I feel very honoured to write a brief biography about Staff Cottman – ILP activist, Spanish Civil War veteran, socialist, internationalist, trade unionist, personal friend of George Orwell, Labour Party activist, and a genuine, nice guy.

I first met Staff in 1993 when I interviewed him about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War at his home in Bath. He was happy to answer any questions about his time in Spain. He was very open and not on the defensive which had been my experience when interviewing several ex-International Brigaders. He invited me and my wife to stay the night and when I told him we had booked into a bed and breakfast he insisted we stay for a vegetarian meal as I mentioned my wife did not eat meat.

After this meeting I had many years of correspondence with Staff and his wife Stella until his death in 1999. He held no grudges against former political opponents and, in particular, the Communists who had vociferously called him a traitor when he returned from Spain in 1937 having fought with the ILP and POUM forces.

I got him to sign a book, Volunteers for Liberty, written by Bill Alexander, a commander of the British Battalion of the International Brigade and a Communist Party Great Britain executive member. I already had several signatures of British International Brigaders with the dates of their time in Spain. Staff happily signed with a mischievous twinkle in his eye and under his signature wrote, ‘ILP/POUM 1937’.

We corresponded regularly over the following years particularly about Spain and current British politics. I do remember in 1998 getting an unusually stern letter from Staff after I had criticised the new Labour government. He agreed with my criticism but pointed out the need for realistic expectations and what the alternative would be like. He was a lovely, warm and generous man, and someone I wish I had known for more years.

Socialist Sunday school

Staff was born on 6 March 1918 in Southampton. His father, captain of the only Russian oil tanker in England, died in a car crash leaving Staff’s mother to raise him and his two brothers alone in an artistic household with socialist views. During Staff’s childhood the family moved to London and finally Bristol. Staff left school when he was 14.

An unusual aspect of Staff’s childhood was his attendance at the Socialist Sunday school in Barking, east London. Here they were taught socialism, internationalism and the horrors of the industrial revolution. Staff’s favourite saying of the school was:

“Observe and think in order to discover the truth. Do not think that he who loves his own country must hate or despise other nations, or wish for war, which is a remnant of barbarism.”

As a teenager Staff joined both the ILP Guild of Youth and the Young Communist League, attracted by the anti-fascism of the two organisations. He became aware of the atrocities of Nazi Germany having met German refugees in 1933 and clashed with British fascists in Bristol.

His anti-fascism eventually led to him volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War. “My political concerns were more instinctive than analytical,” he said. “I felt a personal disgust that Franco should get military aid from Hitler and Mussolini, whilst Britain and France agreed on a non-intervention policy, which starved the rightful government of Spain of arms and meant Spanish workers bled to death. Surely it must be wrong to do nothing. So I volunteered to fight for the Spanish people on the side of the elected government.”

Staff saw adverts for volunteers in both the New Leader and the the Daily Worker and applied to both to go to Spain. The ILP replied first, so Staff went to its head office where they were more interested in his socialist views than his lack of military experience.

Staff commented: “They asked whether I had military experience with their tongue in their cheek, because what sort of chap would they get with military experience, because there wasn’t much military experience to be had? The only experience of guns I’d ever had was at fairgrounds where you set them up and had a shot.”

Spain

Staff was accepted for the ILP contingent and travelled to Spain in January 1937. In Barcelona Staff found a city in the throes of revolution, with the colours of the revolutionary parties displayed everywhere.

Staff particularly remembered the noise of the city:

“All the various political groups in Catalonia had large brass bands and numerous banners, which were brought to demonstrations, two or three times a week. Everybody seemed to enjoy the noise, display and fun. The bands played ‘The Marseillaise’, ‘The Internationale’ and a rousing anarchist marching song, ‘Hijos del Pueblo’, or ‘Sons of the People’. Our contingent was met at the station and marched to the Hotel Falcon, the POUM headquarters in Barcelona, amid cheers and enthusiasm, and with banners and a brass band.”

In Barcelona Staff and the other ILP volunteers received two weeks’ rudimentary military training in the Lenin Barracks, and at the front were given weapons that were old and poorly maintained.

Staff served at the front from January to April 1937, when he was sent to the Maurin Sanatorium in Barcelona to help him recover from suspected TB.

Staff remembers sleeping in caves in the mountains of Alcubierre, which were remarkably comfortable, although he dreaded waking up one day facing an enemy bayonet. He also recalled a skirmish involving four Moroccans (elite mercenaries fighting for the fascists) caught in ‘no man’s land’ where they shot one Moroccan dead. The body remained lying on the ground for several days.

On the Aragon front, Staff saw a Spanish youngster being shot and falling forward over the sandbags. Staff dropped his rifle to go to the young man’s aid and then realised he too could be shot, so he remained in cover till the first aid group arrived to carry the young man away. Staff claimed that he fired few shots in Spain because the enemy were too far away and ammunition was in short supply.

The food at the front was poor, and Staff said he left Spain hating rice, sardines and olive oil, although the sweetened coffee and bread were much better. The volunteers regularly talked about capturing Huesca and drinking a coffee there.

“It became a joke that we looked forward to the day when we would capture the town and drink coffee at our leisure,” said Staff. “This was never to be the case and in fact it took me 46 years to have the pleasure of drinking coffee in Huesca in 1983. This was thanks to the BBC and I enjoyed a coffee with Nigel Williams, writer and director of the Arena programme and an Orwell enthusiast.”

While at the front Staff received a letter from the Barking Guild of Youth, asking him if he needed anything. He replied that chocolate was in short supply and later received several tea chests of chocolate. He ate a bar with John McNair, the ILP’s representative in Barcelona, and then sent the rest to the local hospitals.

May Day 37

In May 1937, while on leave in Barcelona, Staff became involved in the ‘May Day events’, when anarchist and POUM militants tried to prevent government forces overturning the revolution. He left the Maurin Sanatorium to help his comrades and was put on guard duty on the roof of the Hotel Falcon, which McNair claimed was healthier for him. He was given a couple of hand grenades due to lack of rifles:

“Now these grenades were the dangerous Spanish phosphorous type grenade, which you lit before throwing,” he rememebred. “They were always considered as much more of a hazard to the user than the recipient.”

Staff slept on the roof of the POUM headquarters for three nights until the fighting started to die down. After the May days Staff returned to the Maurin Sanatorium and was there when a the police raided looking for POUM sympathisers. Staff and another ILP volunteer fled to avoid capture.

As members of POUM were arrested, Staff and the others visited the British consulate for help. Staff was living in the same hotel as McNair, and when the police raided McNair’s room he asked Staff to warn other foreign socialists in Barcelona who supported POUM. One of these foreigners was Willy Brandt, the future German Chancellor. Staff helped George Orwell to destroy some possible incriminating documents, and tried unsuccessfully to get another arrested ILP volunteer released from jail.

He left Spain in June 1937, along with Orwell and his wife, and McNair. During the day Staff, McNair and Orwell pretended to be British businessmen, while at night they slept rough.

The British Consulate eventually got their passports in order but the slow process meant they missed the train to the frontier. Luckily, an anarchist owner of a restaurant close to the station allowed them to sleep in his house till morning. They caught the next train and decided that everyone should read a book on the train, and pretend to be wealthy businessmen or tourists. The group’s luck held once more when police checked their papers and passports and failed to recognise that the 29th Division mentioned in Orwell’s discharge papers actually meant he was with the POUM.

World War

On his return to England he became involved in the ‘Aid Spain’ movement, attending meetings, taking part in door-to-door collections, and visiting the Basque refugees in Street, Somerset.

Staff was expelled from the YCL and his house was picketed by local Communists who accused him of being in the pay of Franco. They even questioned people who entered his house. In the 1980s his friend Don Bateman organised a meeting with Staff and some old YCL comrades who apologised for their earlier actions towards him.

At the outbreak of World War II Staff declared himself a conscientious objector because of his experiences in Spain and the appeasement policy of the British government. But the success of Hitler’s armies forced Staff to change his mind, so he joined the RAF and became a rear gunner. During his time with the RAF he met his future wife, Stella, who was also in the armed forces. He and Stella later had a daughter, Barbara.

After the war the Cottmans moved to Ruislip in Surrey where Staff worked in air traffic control at London airport. In Spain, Staff had become a friend of Orwell and remained his most loyal friend from the Spanish war, even trying to visit him days before Orwell’s death in January 1950. Staff and Stella later moved to Bath where Staff, now aged 70, almost won a safe Conservative council seat because of his local standing.

Throughout his life Staff remained a committed socialist and internationalist. In 1968 he and Stella were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring when Czech leader Dubcek attempted to liberalise the Communist state before being overthrown by Soviet tanks.

Staff returned twice to Spain after the civil war, first for a holiday in 1960, then in 1983 as a guest of the BBC while they were making an Arena documentary on Orwell. In Staff’s last years he became friendly with the film director Ken Loach and helped him research his critically acclaimed film, Land and Freedom. Many believed the film’s main character was based on Staff. By the time the film was premiered in London, Staff was too ill and frail to attend, so Loach arranged a special screening in Bath with Staff as the guest of honour.

His wife, Stella, wrote: “He watched it in silence and then said, ‘George Orwell always said the truth about what happened to the republican cause in Spain will never be told. But now it has been.’”

Stafford Cottman died on 19 September 1999.

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In Spain with Orwell: George Orwell and the ILP Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Christopher Hall, 2012, is available from Tippermuir Books for £12.50. Email: tippermuirbooks@blueyonder.co.uk

Christopher Hall’s book ‘Not just Orwell’: The Independent Labour Party Volunteers and the Spanish Civil War was published by Warren and Pell, in May 2009.

Read other ILP profiles here.

See also: Two Hundred Brigadiers Pay Homage to Orwell; and Not Just Orwell.

When Chris Hall spoke at a packed meeting of the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) in Manchester in March about the ILP volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, one member of the audience asked in amazement, “Why have we not heard about this before?”

To answer her question properly would take a book in itself. It would have to delve into how the Communist Party largely monopolised the history of the civil war for decades. It would also acknowledge that the International Brigade’s volunteers were numerically far larger than the ILP contingent. No less important, it would have to understand the bitter political differences that arose between communists on one side and anarchists and the ILP’s sister party, POUM, on the other, in particular, the open warfare that broke out between them on the streets of Barcelona in 1937.

There was always another side to the dominant story, however. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, first published in 1938, is his account of serving with the ILP/POUM. It recounts events in Barcelona and has remained in print ever since.

Sixty years later, Land and Freedom, the film directed by Ken Loach, took up the wider political issues raised in the book. As I understand it, Loach was influenced by a conversation he had the ILP’s youngest volunteer at the time, Staff Cottman. Having met Staff myself, I can understand why. He always remained loyal to Orwell.

Moving on

What is remarkable is that this year’s IBMT event took as its focus the 75th anniversary of the publication of Homage to Catalonia. It is sign of how, at long last, we are able to move on. They deserve to be congratulated.

Chris Hall’s latest book, In Spain with Orwell, provides a history of the ILP from its foundation until the 1930s, and examines how the ILP responded to the Spanish Civil War and its links with POUM.

Set against that context, Hall has done a remarkable job researching the lives of the ILP volunteers themselves, British and Irish. What, perhaps, is striking is how similar they were to those who joined the International Brigade. They all shared a fierce hostility to fascism at a time when many preferred not to know.

That is why it is important to remember all those who risked their lives fighting fascism in Spain, whether in the International Brigades or in the ILP Contingent, for which many paid the ultimate price.

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In Spain with Orwell: George Orwell and the ILP Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, by Christopher Hall, 2012, is available from Tippermuir Books for £12.50. Email: tippermuirbooks@blueyonder.co.uk

Christopher Hall’s book ‘Not just Orwell’: The Independent Labour Party Volunteers and the Spanish Civil War was published by Warren and Pell, in May 2009.

Hall’s profile of Staff Cottman will be published shortly.

Read other ILP profiles here.

See also: Two Hundred Brigadiers Pay Homage to Orwell; and Not Just Orwell.

Many people will have been shocked by Friday’s news that the Co-op Bank chief executive Barry Tootell had resigned following the downgrade of the bank’s debt, a sequel to its aborted plan to take over 632 branches from Lloyds Bank.

Ostensibly, these events have their origins in the financial downturn, problematic loans and increases in the capital required to meet new regulations in the banking sector. However, the underlying issues run much deeper than this.

The management of the Co-operative Group appear to believe that they are running a conventional business, with the aim of profit maximisation, which just happens to be owned by members rather than by investors, whereas they need to be clear that the function of all co-operatives and mutuals is to intervene within the marketplace in the best interests of their members.

The Group’s management either do not  fully understand, or choose not to adhere to, the underlying essentials of the model of enterprise required for any form of co-operative or mutual to be successful.

Chasing growth to the detriment of the real interests of the membership has proved to be the downfall of major consumer co-ops in many countries in Europe, such as Coop Dortmund-Kassel in Germany and Konsum Austria, both of which went bankrupt.

Liquidated

Founded in 1902 with 349 members, one shop and two employees, Coop Dortmund grew through mergers to become Coop Dortmund-Kassel with 500,000 members, 350 supermarkets, 16 department stores and 74 business centres, employing 15,000 staff and with a total turnover of DM 2.5 billion. In 1989 approximately DM 45 million was invested in shop modernisation, 31 new shops with a surface of 25,000 square metres, and the expansion of 12 shops. In 1998 Coop Dortmund-Kassel collapsed and was eventually liquidated.

The reasons for this failure include the management seeking to follow practices and methods more appropriate in investor-driven organisations, such as excluding members from goal-setting and policy decisions; giving full autonomy to the professional board; measuring success by growth, market share, volume of turnover, profit and shareholder value; and introducing corporate methods of fundraising to attract investor-members (promising high return on invested capital in the form of share dividends). One result of this strategy was to reduce members to passive shareholders and ordinary customers.

Similarly, Konsum Austria slipped from being the ‘Red Giant’ on the retail scene, with 25 per cent of the Austrian population as members to going bankrupt in 1995. In 1978 all Austria’s consumer co-operatives were merged into a single national society, leaving the management to run the new super co-op, which began chasing market share with little regard for its position as a member-controlled enterprise.

Executives often seek to pursue a growth strategy because it means a bigger empire, more status and higher pay for them. The correct response to expansion proposals, including merger proposals, should always be to focus upon what is best for the membership and what is most likely to achieve the purpose of the enterprise.

When co-operatives grow, in terms of the number of members and/or turnover, they are frequently beset by multiple problems. They lose sight of their original purpose, are prone to switch towards serving the interests of senior executives or cliques rather than the bulk of their members. As a consequence, they come to be regarded as irrelevant to the lives of their members and, in the worst cases, they are hijacked by self-interested groups.

If co-operatives and mutuals are to carry out their function and achieve their purpose then it is vital that all involved have a clear understanding of:

• the member-controlled enterprise model
• the organisational risks inherent within the model
• their economic basis
• the specific requirements of member-controlled enterprises (MCEs) in terms of their leadership, organisation and governance, management and accounting, financing, human relationships, and the public policy framework required.

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A 12-minute video explaining the ‘Member-controlled Enterprise model’ can be viewed here: http://s.coop/1myuo

More information is available at the Member-Controlled Enterprise website at: http://s.coop/1bcyi

Developed by Webarchitects (Webarch Co-operative Limited), the site will become a directory, networking and  news service for community co-operatives in Sheffield. It also includes a history of the co-operative movement in the city, written by Steve Thompson, and an explanation of the international co-operative movement’s values and principles.

There is also an email list for local groups to join while Webarchitects are offering to develop cheap websites for individual co-op groups using the Sheffield co-op domain.

A meeting to discuss networking between co-operatives in Sheffield, promotion of co-operatives and further development of the website will take place on Thursday 9th May at Regather, 57-59 Club Garden Road, Sheffiled S11 8BU.

The Sheffield Co-operatives website can be found here: www.sheffield.coop.

Let’s start this review of our history with some of its people. Over 12 decades since its formation in Bradford – then a leading northern, industrial city – the ILP has attracted a wide variety of people.

They came from the working and middle classes and, occasionally, even from the upper class. Some were rich, like the ILP’s first treasurer, John Lister from Halifax; some were quite comfortably off; and many more lived in poor and sometimes precarious circumstances, like Tom Maguire of Leeds, who died young.

A few, like Ramsay MacDonald, started life in poverty and graduated to an impressive abode in the leafy lanes of Hampstead.

The party also attracted people from very different generations, with varying cultural and educational backgrounds: from manual workers in the textile industry; to teachers, such as Emrys Thomas, who for many years patiently chaired NAC meetings; to writers, such as George Orwell/Eric Blair.

It included the middle class Quaker, Isabella Ford, who relentlessly worked her whole life for progressive causes, from supporting the Leeds tailoresses’ union, to votes for women, to opposing war.

Some, such as Keir Hardie, were practising Christians and tea-totallers; others, such as Robert Blatchford, were of a much more hedonistic temperament, and liked a drink or three.

Then there were many working class women, like Hannah Mitchell. She had longed to have an education but only had two weeks’ schooling. For her there was always work to do and a family to feed and raise. It was a struggle, but she still managed to be active both in the ILP and the suffrage movement. Eventually, she became an ILP councillor in Manchester, and later she wrote her autobiography, although sadly she did not live to see it published.

There was Jennie Lee, one of the ILP’s great orators. Born into an ILP family in a Scottish mining community, she was politically active from a very early age.

It began with the Socialist Sunday School. Later she succeeded in getting to university and then as an ILPer she became the youngest Member of Parliament. Decades later, during Harold Wilson’s premiership, she was the arts minister. Thanks to her steely tenacity, the Open University was formed in spite of fierce opposition from many who loathed the very idea.

In contrast, Walter and Annie Mallorie, of whom I have fond memories, lived all their lives in a rented back-to-back house in Armley in Leeds. Their short honeymoon in Scarborough in 1926 was spent selling replica miners’ lamps to support the strike. Walter had served in the First World War and, in recoiling from its horrors, became both a socialist and a pacifist.

Jennie Lee spent a night with Walter and Annie while on a speaking tour. She borrowed money from them to get home but sadly neglected to pay it back.

There were others who humbly gave a lifetime’s service to the ILP, like Bert Lea from Walthamstow. When he was a boy, Keir Hardie gave him a penny to sell the Labour Leader. Bert continued to do a regular ILP paper round for the rest of his long life – so Hardie certainly got his money’s worth!

And May Allinson who, as child was so inspired by Hardie’s last speech in 1915, that she remained politically committed for the rst of her life, living in a tiny back-to-back house in the hills outside Bradford. She was still attending the Socialist Sunday School in her late 80s.

Others were just passing through, some travelling leftwards, others losing heart. There were those who joined the ILP in an attempt to absorb it into the Communist Party, and there was also a group of Trotskyists, including the writer, CLR James, from Trinidad.

There was also Oswald Mosley, ever impatient for change. After one of his political reincarnations he re-encountered the ILP in very different circumstances, for ILPers played a leading role in halting his fascist march through London’s East End, where a sizeable Jewish community lived, including my mum.

One of those leading the resistance to Mosley’s Blackshirts was the journalist, Fenner Brockway. He’d been jailed several times during the First World War for his anti-war activities and for his refusal to enlist.

After the Second World War, he returned to the Labour Party becoming an MP – and even acquiring a peerage – but he continued to spend his life fighting for just causes, opposing racism and supporting colonial independence movements.

Nor should we forget the ILP contingent who fought in the Spanish Civil War (and its support team in Barcelona, led by John McNair). For me, the person who most stands out is Staff Cottman.

I had the privilege of hearing Staff speak at an ILP conference where he enthralled the audience. He went to Spain in his teens, and when he eventually returned to Bristol, the local Communists picketed his home, claiming he had been in receipt of ‘Franco’s gold’.

So what can be learned from all these experiences? What ideas can we draw from these diverse personal histories, which together combine to make ‘the ILP’s history’?

There were many achievements, and there were undoubtedly plenty of frustrations and failures, which can often teach us more. We might also consider the unintended consequences of past actions. In politics, as in our personal lives, it is wise to be careful what you wish for.

Lessons

When it comes to what might be learned from the ILP’s past, the questions are where to start and what to cover, and, indeed, what to leave out?

You will be relieved to know that I have chosen to be highly selective. To help, I have divided the talk into four parts.

First, I want to consider the ILP’s foundation and its development up to the First World War, looking at what was it trying to do and what obstacles it faced.

Secondly, I will look at the ILP’s brief journey from 1918 to the outbreak of the Second World War, to see what the ILP tried to achieve and what it sought to overcome.

Thirdly, I will touch lightly on some aspects of our politics since we returned to the Labour Party.

Finally, and all-too-briefly, I want to consider what might be gleaned from the ILP’s history about the relationship of parties to left groups and movements seeking radical social change today in our highly disconnected and politically disenchanted society.

When looking at any political organisation there are two elements to consider. First, there’s its internal life, and, secondly, there’s the external environment. There’s also the relationship between these two factors.

The first is something over which it has some control – the culture and organisation, the membership and their activities and, of course, its policies and practices.

But there are also a range of external factors which impact on what the party was trying to achieve. In the ILP’s case, these include its relationships with other political organisations, campaigns and movements, not only the Labour Party but Communists and others.

Other external factors include the wider political culture, the wider social structure, the people the ILP was trying to reach, plus the wars and post-wars, the economic upturns and downturns, and so on.

To help us navigate all this, I’d like to suggest a nautical metaphor.

One of my favourite ILP banners pictures the party as a plump little galleon boldly ploughing through the waves. Its large mainsail carries the party’s initials.

To study this plucky little craft, you need to know about life on board, about the captains and crews, the boat’s seaworthiness, and the nautical skills and commitment of those at the helm, and of the seafarers themselves and, not least, the relations between them, and the direction of travel.

Externally, you might need to consider the calms and the storms, the dangerous rocks to be negotiated, and the risks of being blown off course, or even of sinking.

Of course, the two aspects interact and that’s what makes politics so interesting and, at times, so perplexing.

The Early Years

Put simply, the early ILP with its strong ethical concerns wanted to ‘make socialists’. It was about creating an alternative political culture as the foundation for building a new, socially-just society. To do so it had to begin by opening up some political space in which it could operate.

British politics had been dominated for over a century by a two-party system, by the Conservatives and the Liberals. The second half of the 19th century had seen a hesitant and uneven extension of the franchise to men, and more latterly to better-paid, male industrial workers. Alongside this was an almighty struggle about votes for women, in which the ILP certainly played its part.

While in Lancashire there were a substantial number of workers who supported the Tories, elsewhere it was the Liberal Party and Liberalism which dominated the politics of the organised working classes. To shift those traditional loyalties was no pushover.

Because we are used to seeing the Labour Party as closely linked with trade unions, the tendency is often to downplay how this relationship came about. It is often seen as almost something which naturally evolved, part of what was once confidently described as the ‘forward march of labour’.

Far from it, for the early ILP faced an arduous, uphill struggle, both locally and nationally. It was a hard-won endeavour and many on the left were queasy about the project, to put it mildly, preferring instead to unite the different lefts into one socialist party.

Perhaps the difficulties confronting the ILP can best be demonstrated by the Barnsley by-election held four years after the ILP was established in 1893. The story goes that when the ILP candidate, Pete Curran, went to speak in one mining village, the miners greeted him with a hail of stones. Whatever the truth of this tale, the ILP was heavily defeated. Closely tied to the Liberal Party, the miners wanted no truck with those ILP ‘splitters’. Many other industrial workers felt the same.

As a dejected Keir Hardie recorded, “Barnsley, altogether, is the worst thing we have yet done.”

That said, it was an industrial dispute at Manningham Mills in Bradford, when wages were cut by one-third, which gave birth to the ILP locally. The experience led some of those involved to turn against the Tories and Liberals because both parties fiercely opposed the strikers. Out of that defeat was born a slogan, something like: ‘We have a party that can’t and a party that won’t, so it’s time for a party that will.’

But this was not the pattern everywhere, certainly not in the short term.

So, how was the ILP to build a socialist society if the majority of workers, particularly skilled workers, strongly backed the Liberals and saw it as a threat to that relationship? It was a major challenge.

Many of its members had earlier given valiant support to the struggles of the more radically-led, new unions – from the gas workers in Leeds to the dockers in London – but, sadly, these gains quickly proved to be short-lived.

One aspect of the ILP’s early development was the value placed on developing an ethical political culture. The members created an environment in which a new form of politics could flourish. As well as taking to the streets, they established premises where all sorts of people could meet, debate, hear leading speakers, learn and – no less importantly – have some fun. Fellowship was the foundation of this politics.

Their aim was to prefigure the society they wished to build. Of course, like all human organisations they sometimes fell short of their ideals, but that does not devalue their endeavours.

Many local ILP branches set up their own venues and developed vibrant inner lives. This was certainly what took place in Bradford and in other West Yorkshire towns. It was true also across the Pennines in Nelson, and further south in Norwich and Leicester.

South Wales came shortly afterwards following the ILP’s support for the miners’ struggles there. And by the end of the First World War the ILP’s support for rent strikes firmly established the party in Clydeside.

However, valuable as all this ethical socialism certainly was, it was never going to be enough to change the world. The early ILPers had to find ways to connect with the wider, culturally diverse society.

Following their experiences in places like Barnsley, the idea grew that the road to the new society must be built on a political alliance with the trade unions – that is, by establishing a party of labour.

It was hoped that such an alliance would provide the means to connect with wider layers of the working classes. Then, the next stage would be to transform Labour into a party for socialism and win working people to the cause.

As we now know, the ILP helped achieve the former; the latter ambition has proved to be just a little more elusive.

Through its campaigns at local and national levels, not least at the Trades Union Congress (where, if I remember correctly, the block vote was originally introduced to marginalise the ILP’s political influence), Hardie and the ILP played the key strategic role in founding the Labour Party in 1900.

The party’s original title, the Labour Representation Committee, revealed its very limited horizons. There was not a hint of any kind of radical politics in its aims. That said, over 100 trade unions attended the conference (excluding the miners who took another decade before affiliating).

Of course, external developments had encouraged trade unions to loosen and eventually break their links with the Liberals. As the economic crisis deepened, with employers cutting wages, and as laws against the unions tightened, the Liberal Party proved to be a highly unreliable ally.

To establish a party tied to the unions involved a major compromise for the ILP but, arguably, this was the best that could be done in the circumstances. The Labour Party certainly proved to be a significant organisational break with the Liberal Party, although, as ILPers were to learn, it was much less of an ideological break with liberalism.

The early years of the fledgling Labour Party proved to be a great disappointment to many. Not only was it was politically very cautious but its leaders did electoral deals with the Liberals. This upset those who wanted to see Labour take a more robust political stand, although the arrangement did deliver a batch of parliamentary seats.

Hardie himself began to question what he’d achieved, declaring, “I grow weary of apologising for the state of things for which I am not responsible and with which I have scant sympathy.”

The Great War itself showed serious divisions between the Labour Party and the ILP. Labour backed the war effort and was represented in the wartime coalition; the ILP opposed the war and many of its young men were jailed for refusing to serve in the armed forces.

These political differences were a sign of things to come.

Between the Wars

This brings us to the second part of the story: the ILP’s politics during the interwar period, which led to its disaffiliation from the Labour Party at a special conference in 1932.

In 1918 individual membership was introduced to the Labour Party’s constitution, posing a new challenge for the ILP. This undermined the ILP’s role as, in effect, the grassroots of the Party. Until then, membership of the Labour Party had been via either the trade unions or the socialist societies, of which the ILP was the largest.

Now the Labour Party could set up its own local structures, which worried the trade union leaders who feared losing political control. As compensation, the unions voting strength on Labour’s national executive was enlarged while the ILP lost its automatic place on the executive.

Thus the party which had done so much to establish the Labour Party, and had for years been its active grassroots base, now had to construct a new role for itself. How was the ILP, with its own MPs, relate to the re-formed Labour Party?

Part of its answer was to act as Labour’s radical social conscience. This was not easy in a movement which prized notions of solidarity and loyalty above all else.

Although the ILP undertook some interesting and, I’d argue, constructive policy initiatives in this period, particularly the around the call for the Living Wage, these became secondary to continuing attacks on the Labour leadership. Matters came to a head with disappointment at the two minority Labour governments of 1924 and 1929, particularly the latter, which also produced a crisis for the Labour Party when its leaders joined the national government.

The two minority Labour governments clearly faced harsh, political constraints, but the question was how best to tackle them. The ILP argued that Labour should take a radical stand and, if the Liberals rejected the measures, then take the issue back to the electorate. The right countered that Labour must prove its worthiness and reliability in office.

Hence, during the economic crisis of 1929-31, the left called for bold socialist measures, while the right argued for economic orthodoxy.

Under the leadership of the Clydeside MP, Jimmy Maxton, the ILP was set on a collision course with Labour and relations became increasingly confrontational. Instead of MacDonald and Snowden fleeing into a Tory-led coalition, allowing reconciliation between the ILP and the wider party, the reverse happened.

As the trade union boss, Ernest Bevin, declared dismissively, the ILP always “let their bleedin’ ’earts rule their bleedin’ ’eads”. It was, for him and others, high time to settle the score with this troublesome “party within a party”. ‘Toe the line or go’ was the unvarnished message, even though it was largely played out in a discussion about parliamentary standing orders.

While many in the ILP were reluctant to leave, others – like the much-loved Maxton – believed disaffiliation provided a great opportunity. Freed from its ties with a compromised and demoralised Labour Party, the ILP would quickly win mass support by making a direct socialist appeal to the people. This was a tragic mistake taken in what were difficult and turbulent times.

Was it avoidable? Could the ILP have steered a smarter course and prevented matters coming to such a head? It’s hard to say.

That said, it is interesting to note that future Labour lefts, from the Bevanites to the Bennites, faced similar challenges. How far do you take your opposition, how do you respond to disappointments with Labour governments? Did these later Labour lefts handle these matters any better than the ILP? I think not, and perhaps our awareness of such difficulties influenced our own perspectives when we returned to the Labour Party in the 1970s.

To sum up rather crudely, if the early ILP initially overestimated the potential for change within and through the Labour Party, the inter-war ILP overestimated the possibility of radical appeals without the Labour Party. I think that’s what is called a paradox.

Return to Labour

When the ILP returned to the Labour Party as Independent Labour Publications in 1975, we found an increasingly divided party, with a Labour government struggling to deal with difficult economic circumstances.

We also found ourselves at odds with the trade unions over the social contract. Instead of advocating ‘free collective bargaining’, which many saw as intrinsically radical, we called for a radical social contract in distinction to what was on the table.

Similarly, having supported the left’s initial calls for party democracy, we found ourselves at odds with them when they rejected the idea of one-member-one-vote. Increasingly, we had differences with the Bennite left over its confrontational political tactics and strategy. Many of the Labour left seemed to believe that they could wrest control of the Labour Party from the right, turn it leftwards, and the people would follow.

Our message was that we lived in a conservative (with a small ‘c’) culture and that it would not be so easily overcome. Not that the left should capitulate to those circumstances, as an excuse to avoid social change, but that the political culture required more measured challenges.

The internal conflicts within the party contributed to its electoral defeat in 1983 and to the decline of the Labour left. It also led to the birth of the SDP and, later, to the emergence of New Labour.

In a sense, during this period, the ILP became increasingly heretical. We questioned old orthodoxies and have continued to do so, not for sectarian reasons but because we believe that politics and society is changing, and that simply holding onto old verities, while comforting, is not always wise.

When the Tories returned to office in 1979, we warned that it was different from previous Tory governments. Many argued that it would not last and failed to take the threat posed by what became known as Thatcherism sufficiently seriously.

We were among the first to campaign against the poll tax but disagreed with the slogan advanced by some on the left of ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’, arguing that it narrowed rather than broadened the opposition.

While there is much more to be said about this period, I think it’s time to offer some concluding thoughts.

Movements and Parties

Later this weekend we will be looking at how Labour is seeking to overcome the legacy of New Labour and reconstruct the party. What is interesting is how some in the party are actually revaluing the ethical socialist tradition and the role of the ILP. Some in Labour recognise that traditional social democracy is in crisis; that the left has to find ways to re-engage with people in pro-active ways.

Labour has its work cut out. Never before have people been quite so disillusioned with politics at a time when only politics can resolve the serious economic problems faced by much of the western world.

We still need social democratic parties to connect with the wider society. But they face considerable restraints – politically, economically and culturally – perhaps more now than for decades.

To progress, Labour needs a far more pro-active relationship with the wider society than it has in the past, when its traditional message was ‘Vote for us and we will deliver this for you’. This perpetuated political ignorance, apathy and passivity.

But that is not going to be enough. We also need a radical presence within the party, pushing it towards more progressive goals while aware that it cannot stand too far away from its supporters.

The left should not simply be bounded by the party but needs to relate to wider progressive social and political movements which ebb and flow. While parties are in politics for the long term, movements are more volatile. But they can widen the space for radical politics. They can go where social democratic parties fear to tread, laying the ground where they can follow.

More recent movements – such as feminism and gay rights, environmentalism, Occupy, UK Uncut, and 38 Degrees – have generated creative spaces for new politics to emerge. We need to build bridges between movements and progressive parties. Neither parties nor movements are sufficient by themselves.

I want to conclude with a word from Dom from Occupy, one of the speakers at a Leeds Taking Soundings meeting some months ago. I can’t remember exactly what I said about Labour in the discussion we had, but he replied with gentle humour: “Barry, when you talk about the Labour Party my eyes glaze over.”

My response to him takes us back to my opening remarks. I said that when I talk about the Labour Party, I’m talking about the people within it. I’m talking about building links between those inside and outside the party in order to make the world a better place.

He was not convinced, perhaps too confident that Occupy had found a winning political formula. I hope he can be persuaded eventually, because his vision, energy and commitment is exactly what’s needed. For what we share is a desire to build a better social order drawing on an ethically-based critique of unbridled capitalism and our need to devise strategies to constrain and, if possible, overcome it.

Considering the ravages capitalism is continuing to wreak, today’s challenge is as big as anything the ILP has faced in its history. The question is whether the left, of which we are a tiny fragment, can make itself fit for purpose.

Can we find a language that connects with a very disconnected and politically alienated society? Can we find a politics that brings out the best in people? Can we construct dialogues to overcome difference or, at least, to allow us to learn from each other? Can we work with others to establish something of the fellowship that’s essential to sustain us in that journey? There are lots of questions.

The ILP’s history does not offer us the answers but I think it can afford us some helpful insights about the direction of travel. And perhaps that’s all we could ever expect.

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This is an edited version of a talk given to the ILP’s Weekend School in Scarborough on 6 May 2013. Read more about the weekend school here.

Click here to read more on the ILP’s history.

Click here to read our series of ILP anniversary profiles.

Buy ILP 120th anniversary calendars here.

Winter’s remarks came during the opening session of a two-day programme, called ‘Ethical Socialism, Capitalism and the State’, in which he surveyed the ILP’s 12 decades of political activity in and out of the Labour Party, asking what can be learned by a left struggling to make headway in our current disconnected and politically disenchanted society.

He began by sketching the lives of some of the remarkable people whose own personal stories make up the ILP’s history, from the well-known, such as Keir Hardie and Jennie Lee, to the less familiar though no less important, such as Walter and Annie Mallorie, Emrys Thomas and Stafford Cottman.

He considered the ILP’s beginnings and its role in founding the Labour Party, the disappointments which led to its disaffiliation in 1932, and the political perspective it brought to the left on returning to Labour in the 1970s.

“Put simply, the early ILP, with its strong ethical concerns, wanted to ‘make socialists’,” said Winter. “It was about creating an alternative political culture as the foundation for building a new, socially-just society.”

This, he pointed out, was always “an arduous, uphill struggle”, one that is no less difficult today.

“Never before have people been quite so disillusioned with politics at a time when only politics can resolve the serious economic problems faced by much of the western world,” he commented.

“Considering the ravages capitalism is continuing to wreak, today’s challenge is as big as anything the ILP has faced in its history. The question is whether the left, of which we are a tiny fragment, can make itself fit for purpose.

“The ILP’s history does not offer us the answers but I think it can afford us some helpful insights about the direction of travel. And perhaps that’s all we could ever expect.”

Co-operative rennaissance

One potential ‘direction of travel’ for the left was the focus of discussion in the following session, led by Anna Turley, a Labour prospective parliamentary candidate for Redcar and senior researcher at IPPR North.

Turley described what she called a “co-operative rennaissance” in the public sector, centred on the growth of co-operative councils and schools as alternatives to the private sector.

A former coordinator of the Co-operative Councils Network, Turley argued that Labour local authorities have been rediscovering some of the early movement’s values of self-help to resist the coalition government’s austerity-led cut-backs and privatisation agenda.

More than 100 Labour councils originally signed up to a set of principles based on co-op values, and 21 are now formally linked as part of the Network. It was established in 2011, not only as a defence against the coalition’s attempt to co-opt the language and purpose of mutuals, but also “in recognition that public services need to change”, she said.

Turley outlined examples of current co-operative council-led initiatives in areas such as housing, regeneration, education, finance, energy and youth crime. “The Network believes a co-operative approach can be applied to any area of local government,” she said. “But councils have an important role to play in shaping localities as a whole, not just as service deliverers.”

While the speech was warmly received, a number of respondents warned that implementing co-operative initiatives in a period of public sector cuts was fraught with danger, that the difficulties of maintaining co-operative alternatives in an increasingly open market should not be underestimated.

One nation?

Robust discussion continued on day two with consideration of Ed Miliband’s ‘one nation’ Labour Party and its policy review process led by MP Jon Cruddas, whose speech to the IPPR in February was shown on screen to kick off the debate.

Views of Cruddas’s talk ranged from the highly critical (it was “patronising nonsense” and “fashionable froth”, with “too much emphasis on nation and family”, according to some), to the more accepting – “humanitarian”, “sensitive”, and “a genuine attempt to think through some difficult problems”, according to others.

Some argued that ‘one nation Labour’ appeared to be no different to ‘new Labour’, that it was still undemocratic and over-centralised; while others suggested it was open to ideas which previous Labour leaderships had never considered, and that its more thoughtful and historical approach “provides an opening to talk about our politics”.

ILP chair David Connolly eventually captured the mood, emphasising the dangers of a knee-jerk hostility, which merely offers “a road to nowhere”.

“The situation we face in this country is drastic,” he said. “The last veneer of social democracy is being ripped away to reveal a very selfish society. The right-wing drift we always talked about is becoming a sprint.

“The question is, is this leadership one that can halt that? We don’t know if it is, but we have to engage with them and what they’re trying to do.”

Many agreed that engagement was key, and that the ILP has much to do itself via day schools, public meetings and more round table discussions. One hundred and twenty years on, the ethic of fellowship remains; the task still to create an alternative political culture for a new society.

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Click here to read Barry Winter’s ‘Reflections on the ILP’s History’.

Click here to read more on the ILP’s history.

Click here to read our series of ILP anniversary profiles.

Buy ILP 120th anniversary calendars here.

Click here to find out more about Anna Turley, and here to read about her work with IPPR.

Click here for more on the Co-operative Councils Network.

See also: ‘Handle with Care’ and ‘Are Co-operative Schools the Answer?’

Click here for Jon Cruddas’s speech on ‘The Condition of Britain’.

Click here for more on Labour’s policy review process and ‘one nation’ Labour.

Click here to download the ‘one nation’ Labour e-book, edited by Cruddas.

Let me start with a brief biography. James Keir Hardie was born in Lanarkshire in Scotland in August 1856. At seven he began work as a message boy and by the age of 10 he was working in a mine as a trapper, one of the boys who opened doors to let a coal cart through. At 17 he signed the temperance pledge.

Hardie first became involved in politics through trade union activities, which began at the age of 22 and saw him become secretary of the newly created Ayrshire Miners’ Union in 1886. He was at this time a self-professed Liberal supporter and sought nomination to stand as a Liberal candidate in 1888. When he was rejected, he stood as an independent labour candidate, which also proved unsuccessful.

He helped form the Scottish Labour Party in 1888 and was elected to Parliament as MP for South West Ham in 1892, a year before the Independent Labour Party was founded in Bradford on 13th January 1893. He lost the next parliamentary election in 1895 but was retuned for Merthyr in 1900, remaining in that seat until his death in 1915.

Hardie’s first encounter with socialism was in 1887 when he went to London intending to join the Social Democratic Federation. He decided against it, and in 1900 the ILP joined with other parties to form the Labour Representation Committee which later became the Labour Party.

Hardie opposed the British military campaigns against the Boers and from 1903 onwards worked with the Women’s Social and Political Union in campaigning for female suffrage. In 1907 he embarked on a ‘world tour’, visiting North America, India and Australia.

From 1912 Hardie agitated unsuccessfully for a general strike in Britain and Europe in the event of war. He died in September 1915 with the world war still raging.

Feminism and women’s equality

Hardie dedicated much of his political life to issues surrounding the status of women in British society. His questions and speeches in the House of Commons, his journalism and his political writings all provide ample evidence of his genuine interest in women’s equality.

It is a striking characteristic of Hardie’s politics that he often viewed events with a ‘feminist slant’. For example, he attacked the institution of the monarchy by complaining that Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebrations made no mention of the fact that she was a woman, and he jeopardised his standing in the Labour Party by championing votes for women.

The main focus of Hardie’s efforts was his support for the extension of voting rights to women. Hardie wrote that he wanted to confine himself to this “one question of … political enfranchisement”, arguing that “the woman question as a whole” was “beyond the scope” of his ability. Whether this was because, as a man, he believed he had no right to suggest a definitive solution, or whether he felt it was beyond his intellectual capacity, it is difficult to know. It is tempting to lean towards the former notion, as it is apparent that he saw voting rights as essential precisely because they would enable women to shape their own destiny.

In an article entitled ‘The Citizenship of Women: A Plea for Woman’s Suffrage’ he argued that issues such as marriage laws and economic inequality could only be dealt with satisfactorily once women had the vote and were in a position to “influence equally with men the creation of opinion”.

Secondly, by focusing on the issue, Hardie revealed a level of political pragmatism. He described female enfranchisement as an issue “ripe for settlement by legislation” and demonstrated a complete willingness (at least until 1906) to work with the Liberal Party.

It could also be argued that Hardie made a deliberate effort to win over the Tories. For instance, he cited a speech by Benjamin Disraeli in which the former Conservative prime minister outlined the reasoning behind his support for the enfranchisement of women. And he reassured conservatively minded people that “in those countries where rights of citizenship have been conferred on women, there has been no great and sweeping change either in policy or legislation”.

What’s more, by supporting a limited franchise (that is to say the enfranchisement of women on the same terms as men), not universal adult suffrage, Hardie demonstrated hat he could be pragmatic and principled.

On the one hand, he judged that supporting a limited franchise had more chance of success than pushing for universal adult suffrage, which became the SDF’s position in 1907. On the other hand, it was a principled challenge to elements of the Labour movement who feared such a move would strengthen the middle class vote, and preferred to seek the franchise for all adult males.

Radical tactics

While Hardie may not have been particularly radical in backing a limited franchise, he was extremely radical in his support for the tactics adopted by the suffragettes. We should acknowledge just how militant and almost anarchistic these tactics were. Sylvia Pankhurst described them graphically in The suffrage movement: an intimate account of persons and ideals:

“Street lamps were broken, keyholes were stopped up with lead pellets … golf greens all over the country [were] scraped and burnt with acid… Old ladies applied for gun licences to terrify the authorities. Telegraph and telephone wires were severed with long-handled clippers; fuse boxes were blown up… There was a window-smashing raid in the West End, the Carlton, the Reform Club, and others were attacked.”

Hardie categorically defended these actions, proclaiming, “What else is left to them but militant tactics?” He even went on to claim that “the only fault to be found with the tactics is that they are not big enough, that they are too petty”.

Hardie by no means saw the acquisition of the vote as the end of women’s liberation. In From Serfdom to Socialism he expressed doubts about the extent to which women would fulfil their aspirations once the vote was won. The only way “the position of women would be revolutionised”, he said, was through socialism. His ultimate ambition was the creation of a society whereby women “in choosing a mate … will no longer be driven by hard economic necessity to accept the most accessible from a world point of view but be guided exclusively by an all-compelling love”.

But in other respects Hardie’s views were conservative. For instance, he saw motherhood as “the most sacred of all duties”, and he held a “deep conviction” that enfranchisement would render women “better mothers”.

He also held the conventional model of a married, monogamous family unit in high regard. For example, he was scathing in his criticism of Emily Lancaster and her partner for opting to live in a ‘free love union’ rather than marry, despite the couple explicitly arguing that marriage “destroyed women’s independence”. And when his ILP colleague Tom Mann attended meetings with a woman who was not his wife, Hardie forced him to resign as secretary of the ILP, although later he was involved in an extra-marital relationship himself with Sylvia Pankhurst.

Indeed, Hardie was criticised by Christine Collette (in History Workshop in 1987) who claimed that his paper, Labour Leader, offered “no protracted discussion of sexual politics”. She also accused the ILP of being indifferent to the issue of women’s participation in the Labour movement. Even Carolyn Stevens, who calls Hardie a feminist (in her 1987 PhD thesis A Suffragette and a Man: Sylvia Pankhurst’s personal and political relationship with Keir Hardie, 1892-1915), concedes that he occasionally adopted a “patronising tone” in his articles.

Nevertheless, Hardie agreed with John Stuart Mill’s conviction that “the principles which regulate the existing social relations between the two sexes – the complete legal subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself, and now is one of the chief hindrances to human improvement”.

There were personal factors which shaped Hardie’s commitment to the cause of women’s liberation, namely his association with the Pankhurst family and close relationship with Sylvia Pankhurst, yet undoubtedly there was an ideological basis for his views too, and these existed before his involvement with the WSPU. Stevens even argues that it was Hardie’s column in the Labour Leader which influenced the Pankhurst sisters “to take up the cause of women’s rights themselves”.

Personal and class dimensions

However, Stevens also suggests that the absence of Hardie’s biological father played a considerable role in shaping his attitude to equality of the sexes. Hardie’s father was a middle-class doctor from Glasgow who had refused to marry his mother, causing her to “suffer greatly … in her reputation”.

Stevens claims Hardie’s pseudonymous ‘Lilly Bell’ column in the Labour Leader was a “barely disguised … lament of a loyal son for his mother’s honour … decrying the advantage that his biological father … had taken of his mother years before”. Although the exact details of his father’s background are disputed, for Stevens, the fact that Hardie was ‘illegitimate’ introduced a deeply personal aspect to his feminism.

This emerges, she says, through Hardie’s challenge to Victorian sexual repression and doublestandards, his claim that “there is too much prudery”. “To what depths of degradation has our humanity fallen, when the very means by which this humanity is perpetrated is regarded as unclean, and almost as if it were ‘of the devil’ instead ‘of God’,” he wrote.

There was also a class dimension to his feminism. He wrote about the need to “empower large masses of women” and emphasised the condition of “ordinary women” and “the plight of the poor”, while he also defended working class women involved in prostitution against discrimination by the state. He highlighted the fact that Lady Sybil Smith had been released after serving four days of a 14 day sentence, asking for such clemency to be extended to all suffragettes, not just those of high social status. And he argued for the minimum wage on the basis that it would offer support “especially to young working girls”.

He did hold some unconventional views, too, however. For instance, he argued that equality would steer Britain away from what he termed “race suicide”. “Were women freed from their … bondage, they would have a freer choice … in the selection of a father for their children and the tendency would then be for the less fit to get left, and the more fit taken,” he said.

He also indulged in occasional nostalgic romanticism about the role of women. “The old-fashioned type of woman is becoming scarce,” he wrote, the type who “never fussed, patching, darning, knitting or sewing, keeping the cradle gently rocking with a light touch as she crooned some old ballad… She ruled her little kingdom in love and gentle firmness.”

On the other hand, he argued that women “should and could do men’s work in most instances”, and in this respect he was ahead of his time. In fact, such was Hardie’s commitment to feminism that in 1907 he was prepared to quit the ILP and the fledgling Labour Party if they did not agree to support the campaign for limited female suffrage.

For Hardie, socialism and feminism were inseparable. The Labour movement, he said, had “to recognise the perfect right of every human to equal treatment because they are human beings”. Women could not be truly emancipated without the success of the Labour movement, but the Labour movement could not be credible unless it took up the cause of women’s emancipation.

Common ownership

There’s no doubt Hardie saw himself as a socialist. After all, he proclaimed when he first entered Parliament in 1893, “I am a socialist.” In 1901, he moved a motion in the House of Commons calling for a Socialist Commonwealth “founded upon the common ownership of land and capital, production for use not for profit, and equality of opportunity for every citizen”.

In From Serfdom to Socialism Hardie goes into some theoretical detail about the nature of his political philosophy. He was familiar with the work of Karl Marx, describing the Communist Manifesto as “the most fateful document in the history of the working class movement”. He also described the ILP as “an integral part of the movement … acting as the advanced guard, careful at all times … not to be out of touch with the main body of the army” because “that was what Marx intended the socialist section of the working class movement to be”.

Yet, Hardie did deviate from some aspects of orthodox Marxism believing “the transference of industries from private hands to the state” would be “a gradual and peaceful process”. And he challenged the notion that armed revolution was necessary, saying “with the enfranchisement of the masses, it is recognised that the ballot is much more effective than the barricade”.

Christianity also had a direct influence on Hardie’s political ideas. Indeed, he claimed that “the impetus which drove me first into the Labour movement, and the inspiration which has carried me on in it, has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than from all other sources combined”.

When Hardie argued for a Socialist Commonwealth he said:

“We are called upon … to answer the question propounded in the Sermon on the Mount as to whether or not we will worship God or Mammon.”

However, he viewed the Christian movement in the context of the class struggle. For him, ‘Jesus the communist’ is part of a social history that includes the Peasants’ Revolt, the communist sect during the English civil war, Robert Owen and William Morris. He explicitly talks of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ and ‘Jesus the communist’, rather than ‘Jesus Christ’.

It was not the divinity, but the politics of Jesus that mattered. For him, it was socialism, not Christianity, which offered “the one chance left of saving civilisation”. Hardie told a Methodist congregation that socialism was “a new religion much superior to Methodism or any other form of Christianity”.

He also held secularist convictions, writing:

“As religious belief is a personal concern, I am opposed to its enforcement or endowment by the state either in church or in school.”

However, he rejected some forms of radicalism and those aspects of the socialist movement which espoused what he saw as “dreamy utopianism”. Instead, he believed himself to be part of the “modern socialist movement”, whose “birth certificate was written in the form of the Communist Manifesto”.

He engaged with the discourse of his time, and grappled with concepts such as historical materialism, economic determinism, class war, the role of the working class party, and the ideological conflicts between utopian and scientific socialism. But he adopted a deliberate style, using simple language in order to express his ideas in a way that was “easily understandable by plain folk”. For Hardie, it was to the working class, or “the plain folk”, that the movement must look if it was to have any hope of bringing about socialism.

Ethical socialism

Many scholars have used the term ‘ethical socialism’ to define Hardie’s politics, although Hardie himself did not use the term. He did talk of himself as a ‘communist’, although the meaning of that term later altered significantly after the Russian revolution of 1917. Any broad term runs the risk of ignoring the complexities, distinct traits and contradictions in Hardie’s political perspective.

Ramsay MacDonald claimed that Robert Burns’ ‘The Twa Dogs’ and ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ were more important political texts for Hardie than Das Kapital. Yet Hardie was not politically unsophisticated. He clearly engaged with theoretical questions of Marxism and utopian socialism, read John Stuart Mill, Tom Paine and Thomas Carlyle, and was acquainted with Darwinism.

He did not just dream of an egalitarian future but was quite specific in how equality would be achieved, namely by the working class gaining control of the state. His feminist ideas displayed a depth which went beyond the acquisition of voting rights. And his internationalism operated on numerous levels – he sought not only co-operation between states, and self-determination for India and Ireland, but also unity across the working class. He was perceptive enough to realise that, despite his hopes that organised labour in Britain and Germany would oppose the war, “those who have motives in keeping up the agitation … (could) force one upon the two countries”.

Finally, despite championing causes such as anti-imperialism and republicanism, he was pragmatic enough to appreciate that electoral success would depend at least in part on gaining support from middle class electors and he urged the Labour movement to make “special efforts to reach them”.

At his death, however, it was as labour’s champion that Hardie was remembered, not least by the Irish republican and socialist leader, James Connolly, who wrote:

“By the death of James Keir Hardie, labour has lost one of its most fearless and incorruptible champions, and the world one of its highest minded and purest souls…

“He was a living proof of the truth of the idea that labour could furnish in its own ranks all that was needed to achieve its own emancipation, the proof that labour needed no heaven-sent saviour from the ranks of other classes. He had been denied the ordinary chances of education, he was sent to earn his living at the age of seven, he had to educate himself in the few hours he could snatch from work and sleep, he was blacklisted by the employers as soon as he gave vent to the voice of labour in his district, he had to face unemployment and starvation in his early manhood, and when he began to champion politically the rights of his class he found every journalist in these islands throwing mud at his character, and defaming his associates.

“Yet he rose through it all, and above it all, never faltered in the fight, never failed to stand up for truth and justice as he saw it, and as the world will yet see it.”

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This is an edited version of a talk given as part of Durham Branch WEA Study Group’s series ‘Politicians, Thinkers and Activists’ at the People’s Bookshop in Durham on Sunday 10 March 2013.

Paul Simpson has an MA in Modern History from Durham University. He was nominated for the 2009 History of Parliament Prize for his undergraduate dissertation at Queen’s University Belfast on ‘The Politics of James Keir Hardie’.

More ILP anniversary profiles can be found here.

More on the ILP’s history is here.

Buy ILP 120th anniversary calendars here.

Turley will speak on emerging co-operative alternatives to public sector privatisation as part of a two-day programme of political discussions entitled ‘Ethical Socialism, Capitalism and the State’.

Turley (left), the PPC for Redcar, is a co-ordinator of the Co-operative Councils Network, a group of Labour councils implementing co-operative policies and means of providing services as an alternative to relying on private sector companies.

She will talk about the prospects for co-operative councils and what they have achieved so far, as well as other areas where co-operative alternatives to privatisation are growing, such as co-operative academy schools and trusts.

The round table discussions will begin on Saturday afternoon with a reflection on the ILP’s 120th anniversary led by Barry Winter, author of the ILP’s history pamphlet, The ILP: Past and Present, currently being re-written for publication later this year. Barry will look at the lessons that can be learned from the ILP’s long history for those seeking progressive change in today’s world.

Sunday will be devoted to consideration of Ed Miliband’s ‘one nation’ Labour Party centred around recent speeches and articles by Labour MP Jon Cruddas, co-ordinator of Labour’s policy review process.

Here is the full weekend programme:

Saturday 4 May

2.00pm: Chair’s welcome and introduction, followed by
‘Reflections on the ILP’s 120th Anniversary’ – Barry Winter

3.15pm: Refreshments

3.30pm: ‘Emerging Co-operative Alternatives to the Privatised State’ – Anna Turley

Sunday 5 May

10.00am: ‘One Nation Labour: Radical or Conservative?’

11.30am: Refreshments

11.45am: ‘One Nation Labour: Radical or Conservative?’

12.45pm: Close

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Click here for The ILP: Past and Present.

Click here for more on the Co-operative Councils Network.

See also: ‘Handle with Care’ and ‘Are Co-operative Schools the Answer?’

Click here for Jon Cruddas’s speech on ‘The Condition of Britain’.

Click here for more on Labour’s policy review process and ‘one nation’ Labour.

Click here to download the ‘one nation’ Labour e-book, edited by Cruddas.

Rathfelder and Val Graham, from 38 Degrees’ campaign Save our NHS Chesterfield and North Derbyshire, will be speaking at the afternoon meeting in the North East Derbyshire Council chamber on Monday 6 May.

As Aneurin Bevan said when founding the NHS: “It will survive as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it.”

More details and articles on the NHS from the Dronfield Blather website.

Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s I remember Jennie Lee as a small, grey-haired woman, a fiery speaker and chair of Labour Party conference. And as one of the first phase of Open University graduates in 1978 I was aware of her role in establishing the OU. The 120th anniversary of the ILP, and the Durham branch WEA study group, have given me with the opportunity to discover the roots of her politics and look at her interesting political life in more detail.

Like so many politicians she had a long and very full career. I have chosen to split discussion of her life into two parts, looking here at the roots of her politics in her ILP childhood and her time as an ILP MP.

Jennie Lee was born in 1904 into a strong ILP family in Cowdenbeath, Fife. Her grandfather and father were both Lochgelly miners and played  an important part in local ILP politics.

Her grandfather Michael Lee, born in 1850 to Irish Catholic parents, and a friend of Keir Hardie, had founded the Fifeshire ILP federation, while her father, James, chaired the West Fife branch. Michael was an important figure in local and union politics – he had been elected disputes secretary for the Miners’ Union but also fought and won a Lochgelly town council seat for the ILP, unseating his Tory landlord who promptly evicted the Lee family.

Between the ages of three and eight, she lived with her family in the Arcade Hotel in Cowdenbeath, run by her mother, Euphemia Greig, and grandmother. It was a fairly modest affair, providing lodgings and simple meals for travellers and local miners, as well as touring theatre companies and concert parties who performed at the Arcade Theatre. She had a happy childhood, free to make friends with the Arcade shopkeepers and entertainers such as Harry Lauder and Florrie Ford, although she was especially fond of Tommy Torrance who walked on to the stage pulling a dog singing, “I’m happy for life, I’ve lost ma wife and found a rare wee dug”.

Growing tired of not having a proper family home, her father returned to the pits and the family moved into a rented four-roomed house in Cowdenbeath. Money was not as tight as in some other miners’ homes for Jennie had only one sibling, and her father was in steady work as a deputy and did not drink. She was an avid reader, and each Saturday spent her pocket money on penny fairy tales and comic cuts for her brother. The cold, grey winter days were spent near the fireside surrounded by books, looked after by her doting mother.

It was a busy ILP household. Both parents were non religious but were evangelical in their socialism, certain in their belief that it would deliver a better, fairer society. Each Saturday they welcomed visiting ILP speakers, Jennie’s job to collect them from the station while Ma fed and cared for them.

After their meetings Jennie delighted in listening to the stories and political discussions while sitting on the fender seat next to the fire. These speakers included Jimmy Maxton, a close family friend, Dick Wallhead, Clifford Allen and the Reverend J Munro, as well as prominent members from Clydeside, an ILP stronghold.

As a young teenager Jennie was responsible for collecting local ILP dues two nights a week and she got to know the ILP members well, being invited into their homes and enjoying the heated discussions on current political issues.

At the outbreak of World War One she became aware of how different her family’s attitude was to that of her school friends and, at first, felt secretly ashamed. Like most children, she hated to be different.

The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) forced the ILP to hold its meetings out of town on the moors outside Cowdenbeath, just as the Covenanters had done in a previous era. Listening to the propagandists making sense of what was happening, and hearing how ILPers were treated in jail, had a lasting impression on Jennie, who later said: “We were only a few but we were right.”

All this was reinforced by the Socialist Sunday School she attended each Sunday morning. In her autobiography, Tomorrow is a New Day, written in 1939, she recalls how she learned to recite with gusto from a poem called ‘The Image of God’.

I slaughtered a man, a brother
In the wild, wild fight at Mons,
I see yet his eyes of terror,
Hear yet his cries and groans.

And she also remembered singing socialist hymns, and was especially fond of  the chorus that went:

We are children, but some day,
We’ll be big and strong and say,
None shall slave and none shall slay
Comrades all together.

A treasured child

There were two sides to Jennie Lee growing up: she was an intelligent girl, acutely aware of politics, but also a treasured child, spoiled all through her life by her mother. Even when she was a married woman, “Ma and Dad” travelled south and looked after Jennie and her husband, Nye Bevan, preparing their meals, gardening, keeping the house, and even cooking for friends.

Jennie was the centre of attention in her childhood home and developed a strong ego which needed to be fed throughout her life. As a child she took on the role of the bright first son, was often excused household duties as she buried herself in books, and was allowed to sit in on adult political discussions. She persuaded her mother and father to allow her to stay on at school, even though money was scarce in the difficult years following strikes in 1919 and 1921.

She was also fortunate to have been born in Fife, a local authority which provided more help to students than probably anywhere else in Britain, enabling a miner’s daughter to get an education denied to her contemporaries in other parts of Britain. Her grandfather, Michael, used his place on the Fife School Board to press for free schooling, free books, better schools and travel expenses. Parents in Fife were only expected to feed and clothe their children.

She worked hard at school, learned how to pass exams and won a place at Edinburgh University. She was helped by grants provided by the Fife Education Committee and the Carnegie Trust, who paid half her university fees. Nevertheless, it was still a considerable drain on family finances and her mother got into debt in order to send her off to Edinburgh suitably clothed with two new costumes and a velvet day dress. Her father made regular trips to Edinburgh with a hamper of food.

She studied law and education, intending to become a teacher, and enjoyed student life, if not the orthodox teaching style of the university. She learned how to cram and was a successful student, winning awards which supplemented her limited finances. She engaged fully in both student and Edinburgh Labour politics. During her final year, in May 1926, the general strike was called.

Jennie was bitterly disappointed when it collapsed after her final exams that June and was eager to get back to Fife where the miners fought on for months. It was during this time she started to become a fiery outdoor speaker, attending an unceasing round of meetings, demonstrations and ILP activity. She was even sent to Ireland to raise funds for the strike.

Rooted in the politics of the ILP, three generations of Lees still believed their organisation could lead the Labour Party away from MacDonalism towards socialism. Jennie was determined after the collapse of the general strike to build a more powerful Labour movement that would hold its ground and not run away under fire. The ILP hoped to win sufficient seats in parliament to peacefully and continually carry through basic socialist measures.

In 1927, she was appointed delegate to the ILP National Conference and made a huge impression. She received rapturous applause and made new friends, including Charles Trevelyan, who remained steadfast throughout her political career, sustaining her through stormy weather and providing funds to fight campaigns. Invitations poured in for weekly engagements to speak to ILP meetings in England and Scotland, and that summer she went as a fraternal delegate to the Socialist International in Belgium.

Everyone loved her uncompromising socialist stance. Jennie’s biographer Patricia Hollis tells us she could “storm a meeting to anger, move it to tears, warm it to solidarity, and lift it to confidence. She was sharply class conscious and Maxton’s darling.” She was a young, attractive, impressive, evangelical speaker who could “paint the sorrows of the poor, and the beauty of the promised land of socialism. MacDonald could barely do better.”

Like so many activists, her father was blacklisted after the strike, and Lee, employed as a teacher in her old school in Cowdenbeath, for a while became the sole financial support for her family. She believed she understood the children of her own area but was unprepared for the level of deprivation, and found it difficult to hold the attention of a large class in Glencraig, a nearby communist village.

An uneasy truce between the Communist Party and the ILP had been struck in 1926, but when it ended local communists cynically used a classroom problem of hers to try to discredit the ILP. It was, she said, a life and death struggle. West Fife presented the best opportunity to return a Communist to Parliament (which they later did in 1935), so they had to discredit the Labour Party, its left wing in particular, to win electoral advantage.

Jennie decided teaching was not for her as she didn’t believe in what she was doing. How could she make a difference surrounded by such poverty when she was expected to fill children’s heads with fairy stories masquerading as school history? She was convinced the working class must train its own advocates in the history and objectives of working class movements. Education was essential for building a confident class, but she had a different job to do in the political struggles ahead.

Parliament

She was nominated by Shotts ILP and selected as Labour candidate for North Lanark, a neighbouring but much poorer mining constituency to her own. The miners were impressed by her, a university graduate with impeccable working class credentials and passionate politics.

In the byelection of 1928 she drew on JA Hobson’s ILP policy document about how to deal with the economic crisis: increase home demand through higher wages and pensions, open up foreign markets by resuming trade with Russia, bring about public ownership of basic industries, and provide state-aided schemes to build roads, homes, and other infrastructure. She was elected with a majority of 6,578, aged 24.

On her arrival at Westminster she stayed with the Trevelyan family and had the first of many battles with the Labour Party establishment. Margaret Bondfield and Tom Kennedy had been appointed to introduce her to parliament, but she chose instead Jimmy Maxton and Bob Smillie, her grandfather’s friend and a miners’ leader.

Breaking with tradition she delivered her controversial maiden speech a month later, letting fly at the Tory Government, doubting whether their budget would create more jobs, better conditions, or higher wages, and accusing Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of cant, corruption and incompetence. Her soapbox style was borrowed from Maxton and her gestures were dramatic, theatrically discarding her notes as she spoke.

Many young men from the mining constituencies had emigrated, convinced by the promise of a new life in the colonies, and were now stranded without work or families to help them. The plight of these “wild geese”, as she called them, dominated her constituents’ letters alongside the desperately poor, the overcrowded housing, and all that resulted from poverty.

She had a massive postbag and struggled to cope. Maxton, passing her in the Commons lobby trying to deal with her correspondence, asked whether she wanted to be “a bloody social worker or a socialist MP”. Lee later gave similar advice to a young Joan Lestor, who rightly ignored it.

The approach she adopted led some in her constituency to question whether she was building a career for herself or looking after her electorate. As times changed, and with it the role of MPs, her position became less aceptable and eventually contributed to her losing the Cannock seat in 1970.

Lee fascinated the men in the Commons, but irritated women. Although she spoke about the plight of miners’ wives, she did not see her role as speaking up for women’s rights as a whole. Instead, she concerned herself with mining issues, economic and unemployment matters. Her closest colleague was the combative Ellen Wilkinson.

Disaffiliation

The 1929 general election saw the return of a minority Labour government with 287 Labour MPs, of which 200 were notionally ILPers. Thirty-seven were sponsored by the ILP and of these 17 came from Scotland.

The leadership of the ILP was at odds with the government from the start, and the government’s compromises made them distrustful of MacDonald. They disagreed over the need for increased taxation to fund schemes to combat unemployment, and as the dole queues lengthened, so did the alienation of the ILP.

MacDonald despised their disloyalty, claiming every ILP amendment was giving comfort to the enemy. The ILP insisted their loyalty was to socialist principles not Labour leaders. At its 1930 Easter conference, the ILP demanded their MPs’ loyalty to ILP policy. Eighteen agreed, including Lee. But in the mounting economic crisis the policy differences on issues around unemployment benefit, child allowances and the living wage led to an ever more embittered relationship with the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The ILP’s disaffiliation will be considered in more detail elsewhere, but the disastrous decision to leave the Labour Party in 1932 isolated the ILP from the mainstream Labour movement and split the organisation from top to bottom. Even the Clydesiders were split – Jennie’s lover Frank Wise chose the Labour Party, while she chose the ILP.

In her 1939 autobiography, Tomorrow is a New Day, she says she had considerable misgivings about disaffiliation, writing that she was impatient with ILP friends who believed the Labour Party had become, in their eyes, “a kind of political anti-Christ. It besmirched, betrayed the True Faith.”

Emotionally, she was under its influence, but while her heart told her one thing, her head said another. She did not want to leave the Labour Party but she did not see how she could do otherwise. How could she could continue to speak for a party which was so much at odds with her policies, and where the “arithmetic possibility” of changing the leadership or its policies did not exist, however hard she campaigned?

In her later, 1980 autobiography, My Life with Nye, written with the benefit of hindsight, she describes the ILP’s decision to cut itself off from the mainstream working class movement as “madness”, saying that while she loathed it, she was “a prisoner of geography”. How could she desert her friends?

There is little doubt that she was indeed a child of the ILP from which she received a socialist education. Her wide circle of friends and acquaintances were drawn from the ILP, and she was especially close to Maxton.

However, Hollis believes this account to be, at best, disingenuous and even misleading. Lee’s loyalties were not to her friends, she says, but to her politics. She had lived and experienced bitter struggles in the Fife coalfield and was uncompromising in her concept of socialism. She had grown increasingly hostile to the PLP, which she described as being made up of “every rat and rabbit paid for by the TUC”. She had moved further to the left, and wanted a straightforward fight between “them and us”, the “workers versus the rest”, and she was not prepared to be constrained by the discipline of the Labour Party. Her loyalty was to her socialism and she was not prepared to compromise her beliefs.

Like many other Labour MPs, she lost her seat in the 1931 election. Other than its work on housing, the Labour government was regarded as a great disappointment. In North Lanark, there were problems at local level too, where right wing miners’ leaders felt that “their” seat had been taken from them, and the Catholic church blackballed every MP who had voted down an amendment to Trevelyan’s Education Bill, which would have given greater provision to Catholic schools.

“You could challenge the authority of the Labour Party and still survive,” mused Jennie, “but if I also antagonised the Catholic vote there was not the slightest hope of holding my seat.”

After leaving Parliament, she travelled widely in Russia, Europe and America, earning an income from lecture tours and by writing newspaper articles. Her long love affair with Frank Wise ended tragically in 1933 when he died suddenly at Wallington Hall, home of the Trevelyans. Only a few months later she agreed to marry Nye Bevan, her friend and left wing comrade.

She stayed out of the Labour Party until shortly before the 1945 general election when she rejoined and was returned to Parliament as member for Cannock, a large midlands mining constituency.

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Tomorrow is a New Day, by Jennie Lee, was published in 1939 by The Cresset Press.

My Life with Nye, Jennie Lee’s second autobiography, was published in 1980 by Jonathan Cape.

Jennie Lee A Life, by Patricia Hollis, published by Oxford University Press in 1997, won the Orwell Prize in 1998.