Background As the nineteenth century came to a close, working-class representation in political office became a great concern for many Britons. Many who sought the election of working men and their advocates to the
Parliament of the United Kingdom saw the
Liberal Party as the main vehicle for achieving this aim. As early as 1869, a
Labour Representation League had been established to register and mobilise working-class voters on behalf of favoured Liberal candidates. Many trade unions themselves became concerned with gaining parliamentary representation to advance their legislative aims. From the 1870s a series of working-class candidates financially supported by trade unions were accepted and supported by the Liberal Party. The federation of British unions, the
Trades Union Congress (TUC), formed its own electoral committee in 1886 to further advance its electoral goals. Many
socialist intellectuals, particularly those influenced by
Christian socialism and similar notions of the ethical need for a restructuring of society, also saw the Liberals as the most obvious means for obtaining working-class representation. Within two years of its foundation in 1884, the gradualist
Fabian Society officially committed itself to a policy of permeation of the Liberal Party. A number of so-called "
Lib-Lab" candidates were subsequently elected Members of Parliament by this alliance of trade unions and
radical intellectuals working within the Liberal Party. The idea of working with the middle-class Liberal Party to achieve working-class representation in parliament was not universally accepted, however.
Marxist socialists, believing in the inevitability of
class struggle between the working class and the capitalist class, rejected the idea of workers making common cause with the
petty bourgeois Liberals in exchange for minor, palliative reform legislation. The British
orthodox Marxists established their own party, the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF), in 1881. Other socialist intellectuals, despite not sharing the concept of class struggle were nonetheless frustrated with the ideology and institutions of the Liberal Party and the secondary priority which it appeared to give to its working-class candidates. Out of these ideas and activities came a new generation of activists, including
Keir Hardie, a Scot who had become convinced of the need for independent labour politics while working as a
Gladstonian Liberal and trade union organiser in the
Lanarkshire coalfield. Working with SDF members such as
Henry Hyde Champion and
Tom Mann he was instrumental in the foundation of the
Scottish Labour Party in 1888. In 1890, the United States imposed a
tariff on foreign cloth; this led to a general cut in wages throughout the British textile industry. There followed a strike in
Bradford, the
Manningham Mills strike, which produced as a by-product the
Bradford Labour Union, an organisation which sought to function politically independently of either major political party. This initiative was replicated by others in
Colne Valley,
Halifax, Huddersfield and Salford. Such developments showed that working-class support for separation from the Liberal Party was growing in strength. Further arguments for the formation of a new party were to be found in
Robert Blatchford's newspaper
The Clarion, founded in 1891, and in ''Workman's Times'', edited by
Joseph Burgess. The latter collected some 3,500 names of those in favour of creating a party of labour independent from the existing political organisations. At the
1892 general election, held in July, three working men were elected without support from the Liberals:
Keir Hardie in
West Ham South,
John Burns in
Battersea, and
Havelock Wilson in
Middlesbrough, the last of whom actually faced Liberal opposition. Hardie owed nothing to the Liberal Party for his election, and his critical and confrontational style in Parliament caused him to emerge as a national voice of the labour movement.
Founding conference At a TUC meeting in September 1892, a call was issued for a meeting of advocates of an independent labour organisation. An arrangements committee was established and a conference called for the following January. This conference was chaired by
William Henry Drew and was held in
Bradford during 14–16 January 1893 at the Bradford Labour Institute, operated by the
Labour Church. It proved to be the foundation conference of the Independent Labour Party, and MP Keir Hardie was elected as its first chairman. About 130 delegates were in attendance at the conference, including, in addition to Hardie, such socialist and labour worthies as Alderman
Ben Tillett, author
George Bernard Shaw, and
Edward Aveling, partner of
Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor and translator of his
Das Kapital. Some 91 local branches of the Independent Labour Party were represented, joined by 11 local
Fabian Societies, four branches of the
Social Democratic Federation, and individual representatives of a number of other socialist and labour groups. The keynote address of the foundation conference was delivered by Keir Hardie, who observed that the Labour Party was "not an organisation but rather 'the expression of a great principle,' since it 'had neither programme nor constitution".
Early years The new party was founded in a social environment of great hope and expectation. However, the first few years were difficult. The direction of the party, its leadership and organisation were heavily contested and the expected electoral progress did not emerge. The party did not fare well in its first major test of national support, the
1895 general election. With the NAC taking a lead in organising the
party's contests, and with finance tight just 28 candidates ran under the ILP banner. A special conference decided that support could be given to either ILP or SDF candidates, which brought a further four contests into the picture. None was elected, however, with even the popular party leader Keir Hardie going to defeat in a straight fight with the Conservatives. The electoral debacle of 1895 marked an end to the unbridled optimism which had attended the party's foundation. From its beginning, the ILP was never a homogeneous unit, but rather attempted to act as a "
big tent" party of the working class, advocating a rather vague and amorphous socialist agenda. Historian Robert E. Dowse has observed: "From the beginning the ILP attempted to influence the trade unions to back a working-class political party: they sought, as
Henry Pelling states: 'collaboration with trade unionists with the ultimate object of tapping trade union funds for the attainment of Parliamentary power.' The socialism of the ILP was ideal for achieving this end; lacking as it did any real
theoretical basis it could accommodate practically anything a trade unionist was likely to demand. Fervent and emotional, the socialism of the ILP could accommodate, with only a little strain,
temperance reform,
Scottish nationalism,
Methodism,
Marxism,
Fabian gradualism, and even a variety of
Burkean conservatism. Although the mixture was a curious one, it did have the one overwhelming virtue of excluding nobody on
dogmatic grounds, a circumstance, on the left and at the time, which cannot be lightly dismissed." In a party of loose and diverse opinions, the essential nature of the organisation and its programme would always remain a matter of debate. Initial decisions about party organisation were rooted in an idea of strict democracy. These arguments did have some impact, as the conference held to set policy prior to the 1895 general election and the abolition of the position of party "President" in 1896 testified to the power of such arguments. Nonetheless, the NAC came to possess considerable power over the party's activities, including hegemonistic control over crucial matters such as electoral decisions and relations with other parties. The electoral defeat of 1895 hastened the establishment of centralising and anti-democratic practices of this kind. In the last years of the 19th century, four figures emerged on the NAC who remained at the centre of the party shaping its direction for the next 20 years. In addition to the beloved party leader Keir Hardie came the Scot
Bruce Glasier, elected to the NAC in 1897 and succeeding Hardie as Chairman in 1900;
Philip Snowden, an evangelical socialist from the
West Riding, and
Ramsay MacDonald, whose adhesion to the ILP had been secured in the wake of his disillusionment with the Liberal Party over its rejection of a trade unionist candidate in the
1894 Sheffield Attercliffe by-election. While there were substantial personal tensions between the four, they shared a fundamental view that the party should seek alliance with the unions and rather than an ideology-based socialist unity with the
Marxist Social Democratic Federation. Following the failure of 1895, this leadership became reluctant to overextend the party by running in too many electoral races. By 1898 the decision was formally made to restrict electoral contests to those where a reasonable performance could be expected rather than putting forward as many candidates as possible to maximise exposure for the party and to accumulate a maximum total vote. The relationship with the trade unions was also problematic. In the 1890s the ILP was lacking in alliances with the trade union organisations. Individual
rank and file trade unionists could be persuaded to join the party out of a political commitment shaped by their industrial experiences, but connection with top leaderships was lacking. The ILP played a central role in the formation of the
Labour Representation Committee in 1900, and when the
Labour Party was formed in 1906, the ILP immediately affiliated to it. This affiliation allowed the ILP to continue to hold its own conferences and devise its own policies, which ILP members were expected to argue for within the Labour Party. In return, the ILP provided a good part of Labour's activist base during its early years.
The party matures , Bristol headquarters of the ILP in the early 20th century The emergence and growth of the Labour Party, a federation of trade unions with the socialist intellectuals of the ILP, helped its constituent parts develop and grow. In contrast to the
Orthodox Marxism of the SDF and its even more orthodox offshoots like the
Socialist Labour Party and the
Socialist Party of Great Britain, the ILP had a loose and inspirational flavour that made it relatively more easy to attract newcomers.
Victor Grayson recalled a 1906 campaign in the
Colne Valley which he was proud to have conducted "like a religious revival," without reference to specific political problems. Future party chairman
Fenner Brockway later recounted the revivalist mood of the gatherings of his local ILP branch gathering in 1907: "On Sunday nights a meeting was conducted rather on the lines of the
Labour Church Movement—we had a small voluntary orchestra, sang Labour songs and the speeches were mostly Socialist
evangelism, emotion in denunciation of injustice, visionary in their anticipation of a new society." While this inspirational presentation of socialism as a
humanitarian necessity made the party accessible as a sort of
secular religion or a means for the practical implementation of Christian principles in daily life, it bore with it the great weakness of being non-analytical and thus comparatively shallow. It also offered a political home for some of the women's franchise movement in the UK, the Liverpool branch appointing
Alice Morrissey as the branch secretary (1907–08) and first female delegate to a regional Labour Representative Committee. As the movement for women's suffrage grew, the ILP had engaged with the non-militant suffragists, for example,
Mary H. J. Henderson, Parliamentary Secretary for the Scottish Women's Suffrage Societies, chaired a joint meeting with ILP, with
Ethel Snowden as key speaker in Dundee in 1914. As the historian John Callaghan has noted, in the hands of Hardie, Glasier, Snowden and MacDonald socialism was little more than "a vague protest against injustice." However, in 1909 the ILP laid the basis for the production of agitational material with the establishment of the
National Labour Press. Still, the relationship between the ILP and the Labour Party was characterised by conflict. Many ILP members viewed the Labour Party as being too timid and moderate in their attempts at social reform, detached as it was from the socialist objective during its first years. Consequently, in 1912 came a split in which many ILP branches and a few leading figures, including
Leonard Hall and
Russell Smart, chose to amalgamate with the SDF of
H. M. Hyndman in 1912 to found the
British Socialist Party. Until 1918, individuals could only join the Labour Party through an affiliated body, the most significant of which were the Fabian Society and the ILP. As a result, particularly from 1914, many individuals – particularly ones formerly active in the
Liberal Party – joined the ILP, in order to become active in the Labour Party. While affiliated body membership was not required after 1918, the presence of MacDonald and other leading Labour Party figures in the ILP's leadership meant many converts to the Labour Party continued to join through the ILP, a process which continued until about 1925. The
rank and file membership of the party as well as its leadership were pacifist, now as ever, having held from the beginning that war was "sinful". The guns of August 1914 shook every left organisation in Britain. As one observer later put it: "Hyndman and
Cunningham Graham,
Thorne and
Clynes had sought peace while it endured, but now that war had come, well, Socialists and Trade Unionists, like other people had got to see it through." With respect to the Labour Party, most of the members of the organisation's executive as well as most of the 40 Labour MPs in Parliament lent their support to the recruiting campaign for the
Great War. Only one section held aloof—the Independent Labour Party. The ILP's insistence on standing by its long-held ethically based objections to
militarism and war proved costly both in terms of its standing in the eyes of the general public as well as its ability to hold sway over the politicians who ran under its banner. A stream of its old Members of Parliament left the party over the ILP's refusal to support the British war effort. Among those breaking ranks were
George Nicoll Barnes,
J. R. Clynes,
James Parker,
George Wardle and
G. H. Roberts. During the war the ILP's criticism of militarism was somewhat muted by public condemnation and periodic episodes of physical violence, which included a wild scene on 6 July 1918, during which an agitated group of discharged soldiers rushed an ILP meeting being addressed by Ramsay MacDonald in the
Abbey Wood section of London. Stewards at the door of the ILP meeting were overpowered by the mob, who in what was described as a "riotous scene" broke chairs and wielded their parts as weapons, seizing the auditorium and dispersing the socialists into the night. The conservative leadership of the ILP, notably
Ramsay MacDonald and
Philip Snowden, strongly opposed affiliation to the new Comintern. In opposition to them the radical wing of the ILP organised itself as a formal faction called the Left Wing Group of the ILP in an effort to move the ILP into the Communist International. The faction began to produce its own bi-weekly newspaper called
The International, a four-page
broadsheet published in Glasgow, and sent greetings to the conference which established a
Communist Party of Great Britain, although they did not attend. In July 1920 the fledgling Comintern gave an unequivocal reply: while the presence of communists inside the organisation was acknowledged, and their membership in a new Communist Party welcomed, there would be no joint organisation with those like "the Fabians,
Ramsay MacDonald, and
Snowden" who had previously made use of "the musty atmosphere of parliamentary work" and "petty concessions and compromises" on behalf of the labour movement: [T]hese leaders have lost touch with the wide unskilled masses, with the toiling poor, they have become oblivious of the growth of capitalist exploitation and of the revolutionary aims of the proletariat. It seemed to them that because the capitalists treated them as equals, as partners in their transactions, the working class had secured equal rights with capital. Their own social standing secure and material position improved, they looked upon the world through the rose-coloured spectacles of a peaceful middle-class life. Disturbed in their peaceful trading with the representatives of the bourgeoisie by the revolutionary strivings of the proletariat they were the convinced enemies of the revolutionary aims of the proletariat. The ECCI instead made its appeal directly to "the communists of the Independent Labour Party", noting that "the revolutionary forces of England are split up" and urging them to unite with communist members of the
British Socialist Party, the
Socialist Labour Party, and radical groups in
Wales and
Scotland. "The emancipation of the British working class and of the working class of the whole world depends upon the Communist elements of England forming a single Communist Party", the ECCI declared. The agitation for affiliation to the Third International of Moscow came to a head in 1921 at the annual conference of the ILP. There an overwhelming vote of the party's branches voted not to affiliate with the Third International. This decision was followed by the exit of the defeated radical faction, which immediately joined the CPGB.
The ILP and Labour Party governments (1922–1931) At the
1922 general election several ILP members became MPs (including future ILP leader
James Maxton) and the party grew in stature. The ILP provided many of the new Labour MPs, including
John Wheatley,
Emanuel Shinwell,
Tom Johnston and
David Kirkwood. However, the
first Labour government, returned to office in 1924, proved to be hugely disappointing to the ILP. This came despite 30% of the cabinet holding ILP membership; of the most prominent of these figures, Ramsay MacDonald was removed as editor of the ILP's
Socialist Review in 1925, and Philip Snowden resigned from the ILP in 1927.
1928 policy conferences The ILP's response to the first Labour government was to devise its own programme for government. Throughout 1928, the ILP developed a "Socialism in Our Time" platform, largely formulated by
H. N. Brailsford,
John A. Hobson and
Frank Wise. Increasing the unemployment allowance and switching to bulk purchasing were to be done in the conventional way, but the method of paying the living wage differed from Labour practices. The ILP criticised the "Continental" method of paying wage allowances from employers' pools, which had been implemented in 1924 by
Rhys Davies. as it lost adherents to the Labour Party, the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the
Trotskyists. Some members of the ILP who had chosen to remain within the Labour Party were instrumental in creating the
Socialist League, while the majority of Scottish members left to form the
Scottish Socialist Party and members in Northern Ireland left
en masse to form the
Socialist Party of Northern Ireland. In 1934 a breakaway group in the Northwest of England left to form the
Independent Socialist Party. The remaining ILP membership tended to be young and radical. They were particularly active in supporting the
Republican side in the
Spanish Civil War, and around twenty-five members and sympathisers, including
George Orwell, went to Spain as members of an
ILP Contingent of volunteers to assist the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (
POUM), a sister party to the ILP in the
Three-and-a-Half International. From the mid-1930s onwards the ILP also attracted the attention of the Trotskyist movement, and various Trotskyist groups worked within it, notably the
Marxist Group, of which
C. L. R. James,
Denzil Dean Harber and
Ted Grant were members. There was also a group of ILP members, the
Revolutionary Policy Committee, who were sympathetic to the CPGB and eventually left to join that party. From the late 1930s the ILP had the support of several key figures in the tiny Pan-Africanist movement in Britain, including
George Padmore and
Chris Braithwaite, as well as left-wing writers such as
George Orwell,
Reginald Reynolds and
Ethel Mannin. In 1939 the ILP wrote to the Labour Party requesting reaffiliation subject to a right to advocate its own policies where it had a "conscientious objection" to Labour policy. Labour refused to agree to this condition, stating that its usual rules for affiliation could not be waived for the ILP.
World War II and beyond As in 1914, the ILP opposed
World War II on ethical grounds, and turned to the left. One aspect of its leftist policies in this period was that it opposed the war-time truce between the major parties and actively contested Parliamentary elections. One such contest, the
Cardiff East by-election in 1942, resulted in the bizarre situation that the local Labour and Communist machinery campaigned against ILP candidate
Fenner Brockway in favour of a Conservative. The ILP still had some significant strength at the end of the war, but it went into crisis shortly afterwards. At the 1945 general election it retained three MPs, all in Glasgow, although only one of them had a Labour opponent. Its conference rejected calls to reaffiliate to the Labour Party. A major blow came in 1946 when the party's best known public spokesman,
James Maxton MP, died. The ILP narrowly held his seat in the
1946 Glasgow Bridgeton by-election (against a Labour opponent). However, all its MPs defected to Labour at various stages in 1947, and the party was roundly defeated at the
1948 Glasgow Camlachie by-election, in a seat it had won easily only three years earlier. The party was never again able to win a significant vote in a parliamentary election. Despite these blows, the ILP continued. Throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s it pioneered
opposition to nuclear weapons and sought to publicise ideas such as workers' control. It also maintained links with the remnants of its fraternal groups, such as the POUM, who were in exile, as well as campaigning for decolonisation. In the 1970s, the ILP reassessed its views on the Labour Party, and in 1975 it renamed itself
Independent Labour Publications and became a
pressure group inside Labour. ==List of chairs==