed the Liberal Party aside.
The alienation of organised labour from the Liberal Party can, at least in part, be attributed to myths that surrounded the behaviour of Winston Churchill, Home Secretary and the rising star of that Liberal government. The notion that Churchill was, at heart, always an enemy of the unions was encouraged by his conduct during the General Strike in 1926, when he behaved in such a bellicose fashion that Viscount Davidson, the Prime Minister’s closest confidant, warned Stanley Baldwin that ‘the Chancellor of the Exchequer thinks he is Napoleon’.16 He began (perhaps unfairly) to acquire that reputation as a result of his reaction to disturbances in Tonypandy in 1909.
The Eight Hours Act came into force during July 1909 and the miners, flushed with victory, decided to attempt a further advance into enemy territory. Their next objective was a minimum wage. At the same time as the unions were demanding an hourly increase, the mine owners were planning a reduction to compensate for the loss of working hours. The inevitable strike which followed went on for months despite government attempts at conciliation. By 1 November it had closed down all the collieries in the Rhondda Valley.
Six days later, what came to be known as ‘flying pickets’ toured all the pits owned by the Cumbrian Combine, what are always called ‘violent clashes’ occurred between police and strikers at the Llwynpia Colliery, a quarter of a mile from Tonypandy.17 The Chief Constable of Glamorgan was probably right to fear that, without assistance, his officers wo
uld be overwhelmed. The extent of the help which he requested was, however, undoubtedly excessive. Two companies of infantrymen and two hundred cavalry were a big enough contingent to put down a small revolution. The request was made directly to brigade headquarters of the local command. The Home Office, at which Churchill presided, was informed on the following day.
Churchill’s reaction was described at the time as oversympathetic to the miners. He instructed the Chief Constable to halt the cavalry’s advance at Cardiff and hold the infantry at Swindon. Officers of the Metropolitan Police, rather than soldiers, would reinforce the hard-pressed Glamorgan constables. His telegraph to the rioting miners was astonishingly emollient. It was read out to a mass meeting on 8 November. ‘Their best friends here are greatly distressed at the trouble which has broken out and will do their best to help them get fair treatment … But rioting must cease at once so that the enquiry shall not be prejudiced and to prevent the credit of the Rhondda Valley being impaired.’18
The rioting continued despite the sympathetic tone of the basically meaningless message. Indeed it spread from outside the Glamorgan Colliery to the main square of Tonypandy. A skull was fractured and the injured man died. Shops were looted. Churchill countermanded his own orders and the troops were allowed to move into the town. Next day, Lancashire Fusiliers defended the colliery at Llwynpia.
For the next sixty years Churchill was regarded in trade union folklore as ‘the man who sent troops to subdue the Tonypandy miners’. But the government in which he served, perhaps out of necessity rather than conviction, was, in essence, the trade unions’ friend. Cynics will argue that Lloyd George and Churchill worked hard to accommodate the unions purely out of self-interest. After the general election of 1910 – when 275 Liberal Members faced 273 Conservatives across the House of Commons – the government needed the 40 Labour MPs to help keep its hold on power without being totally reliant on the always demanding Irish Nationalists. And, even in the earlier years of landslide glory, the two men had been shrewd enough to know that the circumstances which brought the triumph of 1906 could never be repeated. One day the Labour Party’s support would be essential to maintain Liberal government. But they were motivated by more than self-interest.
Policies for which Churchill himself and Lloyd George were responsible – at first thought by the unions to be inimical to their interests – turned out to be immensely beneficial. The Parliamentary Committee of the TUC accepted the idea of the government’s agencies setting minimum wages only after much persuasion, and they remained reluctant to accept Lloyd George’s scheme. Their resistance was motivated by a determination to protect the boundaries of the trade union empire. Many of the trade unions provided insurance schemes for their members and they were not prepared to stand aside in favour of state benefit schemes. Lloyd George agreed to compromise – though his critics called it capitulation. The unions were afforded the status of ‘approved societies’ and invited to administer the national scheme on behalf of their members. The result, possibly foreseen, but not intended, was a giant leap in trade union membership. In 1911, unions affiliated to the TUC represented 1,661,000 men and women. By 1913 the total had risen to 2,682,000.19
The government was firmly on the trade unions’ side. The courts were not. In December 1909 another House of Lords judgement – the second in a generation – sapped the trade unions’ strength. Taff Vale had virtually destroyed their industrial power. Osborne did the same for their political influence. And once again it was the Railwaymen against whom the initial action was taken.
W. V. Osborne, a member of the Society of Railway Servants’ Walthamstow branch, was an enthusiastic Liberal. In the spring of 1908 he applied to the High Court for an injunction to prevent the union from using part of its income – and by implication a proportion of his subscription – to finance the Labour Party. Political expenditure was, he argued, ultra vires for trade unions which existed for quite different purposes. The High Court refused his application but the decision was reversed on appeal in the High Court, and the appeal was upheld by the House of Lords. Three of the Law Lords ruled that the union’s lawful operation was confined to rights and obligations laid down by the Trade Union Acts of 1871 and 1876. They were explicit in their condemnation of the trade unions’ relationship with the Labour Party. The obligation of trade union-financed MPs to obey a party whip was ‘subversive of … their freedom’. Once again the TUC demanded a change in the law. The resolution calling upon the government to legislate for ‘union freedom’ was carried by the Trades Union Congress by 1,717,000 to 13,000.20
The Liberal Party was sympathetic. The Irish, on whom the government was dependent, insisted that a Home Rule Bill was the first necessity and made clear that, without it, they would not support a National Insurance Bill or the legislation which might be necessary to reduce the powers of the House of Lords and guarantee its passage. The reversal of the Osborne Judgement had to wait. The Labour Party was offered, by way of compensation for its disappointment, a bill which authorised the payment of MPs. The House of Commons would no longer be an occupation for gentlemen.
It was not until 1913, five years after the Osborne Judgement, that Parliament legalised trade union funds being used to finance the Labour Party. Even then, the Trades Union Act did not provide the unfettered rights for which the union leaders hoped. The freedom to take part in political activities – not stipulated in earlier Acts – was recognised, but before payments could be made to a political party, a ballot of the whole membership had to approve the creation of a distinct political fund. The right to ‘contract out’ of political payments – paying a reduced subscription which did not include the political levy – was established in law.
The agreement that trade unions should take part in the democratic process became a moderating force in late Edwardian politics. The years between the reversal of the Taff Vale Judgement and the annulment of the Osborne Judgement marked a period of unusual militancy. One cause of the numerous disputes was an increase in the cost of living, which rose twice as quickly between 1909 and 1912 than it had risen between 1902 and 1908.21 The militancy was also, in part, the direct result of the unions’ inability to fight their battles through politics and Parliament. Civil liberties aside, the Osborne Judgement, which aimed to separate the unions from the Labour Party, had deeply damaging consequences for the British economy. Industrial action was, the trade unions believed, the only weapon at their disposal.
In 1908, the Engineers in the north-east refused to accept a proposed wage cut and the Durham Miners rejected three-shift ‘continuous working’. Year by year the number of days lost, often in regional and unofficial disputes, increased and 1911 was a year of widespread strikes. The Olympic, a new liner, was prevented from sailing by stevedores demanding a wage increase. There was a brief general strike in the Port of London and a nationwide railway stoppage. Largely thanks to the solidarity of other unions – which threatened action against recalcitrant companies – the Shipping Federation was forced to recognise the Sailors’ Union. The Miners’ Federation called out its members in support of their demand for a national minimum wage of five shillings an hour for men and two shillings an hour for boys. As a result, thousands of other workers lost their jobs when factories were closed down for want of coal. The London docks dispute dragged on into a second year, and Ben Tillett, the dockers’ leader, became notorious because of his prayer for the future of the Chairman of the London Port Authority. ‘Oh God, strike Lord Devonport dead!’22
The period of militancy coincided with – or perhaps was directly related to – the growth of syndicalism throughout Europe and America. In 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World was founded in Chicago and adopted the slogan ‘the working class and the employing class have nothing in common’. In England, Tom Mann, the Marxist ex-engineer who led the Dockers’ Union, returned from organising the industrial workers of Australia and, after taking advice from Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist, began to spread the gospel
in the London docks and beyond. His publication, the Industrial Syndicalist, and his organisations, the Industrial Syndicalist League and the Plebs League, made some converts.
The Committee of the South Wales Miners’ Federation published a pamphlet which called for the ‘elimination of the employer’. That aspiration was wholly consistent with the syndicalist aim. Their first objective was to make sure that the workers were thoroughly organised and therefore ready to achieve the main purpose of a union’s existence – ‘to gain control of and then administer [the mining] industry’. Although syndicalism briefly dominated the politics of the South Wales coalfield, it was not an idea to fire the imagination of the staid, and essentially constitutional, leadership of the TUC. One of Mann’s ideas did, however, commend itself to some of the unions. Amalgamations were, he said, the first step towards the goal of the ‘real democracy’ of workers’ total control. The Railwaymen liked the first step, though they had no wish to move further forward. The Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, the General Workers Union and the United Pointsmen and Signalmen’s Society joined together to become the National Union of Railwaymen.23
There was wild talk of amalgamating the Miners, the Railwaymen and the Transport Workers – a proposition which was rejected as much because of the power which some union leaders would undoubtedly lose as because of a resistance to the extreme continental ideology which motivated it. But when Robert Smillie, the President of the Miners’ Federation, proposed co-operation rather than amalgamation, the practical leaders of the other unions accepted the idea immediately. Everybody kept their existing jobs and the joint power of three mighty unions could be employed in a ‘Triple Alliance’. But nothing happened in the TUC without negotiation and negotiations moved slowly. The movement towards a common contract date – designed to enable each of the three unions to confront the employers simultaneously – was almost completed, but before the documents could be signed the world was at war.
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