Labour Party history

Articles about the history of the British Labour Party

James Keir Hardie

By the death of Comrade 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. It is not easy for us who knew him long and personally to convey to the reader how much of a loss his taking away is to the labour movement. We feel it with the keenness of a personal loss. James Keir Hardie was to the labour movement a prophetic anticipation of its own possibilities. He was a worker, with all the limitations from which no worker ever completely escapes, and with potentialities and achievements such as few...

“BAME Labour” erases Labour’s first MP of colour

The tiny, inactive and secretive BAME Labour grouping has been back in the spotlight, after Labour’s National Executive junked plans to create a democratic structure representing black, Asian and minority ethnic party members. To give a flavour of this “organisation”, in 2018 it had less than a thousand members, out of an estimated 70,000 party members of colour. Yet it has representation on the National Executive. A quick look at BAME Labour’s website confirms it is a non-organisation. But its “What is BAME Labour” statement is worth scanning. Generally vapid in the extreme, it says: “The...

"Used by the profit-mongers to blind the people": Keir Hardie on the monarchy

Keir Hardie, the working-class organiser and campaigner who became one of the first Independent Labour MPs (in 1892) and then first leader of the Labour Party (in 1906), wrote these words in 1897, at the time of Queen Victoria's 60th jubilee. Even under a representative system of government it is possible to paralyse a nation by maintaining the fiction that a reigning family is a necessity of good government. Now, one of two things must be – either the British people are fit to govern themselves or they are not. If they are, an hereditary ruler who in legislation has more power than the whole...

The real history of Labour, NATO and bans

Ian Mikardo, leading left-wing opponent of founding NATO, third from left, with Harold Wilson, Aneurin Bevan, Tom Driberg and Barbara Castle In 1949, when Parliament actually voted on signing the North Atlantic Treaty, six Labour MPs voted against. That was near the height of the Cold War, with the Berlin airlift and more. Three of the six were expelled - it seems for solid Stalinist affiliations, not just opposing NATO - and three weren’t. Of the three expelled, two drifted out of politics. The third, Konni Zilliacus, was readmitted in 1952 and was an MP again after 1955 for a very right...

Charlotte Despard, a rebel from age 46 to 95

Part one of a series on the feminist and socialist Charlotte Despard (1844-1939). Part two is here . At her 89th birthday party, in 1933, Charlotte Despard made a speech urging her friends to fight fascism, and she quoted Lenin as she put the case for revolution. Days earlier she was making a speech in Trafalgar Square, bent with old age and shaking her arthritic fist as she made the case for anti-fascist mobilisation just as she had made countless other speeches in the previous four decades in support of socialist, feminist, anti-imperialist and republican causes. Charlotte was also a...

John Archer: black pioneer of labour politics

Painting of John Archer which hangs in Liverpool Town Hall. It contains many important details about Archer. The paper is The Crisis , edited by W E B Du Bois “My election tonight marks a new era. You have made history tonight. For the first time in the history of the English nation, a man of colour has been elected as mayor of an English borough… That news will go forth to all the coloured nations of the world and they will look at Battersea, and say it is the greatest thing you have done” – John Archer, 1913 In January, Workers' Liberty published a pamphlet on Shapurji Saklatvala, the...

Poplar rates rebellion centenary: ten lessons for today

It is the centenary year of the Poplar council rates rebellion, an inspiring victory in London’s east end rich with lessons for today. At the time the rebellion took place, just after the first world war, the London Borough of Poplar comprised the dockland area in the big bend in the River Thames (Poplar) and an area of similar size to its north (Bow). A quarter of its people lived in (official) poverty, 83 of every thousand of its babies died, and over thirty thousand people lived in overcrowded housing. It had a tradition of working-class organisation and action. The east end was the centre...

The US left and Trump: replying to debate

Thomas Carolan did make a British analogy for what socialists can do now in the USA in relation to the Democrats. But it was not with the Labour Party! It was with the Liberal Party in the late 19th century.

Women of the Poplar rebellion

Our story is set just after the first world war in Poplar, an east London borough with a population of 160,000 people crammed into the docklands in the bend of the River Thames (Poplar) and the area just north of it (Bow). It was an impoverished and exclusively working-class area, which had suffered greatly during the ‘Great War’. Working-class women juggled low-waged work with domestic chores, contending with overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions, fatherless children and war-wounded husbands and sons. They had fought against profiteering companies, government stinginess and for the vote...

Activist agenda: Safe and Equal, Free Our Unions, Neurodivergent Labour, Poplar 100

Safe and Equal is pursuing its drive for full isolation pay for all with systematic phoning-round of its hundreds of contacts, demands for information from councils and from the NHS Test and Trace operators, and an appeal to other groups for a united front on the issue. Momentum Internationalists has given support; a good informal response from Don’t Leave Organise , but no formal answer yet. Free Our Unions has a Zoom meeting on anti-union laws, Tuesday 2 March, 6:30 pm. Speakers include Gerry Carroll MLA on the Trade Union Freedom Bill in the Northern Ireland Assembly, Mark Porter, Unite...

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