Labour Party, UK

THE BRITISH LABOUR Party ended the 20th century with the largest landslide victory in its history. Through 100 years it rose from obscurity—forcing the ruling class to accept the legitimacy of political representation and participation of the working class—to command almost total control of Parliament. In 2004, the Conservative Party failed to dent the Labour government's majority in the polls. However, commentators might argue, this dominance has taken place at the cost of the very values that have historically been embodied in the Labour Party.

The background to the emergence of the British Labour Party has to be found in the mid-19th century Victorian society and class division. In spite of Karl Marx having lived in London for three decades, no organized socialist movement existed in Britain at the time of his death in the early 1880s. However, very soon after, a number of socialist societies—the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Fabian Society—had been formed by the end of that decade. Together with the Socialist League, itself the result of a secession from SDF, they formed the main pillars on which the future Labour Party would be formed. Young, intellectual, and dynamic, these societies fused English liberal intellectual tradition with Marx's view of history and capitalist society. The ideas espoused by these societies were strengthened by a new form of unionism among the working class that was militant, organized, class conscious, and socialist, fighting for better working conditions, such as the eight-hour working day. When this new form of unionism finally accepted the need for independent labor representation in Parliament, the seed of the Labour Party had been sown. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) included trade unionists as well as members of SDF and the Fabians. In the 1906 general elections, they won 30 seats. The new parliamentary group decided to call itself the Labour Party; a new political party had been born.

In spite of being a deeply divided group of trade unionists, activists, and socialists, the Labour Party managed to hold together more successfully than the liberals. Immediately after World War I, it emerged united and confident in the future in a way that the Liberal Party was not. Having become the true opposition to the Conservatives, the Labour Party managed to win its first general election in 1924, a pretty remarkable achievement, making Ramsay MacDonald the first Labour prime minister in Britain. A moderate in charge of a government that needed liberal support, he could not go as far in radical policies as many of his followers would have liked.

The second Labour government of 1929 did not fare much better. Unemployment became the biggest issue of MacDonald's second premiership. Yet, although in the party's political language unemployment was the clearest indication of the ills of capitalism, the Labour government was unable to stem the flow of joblessness nor could it bring itself to challenge the capitalist system. Following the stock market crash, Britain [Page 269]soon reached the two-million unemployed figure. The economic crisis that ensued was associated by the voters with the government's inability to manage the economy properly, a suspicion that would see itself reinforced by Labour's performance in the 1970s, and one that would force a wholesale transformation of the party's ideals in the 1990s. For the time being, the Labour Party lost the 1931 election, returning to prewar levels of representation in the House of Commons. Labour would be in opposition for the rest of the 1930s decade and would only get a seat in a national government of unity when invited by the conservatives in 1940 as part of the war effort.

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