Henry Pelling (1920–1997)

On February 26, 1900, 129 delegates from trade unions and left-wing organizations met at the Congregational Memorial Hall in London to form the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), a group created to coordinate the election of candidates to Parliament who would represent working-class interests. Though only two of its candidates won seats in the House of Commons that year, the LRC succeeded in electing 27 more in the general election of 1906. Flush with its triumph, the enlarged body of MPs adopted the name the Labour Party, which twelve years later became the dominant center-left party in British politics.

Because of this lineage, the meeting at Congressional Memorial Hall is regarded today as the genesis of the modern-day Labour Party. Yet this gathering was itself the culmination of a number of developments going back over two decades. In this book Henry Pelling describes these events and the personalities involved in them, showing how their efforts to address the socioeconomic problems of the late Victorian world resulted in the formation of a political party that would dramatically reshape Britain and the world in the decades that followed.

Such an outcome seemed highly unlikely at the start of the 1880s. At that time the British electorate was still largely confined to male heads of household, who were still a minority of the adult male population. The passage of the Third Reform Act in 1884, however, expanded the percentage of men who could cast a ballot, giving the working class an influx of political power. For many working-class advocates, this expansion of the franchise presented an opportunity to address many of the problems they faced, which they felt the dominant Liberal and Conservative parties had neglected until then.

Not everyone viewed the existing political process as the best mechanism for bringing about change, though. For many workers, the best means of improving their lot in life was through trade unions, whose membership grew during this period. For others, socialism, with its promises of wholesale reform, proved appealing. Yet socialists experienced only limited and erratic growth during this period, and their limited strength was diminished further by factional squabbling over methods and ends. Pelling describes these fights in detail, and even if they can take on a “Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea” air at times, his patient recounting of them is important nonetheless for understanding how these organizations pursued different strategies to attain their shared goals.

By the early 1890s, the promising results of these groups’ propaganda and by-election campaigning increased their determination to elect members of the working class to Parliament. While these efforts lacked the resources of a national organization and were often exploited by Conservatives seeking to dilute the Liberal vote, they succeeded in electing three “Independent Labour” candidates to Parliament in the 1892 general election. Though the decision of two of them to caucus with the Liberals left Keir Hardie as the solitary independent representative of labor interests, the determination to build upon these results led to the creation of an “Independent Labour Party” (ILP) the following year. The number of union members among the ranks of the ILP reflected the increasing recognition of the trade unions of the value of political representation and the need to devote resources to supporting political candidates. It was their acceptance of this which paved the way for the LRC and the founding of a full-fledged national organization.

Though originally published nearly seventy years ago, Pelling’s book remains the go-to text for anyone seeking to learn about the prehistory of the Labour Party. One of the reasons for this is the author’s approach to the subject, which while dry is thorough and prioritizes factual detail over sentimentalization of a romanticized past. Its flaws are mainly ones of omission, as the “Lib-Lab” pacts of the 1860s and 1870s and the role of women not named Beatrice Webb in the socialist and labor organizations during this period both deserved greater exploration than Pelling devoted to them. Yet while there is certainly room to improve on Pelling’s book, whomever does so will have a high bar to meet in order to equal his attention to detail and his careful detailing of the mundane activities which resulted in such historic outcomes.… (mehr)