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.” He might have been talking about the trade union leaders of today. Unfair? Why else, except a burning desire for respectability, have they acquiesced in the hollowing out of the democratic and political life of the Labour Party, the party, which Hardie helped to establish? The trade union leaders’ relationship to the Labour Party is like that of the trade union leaders of the 1880s to the Liberal Party.
It was Hardie’s and others’ tremendous achievement to establish an independent political voice for workers at the end of the 19th century, first through the setting up the Independent Labour Party. They began a long process where the working class could and would become electorally and, through the trade unions organisationally, attached to a “Labour Party”, and break from from the straight-down the line bourgeois parties, especially the Liberal Party. Today’s trade union leaders have done their best to reverse the ILP’s achievement.
The Independent Labour Party, when it was set up in 1893, was the culmination of years of political agitation by the socialists. It was crucially the product of “new unionism” — the building of unions of unskilled men and women, and the reforming of old trade unions so that they were more capable of fighting class battles.
The Independent Labour Party was never the mass united socialist party that Tom Mann — who was its secretary for a few years after 1894 — hoped for, but it did represent an exciting new beginning for working class politics. In this era of majority male suffrage, workers were beginning to join new political clubs and societies, build stable union organisations, set up women’s suffrage societies, and read newspapers aimed at workers. This working class political culture was all based on better access to education.
Engels had the following assessment of the ILP’s start. In retrospect, to my mind, it seems too rosy (and is overly prejudiced against the SDF), but it is essentially right.
“The rush to Socialism, especially in the industrial centres of the North, has become so great that this new party right at this first congress has appeared stronger than the SDF or Fabians, if not stronger than both together. And since the masses of the members make good decisions, since the weight lies in the provinces and not in London, the centre of cliques, since the programme in its main points is ours, [Edward] Aveling [one of Engel’s close political associates] has done right to join and to take a seat on the Executive.” (Letter to Sorge, 18 January 1893).
A good place to start this account of the ILP formation is a by-election of 1892 when Keir Hardie won the West Ham seat in Parliament. He stood as an independent, but the Liberal Party had (reluctantly) stood down in favour of his candidacy. By this point he was thoroughly disenchanted with the Liberal Party, but it had taken him some time to get to that point.
Hardie’s life story was quite similar to Tom Mann’s; both from very poor backgrounds, they had made great efforts to educate themselves and both had become union organisers.
A miner in his youth, Hardie was black-listed by the mine owners, becoming a union organiser and journalist. His mother and step father were atheists, but Hardie, like Mann, became very religious. Hardie joined a church sect that made human “free will” central and depicted Jesus as a social activist. Like many workers before him (and Tom Mann), he was also a temperance activist. So Hardie and Mann’s lives were all about self-improvement, and for a time in the mid-late 19th century this, for some workers, “fitted” with an allegiance to the Liberal Party. Hardie joined the Liberal Party, Mann did not.
Mann had met the socialists early on and was living and working in Britain’s socialist centre — London. Keir Hardie, coming from the mining district of Lanarkshire in Scotland, would share that community’s association with the Liberal Party. Lanarkshire miners’ leader Alexander MacDonald was a “Lib-Lab” MP, one of a group of trade union leaders who from 1880 onwards were accepted as Liberal candidates for Parliament, and had pledged to serve the interests of working class people. It was from this background that Hardie had to break.
Hardie became disillusioned by the “Lib-Labs” and the Liberal Party essentially because they had delivered nothing for the workers — no eight hour day, no necessary democratic reforms such as Irish Home Rule staunchly supported by Hardie and very many like him, despite sectarian divisions in Scotland.
In 1887 Hardie saw just how vicious towards the workers the bosses could be. At the end of a long strike in the Lanarkshire coalfields, the bosses brought in scabs from Glasgow along with army Hussars who raided miners’ cottages. Hardie wrote of “mounted policemen riding down inoffensive children nearly to death, and felling quiet old men with blows from a baton.”
Eventually Hardie came into contact with socialistic ideas. His great mentor was Don Roberto Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Scottish landowner, globetrotter and avowedly socialist MP! Cunninghame Graham was a longtime believer in independent working class Parliamentary politics and he hated the Liberals.
But what kind of working class politics? Even in 1888 when Hardie stood for Parliament in a by-election in Mid-Lanark, he did so as an independent Liberal. His handbills said “a vote for Hardie is a vote for Gladstone.” Yet at the same time, 1888, Hardie and Cunnighame Graham were planning to set up a Scottish Labour Party!
Labour in name, but was it socialist in its programme? The programme called for disestablishment of the Church, reform of the Civil Service, graduated income tax, free education, national insurance for workers, social housing, land reform, the eight hour day, and nationalisation of banking, railways and mineral rights. Ideologically it did not represent much of a step forward, yet it was more detailed than socialist programmes of the early 80s, and in that respect it represented the accumulation of working class struggle and experience.
Cunninghame Graham encouraged Hardie to stand in West Ham in the east London, where socialists like Tom Mann had for years organised and agitated. Caroline Benn describes how Hardie “[addressed] mass meetings throughout the area, not only at factory gates but also in local fields and streets. These meetings were where he aimed to contact the newly enfranchised poor electorate. The largest meetings, running to thousands, were at the dock gates, as workers waited for the revived version of the ‘call on’.” (Keir Hardie)
Hardie was always sure that Parliament was a useful arena for working class politics. But when he got to Parliament, attending in his home-made suit, he felt out of place among the booted and expensively suited that populated the Palace of Westminster.
Where was Tom Mann in 1892? He was also standing for election — for secretary of the engineers’ union (which he narrowly lost). Mann was still focused on organising in the unions. Having resigned in 1891 as president of the dockers’ union he was spending time on the election but also campaigning for the eight hour day, working alongside socialists such as Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx who had set up the Legal Eight Hour Day Campaign — focussing mainly on Parliament to win the demand.
Mann saw the progression of the demand slightly differently — he thought the unions could apply the pressure without necessarily fixing on Parliamentary representatives to deliver; the demand could also be taken up by socialist local government members (of which there were to be more and more).
Mann was still sceptical about Parliament, but also agreed to be member of the Royal Commission on Labour set up in 1891 to look at the conditions behind the rash of strikes in the 1889-90 period. Mann never believed that the Commission would deliver anything for the workers, yet he still wanted to press the workers’ claims.
Mann’s scepticism was rooted in his different journey to socialism, through membership of the SDF. Although the SDF had regularly stood for Parliament, they had done it as a propaganda exercise, as a way to make recruits for socialism.
On the other hand there was no way that someone like Mann would remain unaffected by the new mood for independent working-class politics. When in 1891 Mann was approached by the Colne Valley Labour Union, an important example of many similar “Labour” organisations of the time, to stand as their candidate in the 1895 election, he at first turned them down. He said, “My aim is to spread amongst workmen a knowledge of industrial economics and the channels for the diffusion of this knowledge and the trade unions and co-operative movement, especially the productive branch of co-operation… I am therefore not especially anxious to run Labour candidates for Parliament.”
Eventually, after lots more contact with the Colne Valley people, Mann agreed to stand but only on the proviso that the local workers got better organised! In April 1893 he published this “Appeal to the Yorkshire Textile Workers”.
“I dare not allow anyone to suppose that I can do anything of value to raise the standard of any district in Parliament, unless the electorate are prepared to back up any effort made with the full force of a capable and vigorous organisation. I don’t want to go into Parliament to take part in 1001 generalities signifying next to nothing, and by hiding my incompetency by blaming somebody else in Parliament for blocking Progress legislation… I shall be delighted to work with and for the Colne valley men [sic]… now they are… alive to the fact that it is essential to organise as trade unionists.”
Mann was not present at the founding conference of the ILP in January 1893.
The ILP was the culmination of different political impulses, and these are well illustrated by the different political pasts which Keir Hardie and Tom Mann brought to the new organisation. But the organisational catalyst came mainly from the Bradford Labour Union and a specific drive by the weekly Workman’s Times, whose editor Joseph Burgess had for two years been convinced of the need to organise “independent labour”. In the paper he called for a national body linking groups and individuals who were for “Labour” and for anyone interested to write in.
The groups that were already in existence included the Colne Valley Labour Union and the Scottish Labour Party, the Newcastle Labour Union and the Manchester and Salford Independent Labour Party. The Manchester group was set up by journalist Robert Blatchford, who began a newspaper which was to become enormously popular — the Clarion. The Manchester ILP people did things such as organise “cinderella clubs”, events where poor children would get good food and entertainment.
The final push for the conference was made at a meeting at the TUC conference in Glasgow in September 1892. On the arrangements committee were people like Pete Curran, an organiser for the gasworkers’ union, SDF member and London tailor James Macdonald, and Katharine Conway, a Fabian lecturer. A mixed bag indeed. As was the conference itself. Representatives — mostly from the north — of the labour unions; some “new unionists”; some Lancashire-based SDFers; the dockworkers’ leader (and now alderman on the London County Council) Ben Tillet; and Fabian George Bernard Shaw (who said the new move was premature!).
Henry Pelling describes the typical delegate. There was “a new type of political delegate — the intelligent, respectable, working trade unionist of the new labour clubs. Men [we can suppose it was mostly men, though many women were to join the ILP] of this type, young and friendly, their countenances gleaming with good humour above their loose red ties, dominated the scene. They were not politicians for politics’ sake; they were the working class in earnest, the product of the new education and the widening franchise. Their enthusiasm and discipline impressed the observers in the gallery and the reporters who crowded at the press table. They were the tangible evidence of a new factor in British politics.” (Origins of the Labour Party)
What should they call the new organisation? The Scottish Labour Party suggested the Socialist Labour Party. Katherine Conway and Joseph Burgess spoke against that, and won the day. “Socialism” was not yet the ideology of the masses, said Conway. Tillet said he “wished to capture the trade unionists of this country, a body of men well organised, who paid their money, and were Socialists at their work every day and not merely on the platform, who did not should for blood-red revolution, and when it came to revolution, sneaked under the nearest bed.”
There is not doubt that the move to establish a party that stood for “independent Labour” and would set out to break the workers from the bourgeois parties was a tremendous step forward. But what did the ILP want to achieve and what had happened to the socialist ideas? How did all these different kinds of socialists see socialism coming about? That will be the subject of the next instalment.
