Workers' Liberty

Means versus ends

Evolving out of the trade unions, adopting a formal commitment to socialism only in 1918, two decades after its formation, the Labour Party puzzled and perplexed European Marxists.

From the mid-1890s, British socialists tried to unite under one umbrella. Tom Mann, as Secretary of the Independent Labour Party, was at the centre of the negotiations and debates that took place between the ILP and the Social Democratic Federation. These moves, popular with the members, were scuppered by the leaderships, mainly that of the ILP.

When introducing a discussion at our AWL branch meeting on the first and second Labour governments, I found it useful to tell the story, then ask people to discuss some questions.

Communism and Social Democracy in Britain: How and why the old Labour Party and its reformism came to dominate working class politics in the Twentieth Century.

Continuing the series on the life and times of Tom Mann

In 1887 Keir Hardie called the leaders of the trade union movement “holders of a fat, snug office, concerned only with maintaining the respectability of the cause.”

Down to the 1880s there was no “labour movement” [in Britain] in the continental sense at all. There were strong trade unions (of skilled workers), and these unions were politically-minded — but the only parties were the two ruling-class ones, the Tories and the Liberals.

DALE STREET reviews The Blair Years — Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries

The idea of Gordon Brown writing on the future of socialism will come as a surprise to many, but that is precisely what he invites us to discuss in his foreword to a new edition of Anthony Crosland’s The Future of British Socialism.

Parables for Socialists 9

How can you tell when a political purge has turned into a witchhunt, and the witch-hunt has taken on a momentum of its own?

Over the 13 years since Tony Blair was elected leader of the Labour Party, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has, in our publications, analysed, explained and agitated against the politics of New Labour.

We go to press just before Labour’s special conference vote on Clause Four.

Fifty years ago the Labour Party won an overwhelming victory in the general election that followed the defeat of Hitler.

By Roland Tretchet

This magazine makes no apology for repeating certain basic truths.

Reading through some old issues of the East End News and Chronicle (I think I might have mentioned by local labour history nerd-ism before), I stumbled across this short article.

In 1921, thirty Labour Councillors in Poplar went to prison to protest at an unfair rating system that penalised poor boroughs. They eventually won their fight.

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.

The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was founded by Keir Hardie and others in 1893 and “ended” some time in the 1970s, when what was left of it joined the Labour Party. For the first 25 years of its existence, it played a central role in British working class politics.

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.

By Ruben Lomas

60 years ago, the 1945 Labour government was voted into power.

By Gerry Bates

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.

- How the party that nationalised the railways in 1948 ended up announcing Tube privatisation in 1998 -

Analysing the evolution of the Labour Party over the last ten years is a complex business.

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.

Blair's "speech" to the trade union leadership during TUC conference - the written version of it circulated to the press - laid it hard on the line.

Rosalind Robson reviews Tony Benn’s Diaries 1991-2001, Free at Last, Hutchinson

from Workers' Liberty no.66

In Hackney, east London, the Labour/Tory coalition administration - the first in Britain since World War Two - is making drastic cuts to local services in one of Britain's poorest districts after an unelected council official used Tory legislation to put a halt to any expenditure not mandated by law or required by legal contracts. The Labour councillors' response? To continue the coalition and promise that they're getting the council budget in order at last! The story of the very different Labour council in Poplar - also in east London - in 1919-21 shows an alternative course.

by Janine Booth

There is an extensive Marxist literature on what I would call “betrayal”.

From Socialist Organiser no.28, 25 October 1980

TONY BENN drew an enormous amount of fire from the press with his speech on behalf of the [Labour Party] National Executive Committee at the opening of the Blackpool Labour Party conference.