Although the Labour Party's roots can be traced back further, the direct predecessor of the Party, the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.), was founded in 1893 by Keir Hardie, a Scottish miner, and others for the purpose of electing working-class Members of Parliament (MPs). In the 1895 General Election, it elected two MPs, one of whom was Hardie. Unfortunately the fledling Party had few financial resources and could not afford to undergo General Election campaigns, nor afford to pay MPs.
[1] Thus on February 27, 1900, 129 delegates from the organization, the Trade Unions Congress (T.U.C.)
[2], the Fabian Society
[3], and other leftist organizations and worker groups met at the Congregationist Memorial Hall in London and created the Labour Representative Committee (L.R.C.) in order to facilitate the election of MPs sympathetic to the working class cause(s).
[4]
The organization was founded in a rather disadvantageous political climate. Britain was in the midst of fighting the Boer War in South Africa, which the Party strenuously opposed. Although the British initially lost, they emerged victorious after the capture of Ladysmith and other important South African cities. At that moment, the Conservative Government decided to call a General Election
[5] at which they scored an electoral landslide, winning 402 seats to the Liberal's 184. Labour only returned 2 MPs.
[6]Aside from generalities about war, the Party was uninterested in foreign affairs before 1914. The Party's 1906 Election Manifesto, [7] an extremely terse document devoted only a half-sentence out of 17 to the broad subject of international and defense policy. It read: "Wars are [being] fought to make the rich richer, and underfed school children are still [being] neglected." [8] Even so, not a word was written on what Britain's foreign policy should have been; only insinuations were made that wars were a higher priority than the feeding of school children.
This lack of interest was because industrial and labor concerns were considered more important than foreign policy in the pre-war period. These were the issues which the Party was originally founded to address, not foreign policy. Yet foreign realities forced the Labour Party to move away from its original narrow parochialism. As Wilhelmine Germany began to rearm and threaten the peace, members of the Party started to become interested in foreign policy.
Some supported the British Government's [Herbert Asquith's Liberal Government] rearmament plans. Others, like George Lansbury, a I.L.P. member, who co-sponsored the famous "War Against War" resolution at a Second International [9] meeting in 1910, clung onto their pacifist ideals. The resolution read as follows:
