Orwell went on to write Homage to Catalonia, one of his most famous books, which revealed the sharpening divisions between Communists and others on the left and exposed the role of Stalinist agents in destroying the revolution.

The trip will take place on the weekend of 19/20th May (75 years since Orwell was wounded) and take in Barcelona, Alcubierre and Huesca. It is hoped that some talks will be given on the Saturday evening at the monastery hotel of Lecinena, close to the Ruta Orwell.

Those expected to attend include members of the newly formed Orwell Society, as well as Orwell’s adopted son Richard Blair, and Quentin Kopp, son of Georges Kopp, a commander of the ILP’s sister party, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and later captain of general staff of the International Brigades.

Members and friends of the ILP who would like to join the visit should contact Alan Warren of Porta de la Historia on hill705@googlemail.com.

Costs for accommodation, transport and food are not yet confirmed but the organsiers expect it will not exceed 300 Euros for two nights, not including flights. The idea is to arrive at Barcelona on the evening of Friday 18th May and return to the UK on Sunday 20th after 8pm.

Porta de la Historia is a co-operative initiative of four individuals living in Catalonia who are fascinated with the Spanish civil war and the social struggles that followed the conflict, especially in connection with the International Brigades.

They provide a variety of initiatives and activities to raise awareness of the region’s history in this important period and to help individuals, groups and schools explore the events and places of the civil war.

More information on Porta de la Historia from: www.pdlhistoria.wordpress.com

Land and Freedom, the ILP’s pamphlet about the Spanish civil war is available here.

The Politics of Housing Development in an Age of Austerity and The Big Society: The big con and the alternative will be launched in the Betty Boothroyd Room, in Portcullis House, Westminster, London SW1 on Wednesday 22nd February at 6.30pm.

Speakers include Karen Buck, Labour MP for Westminster North and shadow education minister, plus pamphlet authors Duncan Bowie, Andy Gregg and Mike Davis.

In The Politics of Housing Development in an Age of Austerity, Duncan Bowie examines housing policy over 100 years and provides a powerful critique of new Labour and current coalition government policy.

Both an historian and an experienced housing and planning practitioner, he asks: why are we not building more homes, and with homelessness and overcrowding on the rise, why is there not more affordable social housing?

In The Big Society: The big con and the alternative, Andy Gregg and Mike Davis unmask the paradoxes of David Cameron’s flagship idea, one that keeps rearing its head although few people understand it, including Tories.

Gregg has been chief executive of a number of local, regional and national charities, while Davis worked as a teacher and education adviser for almost 40 years and is now editor of Chartist.

You can download the pamphlets here.

We are doing this, first, because the last edition was published in our centenary year, 1993, which makes it rather dated, and secondly, because there is a growing interest in our history among political activists, Labour politicians and academics. So this seems like a good time to proceed.

To help with the process, we are publishing the whole of the original pamphlet on the website and we hope readers will take the opportunity to respond and comment on the material.

We aim to put the text online in six stages, starting below with the chapters which deal with the early years of the ILP and the birth of the Labour Party. Each of these instalments will be supplemented by a series of ‘side stories’, boxed out material from the original pamphlet which highlight some important aspects of the ILP’s journey.

It is then over to anyone who wishes to respond to do so. This will help us to enrich what we hope will be a moving account of how different generations of people have sought to build a better society.

Of course, if you wish to purchase the printed version of the pamphlet, complete with images and historical photographs, you can do so from our publications page – we still have a few copies left.

—-

The ILP: Past & Present

The ILP in the 30s

Despite its numerical decline, the ILP remained a significant political force throughout the thirties. In addition, it retained a small but vocal parliamentary presence until Jimmy Maxton’s death in 1946.

But, if disaffiliation appeared to resolved the ILP’s dilemma about its role as a left group within the Labour Party, it posed a new and equally crucial question. What was to be its role outside the party? Squeezed between the electorally cautious Labour Party linked wit the unions, and the manipulative Communist Party linked with the international communist movement, the ILP found it had little room for manoeuvre.

Influenced by a pro-communist group in the ILP, serious consideration was given to affiliating to the Communist International. But the terms were found to be too stiff, just as they had been two decades earlier when the ILP tried to set up a alternative international movement (known as the Two-and-Half International) to build a bridge between reformist and revolutionary socialists. In particular, the ILP was unwilling to subordinate itself to Moscow’s demands.

At the same time, the ILP’s relations with the British Communist Part worsened due to the latter’s subservience to the Soviet Union. Like its counterparts in the rest of the world, the Communist Party in Britain took its political line from the Soviet leadership. That often meant rapid political changes to conform to changes in Stalin’s foreign policy. This was usually accompanied by wholesale abuse of others on the Left who disagreed. The Moscow trials and execution of former Bolshevik leaders further widened the breach between the two main left parties in Britain.

In spite of the difficulties facing the ILP in its new role, it continued with its active propaganda, including the open air meetings for which it was famous. It also retained an energetic youth section where a great many political activists were schooled.

The major campaigns of the decade had a strong ILP presence. The Unity Campaign, organised jointly with the Communist Party and Socialist League, the Hunger Marches, and the anti-fascist activities are among the better known examples. The ILP played a leading role in mobilising mass opposition to thwart the march by Oswald Mosley’s fascist through London’s East End, the heart of the Jewish community.

After the rise of fascism, first in Italy and later in Germany, the ILP actively supported the work of socialists from those countries. There was also a fierce debate about how to respond to the fascist threat while not siding with the imperialist powers.

Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in1935 brought these matters to a head. Arguably, it led to one of the least honourable decisions taken by the ILP. At first, the ILP conference agreed to support independent working class action against Italy, to oppose its aggression, and to boycott the transport of arms and other supplies. Among the keenest supporters of this policy was a small Trotskyist group inside the ILP, led by the black writer, CLR James.

Jimmy Maxton and the parliamentary party strongly disagreed with the position. They argued that working class sanctions would be indistinguishable from other sanctions and would make war with Italy more likely. They made it clear that they felt unable to comply with the policy. As a result, the conference backed down and agreed to ballot the ILP membership.

As Fenner Brockway wrote: “I agreed at once without any illusions about the result. I knew it was inevitable that the vote would be influenced by the desire to retain Maxton and his colleagues than by the political issues.”

He was right. This led to a political attack on the ILP by the exiled Trotsky who until then, had seen it as a useful channel for his group’s activities. They then left the ILP, although CLR James continued to co-operate with the ILP in anti-colonial activities.

Spanish Civil War

In 1936, to the horror of socialists across the world, there was a fascist uprising in Spain against the elected republican government. Led by General Franco, the rebels were actively backed by Hitler and Mussolini and greatly assisted by the non-intervention of the British and French governments.

To begin with, people fought off the fascists with great courage but they were ill-equipped and the republican side was politically divided. It was also dependent for arms and other material help on the Soviet Union – and Stalin had his own very different agenda. Anxious to forge an alliance with Britain and France against Nazi Germany, he did not wish to do anything that would greatly upset them.

Obviously, developments in Catalonia and its capital, Barcelona, were particularly disquieting for him. A social revolution was taking place and society was being completely reorganised. Influenced by anarchist and socialist ideas, workers were running the factories and the local administration and peasants were collectivising the farms and taking control of the countryside.

Stalin wanted to defeat the fascist but he did not want a revolution, fearful that if he was seen to support if he would fail to woo Britain and France into an alliance. So while he encouraged Communist-led International Brigades to fight, he was also at great pains to stifle the rest of the Left and bury the revolution.

A small ILP contingent went to fight in Catalonia. Among the ILP volunteers was the writer Eric Blair, who was later to find fame under the name of George Orwell. The ILP gave particular support to the non-Stalinist, revolutionary Marxist workers’ party (POUM) which was ruthlessly suppressed by the Communists. Foreign sympathises of the POUM were jailed. Among them was Bob Smillie, chair of the ILP Guild of Youth, who died a prisoner after being arrested at the border.

Stalin succeeded in suppressing the revolution but by 1939 the fascists had won the war. Spain was to endure four decades of Franco’s oppressive rule. Tens of thousands of Spaniards lost their lives in the fighting and even more were killed when the fascists took control.

Labour Relations

It would be a mistake to suppose that the ILP’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party had ended the relationship once and for all. Not so, several attempts were made to re-open the links in the 1930s.

The most promising attempt began in 1938 with an initiative by the Labour Party leader and former ILPer, Clement Attlee. Both Labour’s executive, with a clear majority, and the ILP’s administrative council, with a narrow one, agreed the general terms of re-entry.

In supporting re-affiliation, Fenner Brockway argued that the ILP had changed significantly. He claimed: “when the ILP was in the Labour Party it had no fundamental philosophy or policy and could not act with a united purpose; but during its period outside it had developed a revolutionary socialist basis and its personnel, although smaller in numbers, had vastly improved in dependable quality; the ILP of 1938 was very different from the mixture of reformism, sentiment, utopianism and awakening revolutionism which characterised the ILP of 1932. This being so, was there not a great deal to be said for entering the Labour Party as a disciplined unit, regarding it not as a socialist party with a policy that commanded our consent, but as the class party of the workers and therefore the right and most fruitful field of activity?”

The ILP convened a special conference to decide its future. The meeting never took place. The conference was called for September 1939, the month that Britain declared war on Nazi Germany.

The two parties differed in their attitude to the Second World War as they had done to the first. Opposing involvement, the ILP saw it mainly as a battle between rival imperial powers and once again its members were imprisoned for refusing military conscription. During the war the ILP played a role in what became a broad current of radical dissent against Churchill’s coalition government and there was a revival of interest in its publications.

Actively supporting the war, Labour participated in the war-time coalition. And it emerged from the hostilities stronger, with a reforming programme, winning its first overall majority in the Commons in 1945.

After the War

Post-war Britain left the ILP in continuing decline, with the return of many of its leading figures, like Fenner Brockway, to the Labour Party. The ILP continued with its anti-colonial work, opposed the post-war Labour government’s use of troops in the docks for strike breaking, and participated in a European campaign to build a united socialist Europe.

But as it shrank so its hostility to the Labour Party increased. Although a minority of its members actively supported Labour in their localities, the formal position of the ILP towards the Labour Party really was sectarian. This purism was reinforce by those who recounted stories of left-wingers who joined the Labour Party to transform it but who were themselves politically transformed.

While the ILP continued to support a host of progressive campaigns during these years – particularly in the peace movement – it was inclined to indulge in pious resolution-mongering. Its libertarian outlook attracted people who were unhappy about the lack of tolerance and democracy on much of the left, but otherwise its politics became diffuse.

While the ILP almost sank below the political horizon in these years, it survived by a fine thread. This was due to the resources it had accumulated in earlier years but, more importantly, thanks to the loyalty and commitment of ILPers with fond memories of the party in days gone by and wished to keep something of that alive. The ILP has always been more than a political party. It was a political movement which valued socialist fellowship and this made it possible for it to renew itself.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a small but significant influx of younger activists from the anti-nuclear movement, and some former members of the Communist Party who were disillusioned after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Unhappy about the lack of radicalism and democracy in the Labour Party and wary of the politics and practices of the far left, the new generation were looking for some kind of alternative. Whatever its faults, the ILP provided them with space to rethink their politics.

In doing so, they became frustrated with the lack of direction of the ILP which by now was a very weak organisation. They challenged its lack of perspective and, as they developed their ideas, they sought to turn the ILP outwards and to reconsider the relationship of socialists to the Labour Party. Support for this rethink also came from longstanding members of the ILP.

In 1974, after several years of debate, the ILP re-adopted a socialist commitment of the Labour Party in its Outline Perspective. In 1975, it changed its constitution to become Independent Labour Publications. On both occasions there were members present who had attended the 1932 disaffiliation conference. Indeed, there were some whose experience went back to before the First World War.

A few months after the decision to change the ILP’s constitution, the national executive of the Labour Party agreed that members of the ILP could join the Labour Party and vice versa. Not only did this end four decades in which the ILP had gone its separate way from the Labour Party but it opened a new chapter in the ILP’s history.

Buy The ILP: Past and Present here

Read other extracts from The ILP: Past & Present here, including:
ILP History 1: The Early Years
- Great Expectations
- Beginnings in Bradford
ILP History 2: Ethical Socialism
- Independent Women
- Living for that Better Day
ILP History 3: Labour’s Rise and Disaffiliation
- Strongholds of the ILP

]]> http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2012/01/22/ilp-history-4-war-and-after/feed/ 0 http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2012/01/13/it-was-119-years-ago-today/ http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2012/01/13/it-was-119-years-ago-today/#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:32:24 +0000 Matthew Brown http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/?p=2497 It was on this day, 13th January, 119 years ago that 120 or so young, working class, mainly male delegates gathered at the Labour Institute in Bradford to found the Independent Labour Party. It has been in continuous existence ever since.

The ILP has gone through several transformations during the intervening years, most recently in 1975 when it became Independent Labour Publications and opened membership to the Labour Party, but many of the concerns and objectives of those founding members remain today, albeit under radically changed circumstances:

• how to construct and sustain a living political community in a hostile world;
• how to combine fellowship in heated political debates;
• how to relate parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggles;
• how to advance progressive causes in political culture unsympathetic to left ideas;
• and, later, how to respond to the Labour Party.

The conference was chaired by Keir Hardie and passed a resolution declaring the party’s aim to “secure the collective ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange”.

It also pledged to work for “independent Labour representation on all legislative, governing and administrative bodies”, thus adopting a dual perspective which embodied the tension between long-term social change and short-term electoral gain that remains problematic for all on the left today.

Beneath that tension, however, the early ILPers brought to their politics a passionate moral fervour, a sense of outrage at the injustices of capitalism that were all around them.

Those injustices are still all around us, and that very ethical kind of vision remains at the heart of the modern ILP’s perspective.

Next year the ILP will celebrate its 120^th anniversary and we invite you to join us. Watch this space for details of how we plan to mark the occasion.

–

For a fuller account of the ILP’s history, click here.

For a statement of the modern ILP’s perspective, click here.

We are doing this, first, because the last edition was published in our centenary year, 1993, which makes it rather dated, and secondly, because there is a growing interest in our history among political activists, Labour politicians and academics. So this seems like a good time to proceed.

To help with the process, we are publishing the whole of the original pamphlet on the website and we hope readers will take the opportunity to respond and comment on the material.

We aim to put the text online in six stages, starting below with the chapters which deal with the early years of the ILP and the birth of the Labour Party. Each of these instalments will be supplemented by a series of ‘side stories’, boxed out material from the original pamphlet which highlight some important aspects of the ILP’s journey.

It is then over to anyone who wishes to respond to do so. This will help us to enrich what we hope will be a moving account of how different generations of people have sought to build a better society.

Of course, if you wish to purchase the printed version of the pamphlet, complete with images and historical photographs, you can do so from our publications page – we still have a few copies left.

—-

The ILP: Past & Present

Labour’s Rise

From 1918 Labour’s star was in the ascendant. Within four years it held over 140 parliamentary seats and it began to eclipse the Liberals. Other factors lay behind Labour’s rise. In 1918, under the influence of both Sidney Webb, the leading Fabian, and Arthur Henderson, the Labour Party secretary, Labour’s organisation was transformed. From a loose electoral alliance it became a more tightly-knit machine based in the localities. Individual part membership was regularised, removing the need to join through affiliated bodies.

To overcome trade union leaders’ unease about the new local parties becoming too radical, they were accorded even greater power. Trade unions were to have control of the elections to an enlarged national executive and the separate places for affiliated socialist societies were eliminated.

In completing the reform package and to show that Labour had a sense of purpose, the party adopted Sidney Webb’s famous Clause IV, the call for the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. However, as he rather pointedly explained, his intention was to transform “the Labour Party from a group representing the class interests of manual workers into a fully constituted political party of national scope, ready to take over the government of the country”.

The changes also had a major impact on the ILP. Deliberately so, as both Labour Party and trade unions leaders were determined to ‘fix’ the left after the war. In many areas, the new local Labour parties began to siphon off many activists. No longer did the ILP hold a seat on the national executive, although some ILPers continued to hold seats in the divisional Labour Party section.

Following the party’s constitutional changes, some right-wing ILPers questioned the continued relevance of the ILP. For example, Philip Snowden MP, argued that the ILP had served its historical purpose. The left disagreed, arguing that the ILP was need to act as a socialist pressure group within the Labour Party.

For a time the ILP’s political dilemma about its role in the restructured Labour Party was resolved by the rise of Clifford Allen. An upper class intellectual with great financial skills, he sought to turn the ILP into a high-powered influential policy-making body. Having served three years imprisonment for refusing war-time conscription, he was able to secure financial support for the ILP from middle-class, pacifist sources.

Allen argued: “We must state the case for socialism so convincingly that all people of intelligence and goodwill will turn to it…if the ILP can become the instrument of such a policy, it will sweep all before it.”

As chair of the ILP, he gathered an impressive array of radical intellectuals around it. He relocated the ILP’s head office to palatial surroundings, established research and information departments, and revitalised the flagging Labour Leader newspaper which became New Leader (1922) with a highly paid editor. In addition, the ILP summer schools were transformed into largely middle-class assemblies.

He also cultivated his friendship with Ramsay MacDonald, who had been restored to the Labour leadership after the war which he too had opposed. When MacDonald became Labour’s first prime minister in 1924, Allen was a regular visitor to Downing Street.

However, Allen failed to persuade MacDonald or the Labour Party to set up commissions to prepare detailed schemes of socialist construction for when Labour was in office. So he encouraged the ILP to do so instead. The first commission, on agriculture, included the call for the nationalisation of land. Promoted by the ILP, it was adopted by the Labour Party conference.

But the commission attracting the most attention did not gain Labour’s support. Socialism in Our Time or The Living Wage (as it was also known) was to become a precursor to Labour’s reforms two decades later. It called for the immediate introduction of a fixed minimum wage for all industries and for family allowances. To provide for these the banks, mines, land, electricity and transport were to be nationalised. Any essential industry failing to comply with the minimum wage was also to be taken into public ownership.

To Allen’s dismay MacDonald instantly repudiated Socialism in Our Time as “flashy futilities”. This left Allen in a much weakened position in the ILP. Ironically, the policies formulated by his commissions contributed to his downfall. They formed part of the growing shift to the left in the ILP and they widened the rift with the Labour Party.

Fenner Brockway, then ILP general secretary, gave three reasons for Allen’s fall and Jimmy Maxton’s rise: “First the ILP was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the MacDonald leadership of the Labour Party, particularly after the first Labour Government of 1924. Second, the rank and file outside of London, which remained proletarian, became impatient with the middle class domination of Head Office and the grand scale of its up-keep. Third the membership having accepted the Socialism in Our Time plan seriously, were in a mood to challenge aggressively the gradualism of the Labour Party.”

Growing Divide

Spearheading the criticisms of Allen’s leadership were the militant Clydeside MPs, including Jimmy Maxton and John Wheatley. Under their influence, the ILP embarked upon a more confrontational course with the Labour leadership.

A fierce and fine orator, and a deeply committed and incorruptible socialist, Jimmy Maxton reasserted the party’s class politics. He confirmed the growing conviction of many ILPers that the Labour and trade union leaderships were becoming obstacles to socialism.

During the 1926 General Strike and miners’ lockout, which the Labour leadership found deeply embarrassing, the ILP published The Miner for the impoverished mineworkers’ union, selling 90,000 copies weekly. Following the miners’ betrayal and abandonment by the TUC, Maxton and the miners’ General Secretary, Arthur Cook, himself an ILPer, published a joint manifesto denouncing all forms of class collaboration. The Cook-Maxton Manifesto, coupled with the campaign for Socialism in Our Time, which was regularly defeated at Labour Party conference, made the ILP increasingly unpopular with the Labour leadership.

These differences of political strategy came to a dramatic climax with Labour’s return to office in 1929. MacDonald’s main aim was to show that Labour was ‘fit’ to hold office. Given that the Liberals held the voting balance in the Commons, he was only prepared to introduce measures which they would find acceptable.

As a result of this approach, the minority Labour government soon found itself in deep trouble with its own supporters. Unwilling to challenge the capitalist system, the government soon fell victim to the pressures of a capitalist recession. Public expenditure was cut repeatedly, unemployment soared, and the working class was made to bear the brunt of the crisis.

The ILP’s case, which MacDonald dismissed as mere romanticism, was that a Labour government should stand or fall by a radical programme. First, it should introduce expansionist popular measures  and, at the point when the Liberals blocked further changes, the Government should campaign with the slogan: “The people versus the banks”.

In vain, the ILP rebels in the Commons mounted a desperate resistance to the government. The remainder of the Parliamentary Labour Party dutifully voted as  instructed, obeying the call to “Trust MacDonald”. In desperation, the ILP’s executive announced that its 140 MPs must take the ILP’s whip and not the Labour government’s. Most refused and 123 MPs were expelled.

These divisions bit deep into the ILP itself. In Scotland the ILP branches condemned Maxton for voting against the government by 103 votes to 94, although the ILP nationally upheld ‘the rebels’.

As the economic crisis deepened – and as the labour movement became more resistant – Ramsay MacDonald and the chancellor, Philip Snowden, defected. In consultation with King George V, they collaborated with the Tories to form a national government, sending shockwaves through the Labour Party, but it did nothing to heal the rift with the ILP.

Disaffiliation and its Effects

The specific issue which triggered the ILP’s disaffiliation from the Labour Party was a heated debate on the relationship of the ILP MPs to the Parliamentary Labour Party. In the aftermath of the conflicts with the MacDonald leadership, the new Labour leadership insisted that ILP-sponsored MPs should now be subject to the same parliamentary whip as Labour MPs. The ILP refused.

But, as we have already shown, the roots of the conflict lay much deeper. They relate to the frustration that different generations of socialists have often felt about Labour’s lack of radicalism.

In its early years, ILPers had hoped that by creating and sustaining the Labour Party, in alliance with the trade unions, they could reach the working class and win them to socialism. By 1932, at an emotionally-charged, special conference, this approach was rejected. The branches voted to disaffiliate by 241 votes to 142.

Support for the break came from a younger generation of working class activists, angry and dismayed at the shameful record of the MacDonald minority government. Disaffiliation had significant consequences for both parties. With the ILP’s departure, the Labour Party became more manageable. The right wing were well placed to strengthen their hold, to keep down the remaining left forces and to direct the party how they wished.

Following MacDonald’s defection, Labour suffered badly in the general election. In response, trade union leaders decided to exert greater control over the party, rather than to trust the parliamentarians as they had done in the recent past. The union leaders’ efforts were made easier because the parliamentary party was in a weaker position, numerically and politically.

But what really strengthened the unions’ grip was the changing nature of the block vote. To survive the recession, the unions were merging into big general unions where power was concentrated at the top. With their massive voting strength they could, if they chose, dominate the party organisation.

Men like Ernest Bevin, head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, began to shape Labour’s future. An alliance was constructed between ‘moderate’ parliamentarians and trade union barons that was to last for decades. The block vote became the property of a handful of trade union leaders who placed it at the disposal of right-wing Labour leaderships.

Bevin dismissed the ILP, saying that they “let their bleeding ’earts run away with their bleeding ’eads”.

For a time, the internal opposition to the Labour leadership and trade union control came from a regrouping of Labour lefts with former ILPers. Together, they set up the Socialist League but it never had the chance to establish a sizeable grass roots base along the lines of the earlier ILP.

Under the somewhat eccentric leadership of Sir Stafford Cripps (who foundered the newspaper Tribune in 1937), the Socialist League came into conflict with Labour’s tough-minded national executive. Eventually the executive expelled Cripps and proscribed the Socialist League (although Cripps was later returned to become a most conventional, post-war chancellor of the exchequer). The League disbanded.

It was not long before the ILP’s high hopes about the advantages to be gained from the split with Labour began to ebb. At first, with unemployment at record levels, with Labour’s electoral decline, and with growing international tensions relating to the rise of fascism, many ILPers had thought that a golden opportunity was at hand. For them, the crisis of capitalism was drawing near. They believed that free from the constraints of a compromised and discredited Labour Party, the ILP would be well placed to drive home the socialist message.

The membership figures for these years tell another story, however. Within four months of the fateful decision to leave, the ILP had lost one-third of its branches. Membership, which had stood at 16,773 in 1932, fell annually. By 1935 it had fallen to 4,392. Three-quarters of the membership were lost in three years.

The Socialist League did not gain many recruits from these losses. Nor did the Communist Party, even though a pro-communist group in the ILP, the Revolutionary Policy Committee, had campaigned hard for the ILP’s break with Labour. Its members joined the Communist Party three years after the ILP’s disaffiliation.

Buy The ILP: Past and Present here

Read other extracts from The ILP: Past & Present here, including:
ILP History 1: The Early Years
- Great Expectations
- Beginnings in Bradford
ILP History 2: Ethical Socialism
- Independent Women
- Living for that Better Day
- Strongholds of the ILP

England & Wales

The first strongholds of the ILP were limited largely to the woollen districts of Yorkshire and parts of Lancashire.

Bradford was a major centre. Here the Liberals were the ILP’s main political contenders for working class support. Influenced by the former textile worker, Fred Jowett (left), the ILP pioneered many of the city’s local government reforms. Activists built a solid political base – which lasted well into the 1920s and 1930s – resting upon a network of ILP clubs and a variety of social activates.

Halifax, a textile town with a radical tradition, became another early focal point. John Lister, whose wealthy but eccentric family had lived at Shibden Hall, Halifax, from the 17th century, was the ILP’s first national treasurer.

Across the Pennines in Lancashire, the ILP faced a popular working-class Conservatism. The ILP grew in Manchester and Salford, and in the cotton textile towns of Blackburn and Preston and it had a presence in Rochdale, Oldham, Hyde, Ashton and Stockport.

In Manchester, where Robert Blatchford initiated the influential Clarion newspaper, ILPers organised soup kitchens at times of high unemployment and challenged the callous attitude of the Poor Law Guardians.

In 1896, Manchester ILPers were jailed for speaking at Boggart Hole Clough, an open site taken over by the city council and long used for public meetings. After enormous protests the council backed down.

In Nelson, where the weavers were a major influence, there was a lively ILP branch which pre-dated the national ILP. The Nelson ILP set up its own institute and built the Clarion House, near Pendle, as a base to explore the countryside.

Outside Yorkshire and Lancashire, Leicester was the most significant of the ILP’s English outposts. The massive presence of radical trade unionists in the boot and shoe industry provided the backbone, as it did in Norwich.

In Wales, the working class had formed close bonds with Liberalism. At the end of the last century, these began to crack with the sharp upturn in industrial disputes among the South Wales miners.

The ILP developed a strong and active base in Merthyr Tydfil from where Keir Hardie was elected to parliament in 1900. In 1922, ILPer Richard Wallhead won the seta. The ILP ran the popular Merthyr Pioneer newspaper and a printing co-operative. It had its own football team.

In the 1930s, massive unemployment meant mass poverty in much of Britain. Wales was badly hit. Babies were said to be contracting rickets in their mothers’ wombs.

The ILP continued to have an important political presence during this period. It was very involved in the hunger marches from Wales to London to draw attention to the terrible conditions. In 1935, it joined with the 300,000 people throughout Wales who protested against the hardship caused by the means test. As a result, the government dropped some of its harsher proposals.

Scotland

Scotland presents a rich and complex picture. Many of the ILP’s first generation of ‘leaders’ were Scottish. The Scottish Labour Party was founded in 1888, five years before the ILP itself. The Party in Scotland was then absorbed by the ILP.

But this early prominence did not mean that there was massive support for the ILP from the outset. Most of the ILP’s leading figures made their reputations only after travelling south.

The Scottish Labour Party had made little headway. This was because of the strong attachment to the Liberals in Scotland. In addition, the working class was deeply divided not only culturally (between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘rough’) as in the rest of Britain, but also nationally (Scottish and Irish) and religiously (Catholic and Protestant).

In time, these obstacles were partly overcome and the Irish question diminished. By November 1922, thousands of people were lining the streets of Glasgow to wave off the newly-elected Clydeside ILPers, such as James Maxton (left) as they headed south for the Westminster parliament.

But this support had not been won easily. It rested upon hard-fought disputes to improve social and working conditions, a well as opposition to war. Working class women were at the heart of these struggles. Housing, particularly in Glasgow, was notoriously bad and yet rent were high. The ILP’s housing committee and the Women’s Labour League, initiated a city-wide housing campaign based on women’s neighbourhood groups.

Conditions worsened with the influx of workers during the First World War. In its first wartime edition, Glasgow ILP’s paper, Forward (which was later suppressed by the authorities), called for the government to limit rent rises.

Women’s groups, together with militant Clydeside shipworkers, organised massive rent strikes. In response to this growing working class assertiveness, the government introduced rent controls.

In the past century, thousands of unknown ILPers across Britain have campaigned for better social conditions, for an end to war, and for a society based on equality and justice. By their own strict standards they did no succeed, but their efforts made a significant difference to the lives of millions.

Buy The ILP: Past and Present here

Read other extracts from The ILP: Past & Present here, including:
ILP History 1: The Early Years
- Great Expectations
- Beginnings in Bradford
ILP History 2: Ethical Socialism
- Independent Women
- Living for that Better Day
ILP History 3: Labour’s Rise and Disaffiliation

The ILP met him at the House of Lords last month to talk about his ideas. This is the second part of a two-part interview. Read the first part here.

Radical and conservative – the Blue Labour paradox

One of the questions Alan Finlayson asks is: Will Blue Labour stumble into conservatism under all the usual pressures, the desire to win elections and deal with the here and now, rather than to the wider vision? It’s either a creative or destructive tension, but is that a genuine tension?

It all boils down to where you think we are. If you think it’s going to be one more heave, more tax, more spend, let’s all rally round and protect the unreconstructed Brownite welfare state, then we will lose the election. So that’s the paradox, the more realist you are, the more you’ll lose.

What’s needed is a populism. You can’t be a fake populist. You can only be populist if you start expressing people’s concerns.

Here’s a very interesting story about the forests.

Very early on after Ed won, we were sitting with Jon Cruddas and looking at this thing saying the New Forest, Sherwood Forest and so on were good investments for the timber industry. And Jon just said to me, ‘That can’t be right; that can’t be right.’

So we moved, and we won that within two or three weeks because it touched so many people. It turned out people had much stronger feelings about their forests; they have much more mixed feelings about their local school or whatever, because they know there was money wasted there, they know there was horrible stuff going on in a lot of those places. Our language wasn’t capturing that.

So to develop a genuinely populist agenda is the task in hand. What we’ve got to remember is, we’ve got three and a half years till the next election, so the next year is decisive. The further we can get away from doing things for people, and the more we can get to a place where people actually have more power to do things for themselves, I think the better.

The Labour Party would be a deeply conservative force, in all the wrong ways, if we hadn’t lost so heavily. But as we did, that allows a genuine space to open up. It can’t be the case, it can’t be the case, that if I raise issues about immigration the only response is that I’m a racist. With all the experiences I’ve been through, it doesn’t hold.

I think we’ve been through quite a lot this year, and heard quite a lot of people saying ‘No, I don’t want to play, I don’t want to talk in this way.’ But then people ignore you.

If you look at the ILP, this was a huge concern: How do we talk to people? How do we engage people in a politics where they are participants in their own lives?

One of the things the ILP has long recognised is the tension between winning elections, which lowers political horizons, and the need to build a broader movement which can take us beyond those immediate concerns. I wonder how you see that?

There are three components.

The first is a genuine change in what I call the relational culture of the party. The reality is the average number of people who turn up for branch meetings is 12, the average number who speak is five. So that means there are seven people who don’t say a word. We’ve got to look at that and say, ‘What kind of culture is this?’

So, from an organising point of view, we’re thinking about bringing in suggestions that everyone says their name and where they are from at the beginning of the meeting – just to hear their voice.

Secondly, that every meeting will include a one-to-one conversation. Once again, it’s about getting away from the idea that the only way to get things done is to get pieces of paper out and pass motions. We’ve got to broaden the base of the party.

And then we come to the key thing – being prepared to actually listen and act on things that people care about rather than the things we think they should care about.

I don’t mind going on record saying that March 26^th, the big rally against the government, was an organisational catastrophe. There was no constructive alternative. And everyone went home and thought, ‘Well, what was that?’

Just to say, I’m much more in favour of resisting the sell-offs than the cuts, just to let you know where I’m at.

It’s about rebuilding constituency Labour Parties as places where people can act to protect the people and the places they love.

It’s got to be much more about forests, about violence on the streets and civic culture, than about equality issues. It will be about affordable housing, family housing, the living wage – these issues – and running successful local campaigns that are off the radar of the national media.

There has been a massive rupture of trust and we’ve got to be quite humble and relational about rebuilding that trust. Small steps, small issues around people’s concerns, can lead you to surprising places.

For example, in places like Burnley and Oldham we’ve got to think of ourselves as the ‘common good party’ that brings together the estranged – Muslim and local, working class and middle class.

That’s one side, the re-organisation.

Then we need ideological renewal, and this is what Blue Labour is about, being able to talk about capitalism while continually being in favour of private sector growth –real businesses, making a distinction between financial and productive capital which Ed spoke about in terms of predatory and productive capital. This is where we’ve got to be a lot more conservative in our disposition, talk to people about what they care about.

The third aspect is leadership development at every level from top to bottom, so we bring on genuine leaders who have followers within their own communities, who are prepared to promote their agenda and negotiate with others in developing a new one.

So roughly speaking: re-organisation, ideological renewal and leadership development are the three big ones.

I can see the need not always to go full blast against the whole of capitalism in a practical sense, but Blue Labour’s focus is on the damage done by capitalist commodification. Currently, the worst excesses may have been done by finance capitalism but isn’t capitalism itself always problematic?

This is where we are, I think: all forms of state-directed socialism have been authoritarian and ugly, and anti-democratic, and elitist, and immoral. We’ve got to eat that, we’ve got to absorb it.

Every day I think about the millions of innocent people killed by Stalin. I just sit and go, ‘My god.’ They were wiped out, they were taken away, they were shot, they were tortured.

In China now, independent democratic trade unionists are killed every day, but I ask Labour Parties, ‘Do you support independent democratic trade unions in China?’ And sometimes only half the people say ‘Yes.’ Because it’s a developing country, because the West shouldn’t be imposing, and so on …

So this is the key thing: we want a non-commodity market in human beings and nature, and we want competitive markets in tables and chairs, and so on.

We don’t want to be static, self-referential; reality has always got to come in. We want high-end innovation, we want skilled work – this is transformative. We want vocational colleges, we want workers on board, we want all these things, but they take time.

So, it’s about a real market in real commodities with democracy to protect the status of labour and land. The complication with capitalism is when you think one of three things:

• first, that it can be abolished – that can’t be.
• secondly, that it works perfectly well in all markets – that leads to mayhem
• thirdly, and this is where we’ve been, that it can only be legally regulated by the state, whereas we need a massive renewal of things like democratic unions.

And in that tension between the maximisation of profit and the preservation of human beings and their environment, that’s where we want to be.

One massive issue is that [in government] we did not promote regional flourishing. To put it bluntly there was not enough private sector growth in the north east, the north west, the midlands and south west, and the south east was financially driven which had it’s own problems.

I share your disposition about capitalism, but I look at Tesco and think, it’s cheap, healthy food, and it has transformed the lives of the poor. Yet we hate them.

When London Citizens did a living wage campaign against Tesco what we found was enormous middle class loathing while the working class had a love for Tesco. They love the fact that the food was fresh and cheap and the environment was safe. And when they bought a small package of mince they didn’t have a butcher going, ‘Ah, tough week, eh?’ They didn’t feel humiliated.

That’s just a tough example I put out there to say we’ve got to build alliances and relationships with the powers. We’ve got to look at how we can get Tesco to foster regional diversity.

This is just an example: I went to visit an old friend of mine and his parents who I hadn’t seen for ages (we were at Cambridge together) and the place they wanted to take me to was the café in the local Tesco. They were so proud of it. It was a real lesson for me. Tesco is a massive power and the question is how do we negotiate with it for the good.

So if we go along with the idea of real resistance to the commodification of human beings and nature then we have to go with the question of how to create a society that can generate value.

I think vocational training is hugely important. I made a big stink at conference by suggesting we should close down half the universities, turn them into vocational training colleges and put the law schools and medical schools in there. Then you’ll have meaningful pathways of equal status for working people.

I’m at London Met, which is one of the poorest universities. It used to be a really good Poly, City of London. Now we’re a crap university, which is no good to anyone.

The experience of students at Oxford is that they have pastoral care and personal tuition. I’ve got 150 students in a room and I’m not allowed to see them personally any more because I’m told that it violates fairness.

We’ve always got to be radical and conservative in a simultaneous motion. It’s hard, but it gets to good places and, conversationally, it’s great because people can join in.

Here’s a classic example: if you look at union data about what people care about at work, yes, it says they care about how they are treated, but in the top three, always, is that they care about colleagues who don’t do their work. And the unions never, ever, ever, ever mention it. I think it’s about time that we did.

It happens in my university, and it’s found in local government too where people who don’t do their jobs get shunted around. It is a very big issue. Of all the documentation you have to fill in it never touches that issue. Staff know who don’t do their work …

Yes, so I’m in favour of 50 per cent of promotions being on the basis of election by colleagues.

I’m glad I’m out of it, I must admit …

And that’s also significant because you loved it. That’s the tragedy of a lot of people: “I’m glad I’m out of it because it was shit, and yet I care passionately about it all.” And the important thing is not to forget that ambivalence. There is no easy position, which was another thing the ILP was good with.

You’ve talked about the need for real markets for real commodities, and forms of democracy to protect human beings and nature, such as democratic unions, and so on. Elsewhere you’ve talked about the importance of local democracy and community organisation. I wonder how you see the role of the state in all this?

To be clear, there’s a central role for the state but not an exclusive role for the state.

I think we got into a position where we thought the only meaningful thing we could do was elect a Labour government and have the state do it. What we know is that the state can be a class-based organisation. We learned that under Thatcherism.

Secondly, we got into an administrative role with the state where it did things for people. But we must remember democracy is also by the people, of the people – it’s worth bearing in mind.

So, there’s a very, very important role for the state. But we also need a rediscovery of statecraft.

I get criticised for talking about this whole Tudor statecraft thing. The logic is that England then was well behind the rest of Europe in three areas – the first was naval technology, the second was armaments, and the third was in science and maths, in particular.

So they endowed the Greenwich Maritime College with land and authority; they endowed the Woolwich arsenal; they endowed Kings College and Trinity College in Cambridge with very specific professorships in maths, in Greek, Latin and science. And the Royal Exchange in the City was definitive in defeating Amsterdam in loans, insurance and finance.

So, we have to rediscover the role of the state in statecraft, in endowing local institutions and vocational institutions, such as regional banks, environmentally specific vocational colleges. I’m very interested in Newcastle and the sea, and maritime technology, and renewables that can genuinely generate jobs in those places.

So – and this goes quiet deeply into the argument with Keynes – the state is not there for continual crisis management, it’s there to look at long-term developments, to endow institutions and renew the BBC, for example, as a local vocational trainer, as a local form of democratic accountability through journalism. There’s so many imaginative ways we could think about the role of the state.

Secondly, the role of the state is to be clearly what I call ‘the floor and the ceiling’. I’d like to see a living wage, for example, and I would also like to see an interest rate cap. So the state should set limits but not micro-manage the process.

It’s also about redistributing power to people. I would love to see a transformative Labour government that was really serious about constitutional redistribution through such things as unitary city parliaments. I’d like to see the extension of the City of London to all of London; I’d like to see Manchester as a unitary city … renew the civic government of the land.

So there’s a huge role for the state here, but it’s got to be in relationship to markets and society. We have to break the idea that there’s either complicity with the market or straightforward opposition, and to open up the space for regional variety.

In Hackney, for example, I’m in favour of breaking up Hackney council and having Stoke Newington, Hackney, Dalston, Shoreditch – parish councils, so people can know who their representatives are and engage with the strengths they’ve got without everything being seen as a redistribution of one thing to another.

Tottenham was a case in point. The leader of Haringey council was there the evening of the riots and no-one knew who he was. So there was no local government going on and the gap was filled by the mob.

The reason there’s been this misunderstanding about the state is because we became so statist that any retreat from it was seen as anti.

The state has to be the guarantor of justice too, but all this stuff with rights and law should be ultimate but not intimate. You know, if you disagree with someone at work you get accused of bullying …

Our capacity to have these conversations and cope with tensions has gone, so we need a much more robust local tension, that’s key to it.

Can we finish by asking what London Citizens has meant to you?

Well, it was absolutely transformative for me, and part of that is a personal story.

What it taught me first of all was the centrality of relationships. When I started I wanted to persuade people of my position but I learned to question what that meant for the politics of the common good and how you bring people together.

So the living wage stuff came from Catholics, Protestants, Muslims – people who basically hated each other in terms of their religion who found a common ground.

The centrality of leadership was another thing.

And then I realised that over a few years through these London Citizens campaigns we’d developed a more radical political economy than the Labour Party. For me, it was catch up, catch up, catch up. I was always a Labour, secular, left-winger and this was all new.

One of the big lessons for me was which people would turn up. If the mosque said 50 people, the Catholic church says 50 people, the local black church says 50 people, they turn up. When the trade unions said 50 people, no-one turns up. So suddenly the crisis of secular institutions and their reproduction came to me.

And then there’s the importance of creative strategy – we did loads of different kinds of actions for the living wage: mass pray-ins, meals, things the Labour Party would never think of.

And finally, what it taught me above all was to be relaxed with tension, not fear tension, and not to do anything on your own, to always work with others and get to a common place – then you can act in the world.

If you just go off on your own, you’re lost. My big regret is the immigration thing. I was just having a chat, I wasn’t thinking. It was a classic case of what not to do. I allowed a position to develop without talking to other people. I am genuinely sorry for that, you can’t imagine, but it wasn’t about the position, it was about my lack of attention to the idea that relationships precede action.

That’s it, if you want it in three words: relationships precede action, that’s what I learned from organising.

–

Maurice Glasman was talking to Barry Winter and Matthew Brown.

Part 1 of this interview is available here.

Read Attlee, the ILP and the Romantic Tradition by Jon Cruddas here.

The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, edited by Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and Stuart White is an e-book available from Soundings.

“Love learning which is the food of the mind.”
Extract from The Socialist Ten Commandments

Socialism did not begin with the ILP. But the ILP created a unique blend of socialism. Not only did it achieve independent representation for labour and links with the trade unions, it also worked outside the formal political structures.

Many ILPers saw their main job as converting people to socialism. To do this, they tried to set an example by leading socialist lives. They encouraged a sense of comradeship, commitment and fun. They invited people to participate in a living community with a choice of activities, cultural as well as political.

Inspired by Robert Blatchford’s popular Clarion newspaper, socialism was preached from touring Clarion vans. Cyclists, who joined Clarion clubs to enjoy the countryside, would ride ahead to give advance notice of the arrival of the vans.

Labour churches, first formed in Manchester, offered an alternative to orthodox religious beliefs. They sought: “The realisation of Heaven in this life by the establishment of a society founded on justice and love to thy neighbour.” From this came the Socialist Sunday School movement for children which called for equality and respect for all.

This ethical, communal and campaigning approach made the ILP’s politics distinctive. ILPers were intent on creating the whole world anew and they had the confidence and enthusiasm to believe that it could be done. Often their moral vision, that desire to inspire and uplift people, was clearer that their political vision. The connection between politics and morality was not explored. Later, the idea of “living and socialists” came under pressure for electoral reasons.

Nor had ILPers set themselves an easy task. They were trying to appeal to people who led hard lives, many of whom were resistant to radical ideas. In times of recession and rising unemployment, many ILPers were unable to pay their subscriptions. As a result, local branches sometimes found it a struggle to continue with their activities.

The ILP published a stream of literature, leaflets, pamphlets, books and newspapers. In the early 1920s, the ILP’s official paper, renamed New Leader, was edited by one of the most influential socialist writers of the time, H N Brailsford.

In the late 1920s, the ILP Arts Guild sponsored the Masses Film and Theatre Guild to show political films. During the inter-war years and after, ILP summer schools, which combined serious politics with social activities, played host to a wide variety of national and international speakers.

Perhaps it was this sense of community and fellowship which did much to sustain the ILP after the Second World War. The spirit of the old ILP thus influenced the new generation and has encouraged them to renew the ILP’s political message.

The Clarionets

“We were furnished with sandwiches, a primus stove for making tea and stacks of leaflets, pamphlets and the ‘Clarion’. Leaflets and pamphlets we gave away; the Clarion we tried to sell. Arriving at some village in Derbyshire or Cheshire we held an open-air meeting to catch the people as they came out of church or chapel. We were young and raw and given to buffoonery. These was a tradition that one Clarion group had pasted some posters with the legend, ‘Read the Clarion’, on a herd of cows in a field. We scrawled slogans in chalk on barns and farmhouse walls…We sang ‘England arise, the long, long night is over’ outside pubs and on village greens.

“At the club-house, after a ride through the lanes of Cheshire or over the Derbyshire hills, we ate an enormous tea of ham, pickles, jam and cake…Washing up followed, after which we cleared the tables away for either a meeting, a play or a concert, finishing the evening by dancing…By ten o’clock we were shooting down Schools Hill, bunched of wild flowers tied to our handle-bars, apples in our pockets, and the wind lifting our hair.”

North Country Bred: A Working-class Family Chronicle by C Stella Davies, published by Routledge & Kegan Paul (1963)

–

This is an extract from the ILP’s history pamphlet, The ILP: Past & Present.

The first two of six instalments of ILP history taken from the pamphlet are:
The Early Years
Ethical Socialism

“No cause can be won between dinner and tea, and most of us who were married had to work with one hand tied behind us.”

Hannah Mitchell: The Hard Way Up: the Autobiography of a Suffragette and Rebel

From the beginning, the ILP accepted women and men as equal members and, as early as 1895, it supported the extension of the vote to both women and men.

Although women were not relegated to the background, few were involved at the policy making levels in the early years. However, women took a leading part in branch life and as public speakers.

Many carried out the roles traditionally allocated to women in politics. And some, like Hannah Mitchell found that their husbands were happier talking about sex equality than practising it!

Some ILP women were at the forefront of campaigns to improve the lives of poor, working class children in the cities. In Bradford, Margaret McMillan’s pioneering work for children and for school meals won her fame as an educational reformer.

There was one woman on the party’s first national council, Katherine Bruce Glasier. Others were to follow, including the suffrage campaigner Isabella Ford of Leeds. She had been a supporter of the celebrated strike at Manningham mills, Bradford and played a leading role in encouraging women textile workers into unions. In 1905, she was supporting striking mining families who had been evicted from their homes by their employers in Kinsley, near Hemsworth in Yorkshire.

Explaining why she joined the ILP after she had been impressed by its support for women, Isabella Ford said:

“My last doubts were removed after a visit to a Labour Club in the Colne Valley, where the men had been giving a tea party to the women, and had poured out the tea, cut the bread and butter, and washed everything up, without any feminine help and without any accidents! A party, that included the education of men, which had hitherto been so much neglected, as well as the education of women, that gave the one such skill and dexterity, and the other wider and truer views of life, was the party for me I felt, and so I joined.”

When the Pankhursts’ votes-for-women campaign folded with the outbreak of the First World War to further the war effort, it was largely those women in the ILP and the peace movement who continued their dogged work in the school boards and as poor law guardians.

Many thousands of women were also active in the wartime peace movement, and others continued the work of Enid Stacy and others who campaigned for:

• The right for women to choose whether or not to have children.
• Equality in marriage and fair divorce laws.
• The right for women to have guardianship of children.
• Full legal and political rights for women.
• Freedom as workers, including protective legislation for men as well as women.

The years between the wars were difficult ones for women raised during the heady days of the pre-war suffrage campaign.

Inside the Labour Party, ILP women played a distinctive role. Dorothy Jewson and Dora Russell fought to improve women’s’ status in the party were at the forefront of campaigns for birth control and peace.

In fighting for women’s independence, such women found themselves confronting a cautious labour movement afraid of upsetting the voters. They found that winning votes usually took precedence over winning people’s hearts and minds.

As a result, many women became disillusioned with these short term considerations. Others, like Hannah Mitchell, undertook new responsibilities as local councillors.

Votes for Women

The ILP was closely involved with the campaign for votes for women before the First World War. But the issue was not a simple one. There was a heated debate about how to, given the fact that not all working class men had the right to vote either. Some favoured militant action, others persuasion.

Some campaigners argued that women should have the vote on the same basis as men, whilst others said the vote should be extended to all men and women at the same time (the adult suffragists).

These disputes were reflected within the ILP which had attracted many women because of Keir Hardie’s and others’ commitment to the women’s cause. There were, though, many men in the ILP who still had to be persuaded.

Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst drew many of her women activists from ILP members and the ILP had supported the suffragettes. But the increasingly separatist nature of her Women’s Social and Political Union and its undemocratic leadership led to a rift between it and the ILP in England. In Scotland, however, the two organisations continued the work hand in hand.

The ILP’s concerns were much closer to those of the largely northern, radical suffragists who called for ‘womanhood suffrage’ and believed that “it is from a truly democratic organisation alone that satisfactory results can be expected”.

In these campaigns working class women with little or no education learned to be outstanding public speakers and grass roots organisers, touring Britain in the Clarion vans.

Self-taught women who learned their politics on the job like Selina Cooper from Nelson and Ada Neild Chew from Crewe who were supported by middle-class, women speakers and writers like Enid Stacy. She made one of the earliest attempts to bring together the ideas of feminism and socialism.

In the last thirty years, feminists have been discovering the work of the women pioneers and many have been inspired by their example.

–

This is an extract from the ILP’s history pamphlet, The ILP: Past & Present.

The first two of six instalments of ILP history taken from the pamphlet are:
The Early Years
Ethical Socialism

We are doing this, first, because the last edition was published in our centenary year, 1993, which makes it rather dated, and secondly, because there is a growing interest in our history among political activists, Labour politicians and academics. So this seems like a good time to proceed.

To help with the process, we are publishing the whole of the original pamphlet on the website and we hope readers will take the opportunity to respond and comment on the material.

We aim to put the text online in six stages, starting below with the chapters which deal with the early years of the ILP and the birth of the Labour Party. Each of these instalments will be supplemented by a series of ‘side stories’, boxed out material from the original pamphlet which highlight some important aspects of the ILP’s journey.

It is then over to anyone who wishes to respond to do so. This will help us to enrich what we hope will be a moving account of how different generations of people have sought to build a better society.

Of course, if you wish to purchase the printed version of the pamphlet, complete with images and historical photographs, you can do so from our publications page – we still have a few copies left.

—-

The ILP: Past & Present

Ethical socialism

The early ILP did more than play a key role in setting up and sustaining the Labour Party, however. It made a unique contribution to socialist movement in another way: through the distinctive quality of many of its members’ politics.

Its largely working class membership favoured a very ethical, indeed evangelical, approach to socialism. They wished to live their socialism, to put it into practice, to prefigure the sort of society which they wished to create.

ILPers brought to their politics a passionate moral fervour, a burning desire to redress the injustices and suffering of people’s daily lives under capitalism. As a result, they tried to reconstruct their whole environment and to foster a spirit of comradeship and community. They built their own meeting halls using them for political, social and cultural activities, and as places for the political education of the young.

Through the Labour Churches some countered the Christian doctrine of original sin with a belief in the essential goodness of humanity. The bible’s commandments were replaced by socialist precepts including, “Honour the good, be courteous to all, bow down to none.”

The Leeds-based photographer and poet, Tom Maguire and the popular campaigner, Caroline Martyn, ruined their health propagating the cause and both died relatively young as a result.

Sometimes the moral fervour lent itself to abuse and manipulation. Skilled party leaders, like Ramsay MacDonald, could draw upon the desire for socialist fellowship to disarm their critics by accusing them of “uncomradely behaviour”.

But at its best, the ILP provided an educative and creative environment. People without formal education had the chance to develop skills of public speaking and organising. Here was a workers’ university where they could mix with all sorts of people and argue about all kinds of subjects – from vegetarianism to Marxism, from art to free school meals.

The ILP offered space for the ‘new women’ to explore the meaning of feminism in practice as well as in theory. In Sheffield, Edward Carpenter, courageously opened up the issue of male-female relationships and gay sexuality.

The youthfulness of the movement gave it an energy and a confidence. Theirs was an exuberant, crusading spirit which often obscured the more precise questions about socialist strategy (in marked contrast to many European socialists’ debates of the period). They saw socialism and the “new life” flowing from their living examples as socialists. It was often assumed that socialism would simply come about as more and more people were won to the cause.

The strength of this alternative culture was that it was a powerful motivating force which bound its members closely together. Not only did it encourage the participants to uphold their socialist vision, but it responded to their deeper, emotional needs and gave them a sense of purpose. But, valuable as it was, the religion of socialism was not enough. It offered little guidance on how to chart a clear path through a dangerous, duplicitous and complex world.

This alternative tradition remained a strong influence in the movement – and for a long time at that – but increasingly, electoral pressures came to prevail, particularly in the Labour Party. Winning the hearts and minds of the working class for real change was subordinated to appealing for their votes in the here and now. As a result, the more ‘controversial’ elements of the alternative culture patchwork, like interest in gender and sexuality as political issues, were marginalised.

All this amounted to a serious loss. Indeed, if socialism is to be renewed, the pioneers’ ethical concerns offer some important lesson. For while there can be no simple return to that age of innocence – indeed clarity about political strategy is essential – the moral dimension to socialist politics is also crucial. As is the need to build a living community capable of sustaining it.

The ILP and the Labour Party

From the outset relations within the Labour Party were often tense. At a time of massive unemployment, for example, the performance of the new Labour Party in the Commons seemed lacklustre and uninspiring. Most Labour MPs appeared to be little more than tame supporters of the Liberals.

Rank and file concern about the political direction of the Labour alliance during these years is shown by the dramatics actions of the controversial, young ILP militant, Victor Grayson. Against the express wishes of many national union leaders, and therefore without the national ILP’s consent, he stood and won the Colne Valley by-election in 1907.

Backed as the ‘Labour and Socialist’ candidate, Grayson received support from the ILP branches for three main reasons. First, because they were worried about what they saw as the dead hand of the unions. Secondly, they were increasingly unhappy about the displays of deference being shown by party leaders in parliament. Thirdly, they were concerned about the constraints arising from the electoral understanding between Labour and the Liberals. This expressed itself in their demand to contest Liberal-held seats as a matter of urgency.

Behind this opposition lay two different strands of thought in the ILP. Some simply wanted Labour to adopt more aggressive politics, while others wanted to break the links with the unions and to unite with other socialist parties.

A further sign of these tensions was the publication in 1910 of what was known as the Green Manifesto, a call to reform the Labour Party. Written by four newly-elected members of the ILP national council, they condemned the deals with the Liberals. They argued that instead of the parliamentary party engaging in electoral pacts and tactical alliances in the Commons, “Labour must fight for socialism…against both the capitalist parties impartially.”

Earlier, Keir Hardie, now MP for Merthyr, had shown equal concern about developments in the Labour Party, even though he knew of the deals with the Liberals. Expressing his worries about Labour’s timidity, he felt moved to write: “I grow weary of apologising for the state of things for which I am not responsible and with which I have scant sympathy,” adding “when the miners come in the Annual Conference will be controlled by coal and cotton, and…that means more reaction. There are times when I confess to feeling sore at seeing the fruits of our years of toil being garnered by men who were never of us, and even now would trick us out….”

Votes for Women

But if Keir Hardie was sometimes despondent about the results of his handiwork, he did play an important role in gaining labour movement support for women’s suffrage.

As a result of much agitation, the nineteenth century had seen a slow and hesitant extension of the franchise to men. By the end of the century, men who owned property or who paid rent, had the vote. Now an increasing number of women wanted their political rights too. But both the Liberal and Conservative parties were opposed to women’s suffrage and treated the idea with a mixture of patronising derision and anger.

Through his close links with Sylvia Pankhurst and ILP women’s suffrage campaigners like Isabella Ford, Hardie influenced the ILP’s support for women’s suffrage at a national level.

The ILP’s position, which owed much to the hard and relentless activist of many women ILPers at the grass roots, also set the tempo for the Labour Party’s approach. Namely that partial advances to extend women’s suffrage were better than none. This was a recognition of the fact that many men still need the vote.

As a result, relations, particularly at national level, were often strained between the ILP and the most militant wing of the suffragettes, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Matters deteriorated when the WSPU began attacking Labour election candidates.

Led by the former ILPers, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, a formidable and dictatorial mother-and-daughter team, the WSPU saw votes for women as paramount. They became more concerned to win friends at the top than to win working class support, and this estranged them from Sylvia Pankhurst whose main efforts were directed at women in London’s impoverished East End.

Increasingly their outlook diverged from longstanding suffrage campaigners like Isabella Ford of Leeds whose deep involvement with and commitment to women textiles workers fed and informed her support for votes for women. But at local level relations between ILPers and the WSPU were not always quite so tense and there were some who continued to belong to both.

The outbreak of the first world war, which was to have a profound effect not only on the British labour movement beut on the course of European socialism, overshadowed the fight for women’s suffrage. However, by the end of the war the government had accepted the principle. In 1918, women over the age of 31 were given the vote. It had taken 30 years persistent and varied campaigning to achieve (it took another decade before women over 21 to be enfranchised).

The First World War

The war shattered the apparent unity of the European socialist movement which had pledged to oppose the fighting. With a few honourable exceptions, most national parties backed their own government’s war efforts.

In Britain, ILP members actively opposed the war although, characteristically, this was for a range of different reasons. Many working class members were committed pacifists. The British labour movement was split in its attitude to the conflict and to the later introduction of conscription.

While Labour parliamentarians participated in Lloyd George’s war cabinet and trade union leaders toured the country appealing for men to take up arms, thousands of young male ILPers were jailed for non-cooperation and many thousands of women ILPers crusaded for peace.

Trade union leaders also co-operated with industrialists in controlling the manor industries and much working class resistance to the conditions imposed from above too on a syndicalist character. The Russian revolution, particularly the overthrow of the czar in February 1917, was welcomed by the Left in Britain. There was a greater ambivalence about the Bolshevik revolution that October but these dramatic events did contribute to a wider self-confidence and radicalism among many workers.

The Great War is said to have killed Hardie (who died in 1915 shortly after making a most moving speech in Bradford) but it helped make the Labour Party. Not only did it gain experience in government, but war-time controls strengthened the view that state intervention was not only possible but achieved results.

Buy The ILP: Past and Present here

Read other extracts from The ILP: Past & Present here, including:
ILP History 1: The Early Years
- Great Expectations
- Beginnings in Bradford
- Independent Women
- Living for that Better Day
ILP History 3: Labour’s Rise and Disaffiliation
- Strongholds of the ILP