Labour Party history

The “IS tradition” of the 1960s, which members and old ex-members of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) cherish, was in fact largely taken from the Independent Labour Party in its last years. The first part of this article described the earlier history of the ILP. After 1946 the ILP mutated. This article tells the rest of the story. From about the time James Maxton died, and Fenner Brockway, John McGovern and others left to join the Labour Party, the ILP shed its character as a trimming, evasive, manoeuvring left social-democratic organism, and took on the character of an “ideological”...

In the last issue of Solidarity, Mordecai Ryan outlined the history of the ILP , the main British "centrist" organisation of the 1930s and 40s. Its nearest equivalent in Britain today is the SWP. As mud is a mix of earth and water so centrism is an unstable and almost always incoherent mix of bits of revolutionary Marxist political tradition and aspiration with alien, reformist, etc elements. But the elements incorporated in any given centrist organisation and the proportion of revolutionary Marxist to other elements vary from organisation to organisation and in a given organisation from time...

While the article “1945 – was it socialism” (Solidarity 3/83) did draw out many accurate criticisms of Attlee’s government, I feel that it failed to get a grip on the real outlook of the people involved. It gives the impression of a government which was cynically passing progressive reforms merely for the sake of reducing working-class militancy. Rather than genuinely believing in its programme, the Labour leadership was merely trying to “appease its working class base” while in foreign policy it was “freest to serve the interests of capitalism more closely”.. There can be little doubt that...

By Ruben Lomas 60 years ago, the 1945 Labour government was voted into power. Staggering out of the nightmare of the Second World War, Britain’s workers — many of whom had fought in the conflict — cast their votes for a party that said it stood for their interests and, in government, would represent them. It is still looked back upon as “radical,” “reforming” and sometimes even “socialist” . But was it? Many of the reforms that this government introduced were progressive. It undertook a raft of nationalisations, including gas, coal, electricity and the Bank of England. It was under this...

Bourgeois politicians praising other bourgeois politicians, even dead ones, is in the same category as self-praise. And as the saying goes, “self-praise is no praise”. Their “adversarial” posturing against each other. even where they agree fundamentally, is a sham. Why should we believe them when they belatedly discover that a departed colleague was an honest person, a humane presence, a great man who might-have-been, someone who, though on the surface an opportunist scumbag, was really a person of deep and unbudgeable integrity. Robin Cook died never knowing how highly esteemed he was in...

Notoriety clung for decades to the Tory politician Enoch Powell for his 1968 speech predicting that “rivers of blood” would flow if black and Asian immigration was allowed to continue. That was a foul speech by a foul man. It was the time when Kenya’s Asian population was being expelled on mass. They had been given British passports when the country became independent five years earlier. They were entitled to come to Britain. But they weren’t allowed to. Powell made the vile and memorable speech. But it was the Labour Home Secretary James Callaghan, who has just died a day short of his 93rd...

- How the party that nationalised the railways in 1948 ended up announcing Tube privatisation in 1998 - The RMT's forerunner, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), was one of the pioneers in setting up the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. In that year, ASRS General Secretary Richard Bell was elected to Parliament. He was the first railway worker MP, sitting in Westminster alongside 53 railway bosses! The founding of the Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906, meant that rather than cutting the best deal they could with the Liberals - as...

Analysing the evolution of the Labour Party over the last ten years is a complex business. In September 1996, leading Blairite Stephen Byers told the press that Labour, once elected, would "break the links with the unions altogether" by forcing a dispute with the public sector unions and legislating for state funding of political parties. Although other New Labour leaders disavowed the plan, it looked plausible. Tony Blair himself said he wanted "a situation more like the Democrats and the Republicans in the US. People don't even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro...

The biggest event in working-class politics for many decades was the Blairite hijacking of the Labour Party in the mid 1990s. John Bloxam and Sean Matgamna look at the lessons. The Blairites transformed the Labour Party, which the trade unions founded over a hundred years ago, from the grossly inadequate and frequently treacherous "bourgeois workers' party" it had been into something qualitatively different. In the public pronouncements of its leaders, New Labour is an explicitly anti-working-class party. It treats the labour movement and the working class with open contempt. If New Labour did...