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"A Party For Ordinary Blokes:" The Birth of Britain's Labour Party, 1900-1924
One of the greatest political events of 20th-century British history was the twin rise to prominence of the Labour Party and the sudden demise of the Liberal Party. This transformation occurred in the course of only a generation, and caused a prominent historian, George Dangerfield, to write, as early as 1935, his seminal work, The Strange Death of Liberal England. But just why did the Labour Party supplant the Liberal Party to become the second major political party in Britain's two-Party political system??
Well, Dangerfield makes the argument that the central reason for the Liberal Party's demise was that it stopped being the party of the left. (1) Prior to 1906, the Liberals had been the traditional party of the left, and had competed on a pretty much even-keel with the right-of-center Conservatives. In the January 1906 General Election, however, a new party - the Labour Party - emerged as a credible alternative, a new party on the left.
The Labour Party was the first socialist party in Great Britain to have any degree of success. This was partially because it wasn't all that much socialist. (2) Instead, it was a genuine working-class political party, initially formed for the sole purpose of electing working-class MPs.
The Party's roots go back to 1893, when Keir Hardie, a Scottish miner, formed the Independent Labour Party. (I.L.P.) Two years later, in the 1895 general election, it elected two MPs, one of whom was Hardie. Unfortunately, the fledging party had few financial resources and couldn't afford to undergo general election campaigns, nor afford to pay MPs (as MPs were until 1911, unpaid). Thus, on February 27, 1900, 129 delegates from the I.L.P., the Trades Unions Congress (T.U.C.), (3) the Fabian Society, (4) and other leftist and worker groups met at the Congregationalist 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). (5)
