In 1901 occurred a decisive moment in the shifting balance of political power. The Taff Vale judgment by the House of Lords, acting in its capacity as a court of appeal, held trade unions liable for the damage caused by strikes, thus putting in jeopardy their pension and benefit funds. It proved to be that act of the ruling class which convinced the English working class of the need for political representation. Until then English labour believed in fighting its battles against employers by direct action through trade unions rather than by political action through Parliament. Giving its political allegiance to the Liberals, English labour could not be drawn into support of a Socialist party and disapproved of class war. “The English working class,” said Clemenceau, “is a bourgeois class.” Continental comrades found the English Trade Union Congresses dull and uninspired because the members were not interested in debating ideas but only in immediate gains. To the French, said one visitor, such gains were the gathering of strength for the social revolution; to the British worker they were ends in themselves while “fundamental principles and eternal verities irritate him.” He was not interested in a new social system, as Morley said, “but of having a fairer treatment in this one.”
In 1892 the eternal verities found a voice in a Scottish miners’ organizer with the zeal of a prophet. Keir Hardie, then thirty-six, was a short handsome man with smoldering brown eyes and hair brushed back from a domed forehead. Born in a one-room cottage on a Lanarkshire coal field and brought up with two adults and nine children in that room, where somehow his mother taught him to read, he went to work as a baker’s errand boy at the age of seven. On one weekly payday, with his father out of work, his mother in bed with a newborn child and no food in the house, the family’s small and only breadwinner walked the two miles to his place of employment in the rain, to arrive for the second day in a row fifteen minutes late. “You are wanted upstairs by the Master,” said the girl behind the counter. Entering the room where the employer and his family sat around a mahogany breakfast table set with steaming coffee and hot rolls, he was told he was dismissed and, as a reminder against lateness, his week’s wages were forfeit. On his empty way out the maid in silent pity gave him a roll.
Hardie believed in class war to the end. Liberals to him were no different from Tories but just another face of the employing class. When he stood for the first time as an independent labour candidate from mid-Lanark in 1888, the Liberal candidate—Sir George Trevelyan—explained to him how unfortunate it was that they should fight each other to the benefit of the Tories and proposed that if Hardie withdrew, the Liberals would assure him a safe seat and election expenses at the next general election and pay him as M.P. a yearly salary of £300. Hardie, who had never earned anything approaching that sum, refused. Although he lost on this occasion, receiving only 617 votes out of a total of 7,000, four years later he was elected as an independent from South West Ham. When he took his seat in the House wearing tweeds and a cloth cap, unlike others of his class who put on respectable black broadcloth when they mixed in the world, it was as if the red flag had been raised at Westminster. He never succumbed to the capitalist embrace. During a debate on the unemployed he sat listening in growing rage while no word of sympathy for the starving was uttered and finally burst out, “You well-fed beasts!” On another occasion when a member was denouncing the unemployed as lazy vagabonds who did not want to work, Hardie suggested that an equal number of vagabonds could be seen “every day on Rotten Row in top hats and spats.” When he addressed meetings, standing like a statue in hewn granite of the emancipated worker, with head thrown back and body erect, he seemed to express the “equality, freedom and triumphant self-reliance” which he wanted to infuse in the working class. With no salary or political funds to draw on, he supported himself, his wife and three children on what he could earn from journalism, the maximum he ever made being £210 a year.
In 1889 the desperate dockers’ strike for 6d. an hour started the movement to organize the unskilled in industry-wide unions. It continued through the nineties with organizers moved by a sense of “religious necessity” and workers whom it was difficult to persuade that arbitration paid them better than “the fierce strikes in which their repressed emotions sought outlet.”
The dockers’ strike waged in the heart of London had thrust the realities of labour’s battles under the eyes of capital and swept young men like Herbert Samuel into politics. Appalled by conditions among the strikers and by the sweatshops and squalid homes he saw in Whitechapel when canvassing there for his brother’s candidacy for the LCC (London County Council), he decided “from that moment” that the House of Commons was “my objective and to take part in social legislation my aim.” The strike also brought to prominence a rampant trade unionist, John Burns of the Amalgamated Engineers, union of the locomotive drivers, who was known as the “Man with the Red Flag” from his habit of carrying that item with him whenever he addressed meetings. Although the dockers were not his union, he took over management of the strike to help its leaders, Tom Mann and Ben Tillett. He kept on excellent terms with the police, organized food lines and procured the settlement which won the “dockers’ tanner”—to the distress of Kropotkin, who thought a critical moment had been missed. “If Burns with 80,000 men behind him does not make a revolution,” he wrote, “it is because he is afraid of having his head cut off.” Burns, however, despite a period of vociferous Socialism, was too English to be revolutionary and never shared Hardie’s refusal to compromise with capitalism. He preferred to fight labour’s cause through whatever alliances suited the situation, and when elected to the LCC, collaborated with the Liberals. His hatred of Keir Hardie, according to Beatrice Webb, “reaches the dimensions of mania.”
At the Trades Union Congress of 1893 Hardie generated enough support, against the opposition of Burns, to form an Independent Labour Party of which he was named chairman. Its declared Marxian purpose was to secure public ownership of “all means of production, distribution and exchange” and, lest there be any mistake, “to take charge of the revolution to which economic conditions are leading us.” Not unnaturally financial support from the craft unions was shy. Two years later in the general election of 1895, which brought in Lord Salisbury’s Government, the ILP failed to elect a single one of its twenty-eight candidates. It was “the most costly funeral since Napoleon’s,” commented Burns, not without satisfaction in which he was joined by Mrs. Webb. For Labour to act independently and insist on three-cornered contests, she declared, was “suicide.” Yet the Conservative editor J. L. Garvin suspected that despite the fiasco the ILP might well prove to be “an increasingly powerful and disturbing factor in English politics.”
At the same time, employers’ associations—formed to resist the demands of labour—increased in number and joined in agreements to employ non-union labour. To create a “reserve” in case of strikes they organized Free Labour Registries, which were simply lists of strikebreakers under another name. In 1897 they were able to defeat the old and powerful Amalgamated Engineers in its strike for the eight-hour day which lasted thirty weeks. Taking the offensive by lockouts, they succeeded against other unions in re-establishing piecework and repudiating overtime pay. On occasion the Government lent troops in their support. Leaving nothing to chance, the associations in 1898 formed the Employers’ Parliamentary Council to smother any nascent legislation unfavorable to their interests.
In 1900, reluctantly edging toward the political arena, a number of trade unions, representing about one quarter of the total membership, joined with the ILP and Hyndman’s group to form a Labour Representation Committee for the election of political candidates. The Fabian Society lukewarmly and temporarily joined also. As Secretary, the Committee chose Ramsay MacDonald, a thirty-four-year-old Scot who emerged from obscure beginnings to be a founder of the ILP and was recognized for an astute political sense. On discovering that the intellectuals were not, after all, to control policy, Hyndman’s group pulled out and the Fabians, finding the endeav
or “not in our line,” never played a role. Coal and Cotton and the older craft unions remained hostile. Of the committee’s fourteen candidates put up for the general election of 1900, only two, Hardie and John Burns, were elected.
Then came the “staggering blow” of Taff Vale. On the strength of the decision other employers began to sue for damages, the unions lost case after case; with their funds held liable, the long-acknowledged right of strike was nullified and all the hard-won gains of collective bargaining suddenly vulnerable. Discouraged and disillusioned in the old principle of direct action, the unions faced into politics, determined to reverse Taff Vale in the only way possible: through Parliament. Union membership in the Labour Representation Committee more than doubled in two years and with union treasuries opening up, the Committee won three by-elections in 1902 and 1903, including one three-cornered contest at Durham. Will Crooks, a former cooper and borough councilman, born in a workhouse, Arthur Henderson of the Ironfounders, and David Shackleton, a weaver, took their places in the House called “the best club in London.”
Here indeed were new winds blowing through society. Yet they did not as yet seriously ruffle the class represented by the Tories. Its prevailing mood remained on the whole complacent. Tory philosophy accepted a surplus labour force as the fulcrum of the profit system, an economic law of nature not to be disturbed by legislation. Upper-class life continued so comfortable and pleasant that it was difficult to feel any urgency about reforming what The Times imperturbably called “imperfections of the Social Order.” When Keir Hardie in 1901 moved the first Socialist resolution ever presented to the House of Commons and spoke for twenty minutes on how the menace of the profit system, responsible for the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion and the London slums, could be remedied by common ownership of land and capital, “Mr. Balfour, coming back from dinner, smiled pleasantly on the Speaker, doubtless calculating that things as they were would last his time.”
By 1905 with a general election looming, concessions were necessary. Wooing the labour vote the Conservatives appointed a Royal Commission on Trades Disputes to report on the question of re-establishing the principle of non-liability. It even allowed a Trades Disputes Bill, which would have reversed Taff Vale, to go through committee and pass two readings in the House, though it did not go so far as to enact it. It faced unemployment sufficiently, if not very boldly, to enact an Unemployed Workmen’s Act which established Labour Bureaus to register the unemployed and to help them find work and to pay compensation in certain cases. The Act applied, however, only to London and its spirit was one of limited patching. The Tories had no really remedial program to offer because they did not want one.
As a minority party the Liberals needed the support of labour to win, especially to win by a large enough margin to free them of the Irish incubus. For them the appearance of independent labour candidates in the field could mean disaster. Faced with the danger of three-cornered contests which could only take away their votes, the Liberals now needed not merely support but alliance. Labour in the person of Ramsay MacDonald was ready to listen. In 1903 he and Herbert Gladstone, Chief Liberal Whip, worked out a secret pact by which the Liberals agreed not to contest thirty-five seats in return for the voting alliance of those labour M.P.’s elected. Keir Hardie, who was not consulted, would have regarded the arrangement as not only betrayal but superfluous. The Liberals would eventually discover, in his opinion, that without the working-class vote they were helpless; at that point they would either come to Labour or “go the Tory way.”
In mid-January, 1906, spread over a period of two weeks, as was then the custom, the General Election took place. Chinese slavery, Protection vs. Free Trade, the school tax, Taff Vale, all the issues aired over three years, resounded again. Chinese labour on the hills of Wales? roared Lloyd George rhetorically, “Heaven forbid!” The voice of the demagogue and the force of the irrational merely reinforced a general sense that the Tories had been in power too long and this time the demagogue and the irrational were right. People wanted a change and they got one.
The Liberals won in a gigantic landslide. They returned to Parliament with the unprecedented margin of 513–157. Not all of this was their own. Labour won a total of 53 seats, of whom 29 were elected by the Labour Representation Committee, and organized themselves in the House for the first time as a recognized party with their own Whips. The remaining 24 were trade-union representatives called Lib-Labs who accepted the Liberal Whip and did not affiliate with the Labour Party until 1909. All 53 voted with the 377 Liberals, as did 83 Irish, giving the victorious party an absolute, almost unwieldy majority of 356. Even without the Irish and Labour, their own majority of 220 made them free of ties to any group. For the first time they had what Gladstone always wanted, that “hideous abnormality,” as one Tory called it, a Liberal majority independent of the Irish vote.
The Labour accomplishment was even more startling and its implication was not missed. A friend of Sir Almeric Fitzroy who lost his seat in Lancashire attributed his defeat to the uprising of Labour and did not believe that the tariff and other issues played much part in the outcome but rather “the conviction, for the first time born in the working classes, that their social salvation is in their own hands.”
In recognition of the new arrival on the political scene, John Burns was named President of the Local Government Board, becoming the first workingman ever to hold Cabinet rank. “I congratulate you, Sir Henry,” he replied when Campbell-Bannerman, the new Prime Minister, offered him the post, “it will be the most popular appointment that you have made,” as in fact it proved. After a week’s enjoyment of the ruling-class embrace, Burns told Beatrice Webb, “I am a different man from what I was a week ago.” His enjoyment of Cabinet office was so patent that he reminded Sir Edward Grey of a sentence from the naturalist Gilbert White, “In June the tortoise grows elate and walks on the tips of his toes.”
For the Tories the result was the most overwhelming electoral defeat of a party in living memory. In the debacle even Balfour lost his seat, as did his brother Gerald, two members of his Cabinet, Alfred Lyttelton and St. John Brodrick, his cousin Lord Hugh Cecil, and, “saddest fate of all,” as Punch lamented, Henry Chaplin, Squire of England, after thirty-nine years as M.P. All subsequently found seats in by-elections but in the meantime the “new Demos” reigned in fat triumphant majority.
During the hectic days of canvassing in Manchester before the election, Balfour, with his extraordinary capacity for detachment, took time out to seek an answer to an older if less immediate question than whether or not he would return as Prime Minister. In 1903 Joseph Chamberlain had been asked by Theodor Herzl on behalf of the Zionists for support in obtaining a colonization charter for the Sinai peninsula. Unable to persuade the British authorities in Egypt, Chamberlain, who saw the Jews as enterprising agents of colonization, offered them Uganda in East Africa as a substitute for Palestine. In the time of agony of the Russian pogroms, when East European Jews were desperately seeking an escape from Europe, the Zionist Congress nevertheless refused the offer, and Balfour wanted to know why. Long concerned with the idea “that Christian religion and civilization owes to Judaism an immeasurable debt,” he held the Uganda question in the back of his mind and in the heat of the election campaign questioned his political agent, a Mr. Dreyfus, about it. Dreyfus offered to bring along a friend and ardent Zionist, born in the Russian pale, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, then a thirty-two-year-old instructor of chemistry at Victoria University in Manchester. Balfour at his election headquarters in a Manchester hotel set aside fifteen minutes for his visitor and stayed to listen for over an hour. Weizmann was nervous at the prospect of explaining to the renowned statesman in his shaky English all the history and hopes, the divisions and crosscurrents of his people in fifteen minutes. “I plunged into a long harangue on the meaning of the Zionist movement … that nothing but a deep religious conviction expressed in modern political terms could keep the movement alive and that this conviction had to be based
on Palestine and Palestine alone. Any deflection from Palestine was—well, a form of idolatry.… I was sweating blood and trying to find some less ponderous way of expressing myself.… Suddenly I said: ‘Mr. Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’
“He sat up, looked at me and answered: ‘But Dr. Weizmann, we have London.’
“ ‘That is true,’ I said, ‘But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’ He leaned back and continued to stare at me.… I did not see him again until 1914.” Of the future Declaration that was to bear his name, Balfour said at the end of his life that “on the whole [it] had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.”
On the morning after his electoral defeat, Balfour visited a friend who for the first time in his life saw him “seriously upset.” However, he went to bed with a book, came down to lunch next day “quite rested and cheerful,” played golf in the afternoon and again on the day following, appeared thoroughly to enjoy himself and showed no curiosity about the continuing election results, “not even looking at a newspaper.” He ascribed the defeat to the rise of Labour and to the public’s desire for a change. Real issues had played little part, he noticed, audiences having refused to listen to argument.
Behind his carefree golf Balfour had been thinking. “The election of 1906 inaugurates a new era,” he wrote the next day to the King’s secretary, Francis Knollys, and the sudden emergence of a Labour party was its salient fact. It was the bid for power of a new claimant. In letters to several friends on this and the following day, Balfour opened his mind: something more was going on than the “ordinary party change.… What has occurred here has nothing to do with any of the things we have been squabbling over for the last three years.” Campbell-Bannerman “is a mere cork dancing on a torrent which he cannot control” and the full significance of the drama could not be understood unless it was seen in terms “of the same movement which has produced massacres in St. Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin.” His mind traveling ahead to the implications of this new development, Balfour wrote, at that moment of swollen Liberal victory, “It will end, I think, in the break-up of the Liberal Party.” More enlivened than depressed by the new terms of battle, he assured Knollys that he had no intention of withdrawing from politics, because “I am so profoundly interested in what is now going on.”
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