A History of the Independent Labour Party

After 13 years in power, Labour suddenly returned to being the party of opposition in 2010. This new edition of A History of the British Labour Party brings us up-to-date, examining Gordon Brown's period in office and the Labour Party under the leadership of Ed Miliband. Andrew Thorpe's study has been the leading single-volume text on the Labour Party since its first edition in 1997 and has now been thoroughly revised throughout to include new approaches. This new edition: - Covers the entirety of the party's history, from 1900 to 2014. - Examines the reasons for the party's formation, and its aims. - Analyses the party's successes and failures, including its rise to second party status and remarkable recovery from its problems in the 1980s. - Discusses the main events and personalities of the Labour Party, such as MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Brown. With his approachable style and authoritative manner, Thorpe has created essential reading for students of political history, and anyone wishing to familiarise themselves with the history and development of one of Britain's major political parties.

Interest in the Labour Party remains high, particularly following the unprecedented election of a third successive Labour government and amidst the on-going controversies that surround the New Labour project. Increasingly, the ideological basis of the Labour Party has come under scrutiny, with some commentators and party members emphasizing progressive traditions within the party, whilst others refer back to the trade union foundation of Labour. This volume brings together a group of scholars working within the field of labour history to consider the various elements that influenced the early Labour Party from its formation into the 1930s. The party's association with the trade union movement is explored through the railwaymen and mineworkers' unions, while further contributions assess the different ways in which the Independent Labour Party, the co-operative movement, liberalism, Christianity and the local party branches helped lay the foundations for Labour's growth from a parliamentary pressure group to a party of government.

Since World War II, the British Labour Party has played a central role in dealing with complex international issues. Achieving real power in parliament for the first time, Labour governments have acted responsibly, and are usually in accord with the views of a substantial majority of the British people. Such was not always the case. In British Labour Seeks a Foreign Policy, 1900-1940, Henry R. Winkler synthesizes twenty years' study of the subject to offer the first full-scale treatment of the Labour Party's evolution in foreign affairs. The Labour Party came into existence at the beginning of the twentieth century to deal with the domestic problems of the working class, and it showed relatively little interest in foreign policy issues. In the aftermath of World War I, however, small groups of moderates made the case against the bitter rejection of the Versailles Treaty by many in the Labour Party and the trade union movement. Most of these argued that the League of Nations could be used to remedy some of the deficiencies of the settlement and that such a League must have the sanction of force if it was to be effective. During the 1930s, the failures of the League--in the Far East, Abyssinia, Spain, and Central Europe--compelled some of its advocates to conclude that, League or no League, the threat from Nazi Germany mandated support for a program of preparedness and rearmament even under the aegis of a hated National Government. The result, by 1937, was the final formal abandonment of many of the radical illusions of the twenties and thirties, as Labour reluctantly but formally assumed a posture that enabled it to share in the governance of wartime Britain and to take a key role in dealing with the international issues that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. This volume contains valuable lessons on the responsibilities of political parties as well as the pros and cons of specific policies. It is essential reading for understanding Britain's later stands as its leaders tried to adjust to Britain's diminished power in the post-World War II world.

Accusations of betrayal played a significant role in the shaping and maintenance of solidarity in socialist and other modern radical political organisations in Australia and Britain. This fascinating study of trust and betrayal focuses on case studies of 6 'rats' or renegades: H.H. Champion; William Trenwith; John Burns; Albert Victor Grayson; Adela Pankhurst Walsh; and Ada Holman. Renegades and Rats will appeal to scholars of history and sociology alike, and to anyone intersted in the subject of trust: what it is, and how it is lost.

In February 1900 a group of men representing trade unionists, socialists, Fabians and Marxists gathered in London to make another attempt at establishing an organisation capable of getting working-class men elected to Parliament. The body they set up was the Labour Representation Committee; six years later when 29 of its candidates were elected to the House of Commons it changed its name to the Labour Party. No women took part in that first meeting, but several watched from the public gallery. Amongst them was Isabella Ford, an active socialist and trade unionist who would have been familiar to most of the men assembled below. She had been asked by her friend, Millicent Fawcett, to attend and report back on what happened. Millicent was the President of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and Isabella had been involved with the suffrage movement for a long time. A few years later she would become the first woman to speak at a Labour Party conference, moving a resolution on votes for women but, at the Party's inception in 1900, she and every other woman in the hall was silent. Throughout Labour's history, even in its earliest years, women were present in the room, but they were not always recorded or remembered. They came from many different backgrounds and they worked for the causes they believed in as organisers, campaigners, negotiators, polemicists, public speakers and leaders. They took on the vested interests of their time; sometimes they won. Yet the vast majority of them have been forgotten by the Labour movement that they helped to found. Even Margaret Bondfield, who became Britain's first woman cabinet minister, often barely merits a footnote. Women made real and substantial contributions to Labour's earliest years and had a significant impact on the Party's ability to attract and maintain women's votes after World War I. In addition to Margaret and Isabella, in many of the rooms in which the Labour Party found its feet, remarkable women wait to be rediscovered. This book tells their story.

Rethinking U.S. Labor History provides a reassessment of the recent growth and new directions in U.S. labor history. Labor History has recently undergone something of a renaissance that has yet to be documented. The book chronicles this rejuvenation with contributions from new scholars as well as established names. Rethinking U.S. Labor History focuses particularly on those issues of pressing interest for today's labor historians: the relationship of class and culture; the link between worker's experience and the changing political economy; the role that gender and race have played in America's labor history; and finally, the transnational turn.

"The Transformation of Urban Liberalism" re-evaluates the dramatic and turbulent political decade following the 'Third Reform Act', and questions whether the Liberal Party's political heartlands - the urban boroughs - really were in decline. In contrast to some recent studies, it does not see electoral reform, the Irish Home Rule crisis and the challenge of socialism as representing a fundamental threat to the integrity of the party. Instead this book illustrates, using parallel case studies, how the party gradually began to transform into a social democratic organisation through a re-evaluation of its role and policy direction. This process was not one directed from the centre - despite the important personalities of Gladstone and Rosebery - but rather one heavily influenced by 'grass roots politics'. Consequently, it suggests that late Victorian politics was more democratic and open than sometimes thought, with leading urban politicians forced to respond to the demands of party activists. Changes in the structure of urban rule produced new policy outcomes and brought new collectivist forms of New Liberalism onto the political agenda. Thus, it is argued that without the political transformations of the decade 1885-1895, the radical liberal governments of the Edwardian era would not have been possible.

'Those who were originally called radicals and afterwards reformers, are called Chartists', declared Thomas Duncombe before Parliament in 1842, a comment which can be adapted for a later period and as a description of this collection of papers: 'those who were originally called Chartists were afterwards called Liberal and Labour activists'. In other words, the central argument of this book is that there was a substantial continuity in popular radicalism throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The papers stress both the popular elements in Gladstonian Liberalism and the radical liberal elements in the early Labour party. The first part of the book focuses on the continuity of popular attitudes across the commonly-assumed mid-century divide, with studies of significant personalities and movements, as well as a local case study. The second part examines the strong links between Gladstonian Liberalism and the working classes, looking in particular at labour law, taxation, and the Irish crisis. The final part assesses the impact of radical traditions on early Labour politics, in Parliament, the unions, and local government. The same attitudes towards liberty, the rule of law, and local democracy are highlighted throughout, and new questions are therefore posed about the major transitions in the popular politics of the period.