Labour Party history

Articles about the history of the British Labour Party

How Connolly became a socialist

James Connolly was born in poverty in the Edinburgh slum of Cowgate in 1868 to Irish parents. His father, John, was a manure carter for the Edinburgh Corporation and his mother, Mary, a domestic servant. Cowgate was part of a “little Ireland” ghetto in Edinburgh, politically dominated by the Irish National League (linked to the pro-Home Rule Irish Parliamentary Party) and the influence of the local clergy. Some Irish workers found a niche in the local garment trade, and their relative advantage over poorer Scottish labourers generated a cross-class national solidarity with the Irish middle...

How councillors could fight the cuts

Councils lost about a quarter of their funding during the 2010-15 Tory and Lib-Dem coalition government. Now they face the same order of attack again. Libraries, social care, and all community services beyond the minimum councils are legally compelled to do face futher chops. Either Labour finds a new approach, or Labour councils will be reduced even more to local administrators of the Tories’ demolition job on our communities. Discussions and debates in local Momentum meetings have showed majorities saying that Labour councillors should refuse to make cuts, defy the Tories’ plans, and help...

The Ice-pick again?

According to Stephen Bush in the New Statesman, the Labour Party machine’s spate of expulsions and bannings in the run-up to the leadership election which Jeremy Corbyn won was talked about as “Operation Ice-pick”. The name echoes the sick in-jokes popular among leaders of the Labour student organisation in the 1970s and 80s; they admired the Stalinist assassin who used an ice-pick to kill Leon Trotsky in 1940. Bush reported that “Twitter [was] ablaze with activists who believe they have been kicked out because they are supporters of Jeremy Corbyn”. The purge was not systematic. According to...

Build a Labour youth movement!

Since the late 1980s, the Labour Party has had only a token youth movement. Yet throughout working-class history, the energy of younger activists has always been the first essential for a dynamic labour movement. History suggests that the new Labour leaders could more or less at will transform Young Labour into a lively movement. They should change the rules to give a democratic breath of life to Young Labour, and openly campaign to build it. Even if the leaders drag their feet, there will be local openings now for building lively constituency Young Labour groups. As Michelle Webb reported in...

Organise Labour's newcomers! Remake the party!

The trade unions and the working class have re-taken the Labour Party! An enormous beginning has been made to regain the working-class representation in Parliament that in the years since the Blairite coup in 1994 has been more or less absent. That is the fundamental meaning of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader on 12 September. The influx of 150,000 new members — including individual members politically activated by the trade unions — has the same meaning, as well as being a tremendous expression of the hunger for a radical alternative to both the Tories and the Blairite Labour...

The "mandatory reselection" panic

The Guardian on 6 September tried to stir up panic by claiming that "Jon Lansman, a Corbyn supporter who acts as the spokesman for the Bennite Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), is planning to table a motion at the party conference calling for the reintroduction of... mandatory reselection of MPs", as a plan for "weeding out MPs opposed to the hard left". The facts are as follows. In 1979 Labour conference changed the rules so that Labour MPs, once elected, did not automatically remain Labour candidates in their constituencies for life. They could be chosen election after election...

Getting things wrong

Some delegates at the Labour Party special conference on 12 September estimated that maybe a majority of those in the hall were unhappy about Jeremy Corbyn being elected Labour leader. Among ourselves, in Workers’ Liberty, we consider it tacky to applaud “leaders”; indeed, we have a rule banning such applause at our conferences. In the Labour Party, it is reckoned routine courtesy to give standing ovations to leaders. But many in the hall, so I’m told, could only bring themselves to clap politely. Unlike in the 1980s, we have a Labour Party where the rank and file members are on average to the...

The lefts we've had and the left we want

The Labour Party has always had left wings, more or less organised, more or less diffuse. The thing is, up to now, they have always been defeated. A look at the history tells us what we need from a new left. In a way the Labour Party’s founding (as the Labour Representation Committee, in 1900) was a high point for the Labour left. The left wing was embodied in affiliated sub-parties, able to operate regular party structures of their own, without witch-hunts or bans. Until 1918 the Labour Party had no individual members: it was a federation of trade unions (only a minority of unions at first...

How the Labour Party began

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. The trade unions expressed themselves politically by serving as the arms and legs of one or other of these parties — usually the Liberals, though in an area such as Lancashire and Cheshire where the employers were strongly liberal the trade unions might retort to this by supporting the Tories! The political prospect of the...

The Last Time the Labour MPs Revolted Against Party Democracy

At its Scarborough conference in 1960, the Labour Party voted in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. This decision had tremendous implications for British politics, for it opened a fundamental breach in Labour-Tory foreign and 'defence' policy bipartisanship, one of the pillars on which class collaboration rests and on which depends the possibility of orderly changes in party government at Westminster. British unilateral nuclear disarmament implied the disruption of NATO and probably British withdrawal from the western military alliances all of which relied on nuclear weapons...

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