Perhaps more than any other party, history holds a power over Labour’s present. This despite that, at a youthful 125, the Party is a relative newcomer to British politics. Labour differs from the other major parties of British history in that it was formed as an extra-parliamentary body that sought the fundamental transformation of the party system, rather than emerging out of alliances within parliament itself. (For an account of the latter, see my recent Very Short History of the Conservative Party.) Formed by outsiders, yet quickly becoming Britain’s second party of government, the Labour Party has always been an uneasy coalition, with a contested identity.
Its greatest success has been to build alliances across ideological and class lines which can produce an electorally palatable brand of social democracy, or democratic socialism depending upon one’s persuasion. But if the Labour Party has made a virtue of its ‘Broad Church’ and the compromises that it requires, those within Labour long-ago honed the knife of faction-fighting. Labour’s history is a modern political history of the United Kingdom, and one which must be understood with reference to its internal struggles.
Foundations
The Labour Party was diverse from the start. In February 1900, a conference held in the (now demolished) Congregationalist Hall on Farringdon Street, London, brought together representatives of major trade unions, the socialist Independent Labour Party (ILP), and the largely middle-class reformist socialists of the Fabian Society. The Marxist Social Democratic Federation was also a participant, though it left after only one year, eventually becoming the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. The co-operative movement, though invited to the conference, declined to participate, eventually forming the Co-operative Party to campaign for office independently. After an electoral agreement in 1927, the Co-operative Party (though remaining an independent party) began jointly sponsoring Labour MPs. Today, with 43 MPs, it is technically the fourth largest party in the House of Commons.
Delegates at the 1900 conference agreed to form the ‘Labour Representation Committee’ (LRC, which officially adopted the name ‘Labour Party’ in 1906) to secure independent representation for organised labour in parliament. This built on earlier attempts to elect working men after the franchise extensions of 1867 and 1884, which had largely taken the form of “Lib-Lab” MPs who were endorsed by both Liberals and trade unions in industrial areas. Labour representation independent of the Liberals had been an ambition of radicals and some trade unionists, and the ILP, founded in Bradford in 1893, had been an earlier attempt at this. By 1900, however, the ILP’s leadership under Keir Hardie recognised that its avowedly socialist programme was alienating liberal-minded trade unionists. From the start, then, the task of building bridges was at the core of the new Labour Party’s activity.
This process was not without difficulty, though. In the early years, there was no agreement on whether the LRC should be an independent party at all, or instead be a ginger group supporting Liberal or Conservative candidates. Trade union suspicion of the middle-class influence and opposition to the statism of socialist politicians remained a barrier to mobilising working-class support. It is worth remembering that in 1899, when the Trades Union Congress had considered the proposal to form the LRC, the motion passed in the face of significant opposition from the mining and textile unions. Despite this initial uneasiness, though, the early Party achieved an electoral breakthrough in 1906, winning 27 MPs. In large part this success was due to an anti-Conservative alliance with the Liberal Party; cooperation within Labour’s coalition was matched by cooperation outside of the Party.
Though electorally successful, and with leaders effectively articulating the concerns of organised labour in the Commons, the organisation of the Labour Party at this stage was threadbare. At a local level, trades councils (and occasionally local ILP organisations) were the Party’s only presence and (frequently in cooperation with the Liberals) selected and supported candidates for office. There were no individual Party members, and the national Party institutions – the Party’s Executive Committee and annual Party Conference – were formed of representatives of the affiliated unions and organisations. This federal model was vital to managing the unwieldy coalition the Party represented, and in surviving on limited funds in an era before MPs were paid a salary, but it also created challenges in organising campaigns.
Transformation
The First World War gave Labour its first taste of government, participating as a junior partner to the Conservatives and Lloyd George’s Liberals in the wartime coalitions from 1915-18. At the same time, the Party’s leader Arthur Henderson undertook a transformation of the Party with the support of Sidney Webb of the Fabian Society, Robert Simillie of the Miners Federation and J. H. Thomas of the National Union of Railwaymen. This consisted of both a dramatic shift in Labour’s political position – for the first time setting out an independent programme of party policy – and in the Party’s organisational structure. 1917 saw the ‘War Aims’ memorandum (proposing a League of Nations), and in 1918, Party Conference adopted resolutions which set the tone of the state-led, social democratic policy of the Party for much of the remainder of the century.
This new and distinctively ‘Labour’ political message went hand in hand with Henderson and Webb’s other project: the reshaping of the Labour Party itself. A new written Party constitution was adopted in 1918 that aimed to strengthen the Party and do away with the ‘federal’ model of organisation. Party Conference was made the supreme decision-making body and individual Labour membership became possible for the first time. Local parties, which had begun to emerge informally around 1910, were put on a formal footing, and were empowered to select candidates and run local campaigns independently of affiliated organisations. These local parties were also given seats on the National Executive and were able to elect delegates to Party Conferences. This 1918 constitution remained in place virtually unchanged for over fifty years and, though significantly reformed from the 1980s onwards, it remains the basis of the Labour Party’s governing Rule Book today.
These new structures were elaborate and were far more expansive than what came before, but they were not (and were not intended) to be a system of democratic control for members. Though the annual Party Conference was made the supreme body, in practice the Parliamentary Party was more or less free to act independently, where the leadership at Westminster could make policy and structure campaigns without the oversight of Conference. Even at Party Conference itself, trade unions held an overwhelming proportion of the vote, and the voices of local activists were marginal. The intention was clearly to manage Labour’s coalition whilst encouraging independent local activism.
These structures helped Ramsay MacDonald form a short-lived minority government after the 1923 election, now best remembered for formally recognizing the Soviet Union. Despite some disquiet within the Party, independent local organisations were secured across the 1920s, with individual Party membership rising to the hundreds of thousands by the end of the decade.
In 1931, though, Labour’s climb was jeopardised when leader Ramsay MacDonald and a small group of supporters were unable to achieve Cabinet support for a programme of spending cuts following victory in the 1929 general election and the coming of the great depression. Opposed by the rump of the Labour Party, MacDonald (to some degree prompted by the King) remained Prime Minister only with the support of the Conservative and Liberal parties. With the Labour Party subsequently expelling MacDonald, the Party was exiled to opposition and a traumatising period in the political wilderness after the newly minted National Government came to win the 1931 general election.[1]
Despite these tribulations, the strength of the local organisations that had grown in the 1920s remained, and it was through this local organisation that the Labour Party survived the National Government. Many of the wounds of what the Labour Party saw as Ramsay MacDonald’s betrayal were patched (if not fully healed) and across the 1930s and 1940s the Labour Party came to comfortably see off threats to its left. This, combined with the collapse of the Liberal Party, meant that by the outbreak of the Second World War, Labour’s status as the official opposition, if not quite a government in waiting, was well secured.
Majority government and after
The success of local organisations in the period from 1931 and the national success of Labour’s involvement in the wartime coalition were central to enabling the victory of 1945 which saw Labour form a majority government for the first time.
In the new two-party system which emerged following the War, challenges to Labour’s status as the second party in British politics increasingly came from within. There, factionalstrife between left-wing Bevanite and right-wing Gaitskellite camps hugely damaged Labour, including in the venomous row over prescription charges in 1951. This broadly left-right split has defined Labour’s internal politics ever since, though shades of opinion are and always have been more complicated that this Manichean description allows.
From the 1960s, Labour’s internal challenges were supplemented, though, by increasingly radical grassroots trade unionism, which encouraged re-examination of the Labour Party’s trade union ties on both sides. The balancing of the interests of trade union members with the leadership of the Party’s, and the press’s perception of the ‘national interest’, raised again the fundamental question of Labour’s purpose and core identity. Throughout, these battles over the very political identity of the Labour Party were expressed in disputes over its internal governance and democracy.
Who rules?
The struggle for the Party took a new turn in the 1970s when largely left-wing constituency activists railed against their relatively weak position. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), founded in 1973, became the centre of calls for a radical reshaping of the Party’s internal structures and Tony Benn became its most prominent national advocate. During the leadership of Michael Foot in the aftermath of the 1979 election defeat, many of the CLPD proposals were endorsed by Party Conference. In particular, mandatory reselection (giving local party members the opportunity to choose alternative candidates to sitting MPs) was endorsed, along with the most consequential change: the process of electing the Party leader.
Until 1981, the Party’s leader had been elected by Labour MPs, with annual votes while in opposition. Under Foot, CLPD demands for membership involvement in leadership elections were endorsed, with a new electoral college system put in place where party members, MPs, and trade union leaders each had a role in electing the leader.
The empowering of local members was not without consequence. Many senior politicians saw grassroots activists as overly enthusiastic radicals, with little interest in the practicalities of winning elections and running a government. The leftward shift and internal reforms, particularly mandatory reselection, led in 1981 to the largest split in the Party since 1931, when the ‘Gang of Four’ (Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams, and Bill Rodgers) left to establish the Social Democratic Party, which would later merge with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats.
The 1980s were a decade of intense, draining, and occasionally violent infighting, exacerbated by the Trotskyist group Militant, who pursued a tactic of entryism within the Party. Labour’s constitution proved central to this fight, with disputes over minor rule changes taking on an outsized importance in the struggle for factional influence in Party institutions. Under Neil Kinnock, John Smith, and Tony Blair, the leadership endorsed a series of constitutional reforms aimed at making the Party electable, which were largely successful in suppressing internal strife. Some of this in fact reversed Foot’s reforms – in particular, the process of mandatory reselection for MPs was weakened.
Other reforms pushed further, faster, though. Key to this was the adoption of One Member One Vote (OMOV) in 1993. This meant that parliamentary candidates would be selected by individual Party (and trade union) members, rather than by the local constituency committees. Perhaps more consequently, trade unions would no longer vote as blocks in leadership elections and instead trade union members who paid into the political fund would vote individually, reducing the power of trade union leaders. This period also saw major transformations including the adoption of certain all-women shortlists and the revising of Clause IV of the Party constitution. At the same time, more liaison forums (such as the National Policy Forum) were established to provide alternative means of managing the Labour coalition.
The process of ‘democratising’ Labour continued haltingly, including in Scotland and Wales post-devolution. In 2014, Ed Miliband pushed through totemic reforms that abolished the electoral college for electing Party Leaders in favour of a single electorate of party members, members of affiliated trade unions, and ‘registered supporters’ (non-members who paid to participate in the election). Candidates for leader needed only 10% of MPs and 5% of constituency parties to stand. This new system enabled the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015, despite only having the support of a minority of MPs. The issues with such systems have been discussed extensively by the Constitution Society elsewhere.
The future of Labour
In 2021, an attempt by the leadership to return to the pre-2014 electoral college system was successfully opposed at Party Conference, though the barrier to candidates was increased to 20% of MPs. This was a partial response to concerns in the Party and amongst commentators that the weakening of the elected Parliamentary Party was damaging to the stability of Labour’s coalition.
The Party today is a labyrinthine network of committees, fora, and boards confusing even to many Party insiders. Yet its core national institutions can be quickly enumerated. The annual Party Conference remains the supreme constitutional body, with the elected National Executive Committee managing the Party’s affairs between conferences. The National Policy Forum, a much newer innovation established by Tony Blair, manages the Party’s policymaking process. All three of these bodies include representatives for MPs, individual members, the eleven affiliated trade unions and the twenty affiliated socialist societies (a list that includes groups such as the Fabian Society and the Jewish Labour Movement). Despite occasionally frosty relations, and occasional proposals (on both sides) to sever the relationship, trade unions remain a vital part of the Labour Party’s structures. The around 3,500,000 members of affiliated trade unions dwarfs the 370,000 members of the Labour Party and trade union donations still represent a key source of Party funds.
Given the many groups who are part of Labour’s coalition, attempts at structural reform are likely to continue. However, given the bitterness of factional infighting, and the huge reputational costs that such navel-gazing imposes, particularly on a party in power, Labour’s leadership and activists alike would be well advised to let these matters rest for the moment. The status quo won’t hold forever, though. As society and politics continue to evolve, so too does the broad and frequently unwieldy political coalition of the Labour Party. The history of the Labour Party is a modern history of British politics, and one which remains unfinished.
Ed Selkirk Ford.
Ed Selkirk Ford is a PhD candidate and postgraduate teaching associate in history at the University of Exeter. He researches debates about parliaments and representation in Britain and British settler colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Constitution Society is committed to the promotion of informed debate and is politically impartial. Any views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author and not those of The Constitution Society.
[1] This was followed in 1932 by the disaffiliation of the now-marginal ILP.