Labour policy—false and true

There are two great Labour organizations: the Trades Union Congress, with its Executive, the General Council, which represents the industrial wing; and the Labour Party, with its National Executive or Executive Committee, representing the political wing. The distinction between industry and politics—at no time kept clear—is fast disappearing.

Origin of the Labour Party

The Labour Party dates from 1900—when the Labour Representation Committee was formed on the initiative of the Trades Union Congress, the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society. Of 15 Committee candidates who ran at the subsequent General Election of 1900, 2 were returned—the late Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Richard Bell—9 Trade Unionist members being also returned, but not under the auspices of the Committee. Before 1900 prominent Trade Unionists had stood individually for Parliament, and had, from time to time, been elected. The first effective steps had been taken in that direction by the Labour Representation League established in 1869, after the Reform Act of 1868. In 1874, 13 candidates went to election, and the first two “Labour members” were elected, one being the late Right Hon. Thomas Burt. In 1880, 3 were returned; in 1885,11; in 1892,14; in 1895,12. The successful Labour candidates stood on an industrial and not a “Socialist ticket”; where Socialists did stand they received scanty support. At the election of 1885, the Social Democratic Federation ran a candidate in Kennington and one in Hampstead: the former polled only 32 votes, the latter 29.

In 1886, the Labour Representation League having been dissolved, the Electoral Labour Committee was constituted by the Trades Union Congress. It soon fell under the influence of the Liberal Party, and this led to Mr. Keir Hardie’s campaign, opened at the Swansea Trades Union Congress in 1887, for an independent Parliamentary Party representing Labour. Mr. Keir Hardie himself fought Mid-Lanark as an Independent Labour candidate in 1888 unsuccessfully, but was returned for South-West Ham in 1892. At his instance the Independent Labour Party was founded in 1893; it sent 28 candidates to the poll in 1895, with no success. But the political activity of the Independent Labour Party soon roused the Trades Union Congress. In 1899, at the Plymouth Conference, the Congress passed a resolution directing its Parliamentary Committee to arrange a conference of Trade Unions, Co-operative and Socialist Societies, to secure the return of an increased number of Labour members to Parliament. As part of the machinery the Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1900.

The constitution of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 was as follows: 41 Trade Unions, with a membership of 353,070 members; 7 Trades Councils; 3 Socialist Societies, adding a further membership of 22,861, making a total of 375,931. At bye-elections between the General Elections of 1900 and 1906, three prominent candidates of the Labour Representation Committee were elected: Mr. (now Sir) David Shackleton for Clitheroe, the late Mr. Will Crooks for Woolwich, and Mr. (now the Right Hon.) Arthur Henderson for Barnard Castle. The Newcastle Trades Union Congress of 1903 passed a strong resolution enjoining political independence, and instituted a parliamentary fund. At the General Election in 1906, out of 50 candidates sponsored by the Labour Representation Committee, which in that year re-christened itself “the Labour Party,” 29 were elected. Under the chairmanship of Mr. Keir Hardie, the Parliamentary Labour Party was immediately established with all the paraphernalia of a separate political party in the House of Commons. At the General Election of January 1910, out of 78 candidates, 40 were elected; at that of December 1910, out of 56 candidates, 42 were elected; at that of December 1918, out of 392 candidates, 59 were elected. At the last election in 1918, with a total vote in Great Britain of 9,690,109, 2,375,202 were polled by Labour.

Reconstitution in 1918

At the Labour Party Conference at Nottingham in January 1918, a revised constitution was proposed, which was ultimately adopted in London at the Party Conference on February 26 of the same year. The case for the new constitution was put before the Nottingham Conference by the Secretary to the Executive Committee, the Right Hon. Arthur Henderson, in these words: “It was no use the Executive using anything in the nature of a social programme or talking about building up a new social order and reconstructing society until they had taken into very careful consideration their present position as an organized political force. They had done so, and came to the unanimous conclusion that Labour, as politically organized in the existing circumstances, was altogether inadequate to the great task that lay immediately before it. They had never in the proper sense claimed to be a national political party. This limitation was inherited from the resolution carried at the Trades Union Congress in Plymouth in 1899. They were a political federation consisting of Trade Unions, Socialist bodies and Co-operative Societies, but in recent years they had developed what were called Local Labour Parties.” Mr. Henderson said the real question to be decided was whether, for the purposes of best attaining political power and of so advancing its party programme, the Labour Party should scrap the whole of its existing political machinery and build up a political organization from a new foundation depending only upon individual membership. “Speaking as an old electioneerer,” he continued, “he did not mind saying that if they had to begin afresh that would be the ideal at which he would aim, but in view of the close proximity of a general election he could imagine no greater mistake than to attempt to create a new organization based solely upon individual membership.” The Party ultimately decided to adhere to the existing scheme of a central industrial federation, but to graft on to it such a form of electoral constituency organization, linked up with the Local Labour Parties or Trades Councils, as would bring the federation and the constituencies into close contact with the Annual Conference and the National Executive of the Labour Party.

In the new constitution the Party thus expressed its intention:

The new constitution maintains the Party as an industrial federation of Trade Unions, Socialist Societies, Trades Councils, and Local Labour Parties; but it establishes the principle of individual membership of the Party through membership of the local organization. Every man and woman, therefore, may now join a Local Labour Party. It is intended to form a Labour Party in every parliamentary constituency, as a unit of organization to which Trade Union local branches and Local Trade Councils, Co-operative, Socialist, and other such societies will be affiliated, and to which each individual local supporter of the Labour Party will adhere. Every candidate for Parliament must be chosen or approved by the local organization and accepted by the National Executive. He must stand as a Labour candidate, and, if elected, must agree to act in harmony with the constitution and standing orders of the Party, and accept the decisions of Party meetings. He must include in his electoral address those issues defined by the National Executive as the Labour Party’s programme for the election.

The official adherence of the Co-operative movement to the political Labour Party is rather interesting. For many years when motions were brought forward in the Annual Co-operative Congress in favour of the Co-operative movement taking up political activity, these resolutions were invariably rejected by overwhelming majorities. However, in 1918, at an emergency conference of the Co-operative movement in London on October 16 and 17, it was decided to take political action. The reasons which led the Co-operative movement to this decision were taxation of Co-operative dividends, the alleged neglect of the Government to make greater use of the Co-operative movement in dealing with the national food supply, and alleged unfair treatment of the staffs of the distributive societies under the Military Service Acts.

For the year 1917, prior to its reconstitution, the Labour Party’s membership was as follows:

making a total affiliated membership of 2,465,131, which also included the membership of the Co-operative and Women’s Labour League affiliations. For the year 1920, the membership of the Labour Party was 122 Trade Unions, with a total membership of 4,317,537, 492[1] affiliated Trades Councils and Local Labour Parties, 5 Socialist Societies, representing a membership of 42,270, making a total membership of 4,359,807, which also included the membership of the Co-operative and Women’s Labour League affiliations.

The Socialist Societies are the Fabian Society, which, in 1921, returned a membership of 1,770; the Herald League with a membership of 500; the Independent Labour Party with a membership of 35,000; the Jewish Socialist Party (Poale Zion) with a membership of 3,000; the Social Democratic Federation with a membership of 2,000.

By the accounts of the Party the total receipts for the year ending December 31, 1920, were £62,000 odd, of which £49,000 represented affiliation fees.

The Trades Union Congress

Turning from the Labour Party to the Trades Union Congress, “Labour’s Annual Parliament,” this, when founded in 1868, consisted of 34 delegates, representing about 20 societies with an affiliated membership of 118,367. In 1919, although all Trade Unions were not included, it had grown to 851 delegates, representing 266 Unions and an affiliated membership of 5,283,676. In 1921 it consisted of 810 delegates representing a membership of 6,417,910. It may now be taken to represent industrially the organized labour of Great Britain, and has the largest Trade Union affiliated membership in the world.

The Trades Union Congress must be distinguished from the General Federation of Trade Unions which was created under its auspices in 1899—now representing an affiliated membership of about 1½ millions—and the chief object of which is to maintain Trade Union rights, and to assist financially or otherwise affiliated Unions involved in disputes with employers or employers’ organizations.

The National Joint Council

A scheme for co-ordination of Labour forces was recently worked out by a Joint Co-ordination Committee representing the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress and the Executive Committee of the Labour Party. A National Joint Council has been constituted representing the General Council of the Trades Union Congress, the Executive Committee of the Labour Party and the Parliamentary Labour Party. Its duties are to consider all questions affecting the Labour movement as a whole, and to make provision for immediate action on questions of national emergency, and to endeavour to secure a common policy and joint action, whether by legislation or otherwise, on all questions affecting the workers as producers, consumers or citizens. The expenditure of the Council is met in equal proportions by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress and the Executive Committee of the Labour Party. The scheme also provides for the establishment, under joint control of the General Council and of the National Executive, of four departments organized to deal with research and information, international affairs, publicity and legal matters. In the memorandum which recommended the scheme for the National Joint Committee, it was pointed out that in view of the enormous growth of the Labour movement and the importance of presenting a united front upon the great problems which lie before it, the need for co-ordination was becoming daily more important. “If Labour is to realize its ideals it must formulate a common policy and secure the maximum of common action. The effectiveness of the Labour movement has in the past been dissipated by overlapping functions, by duplication of effort, and by confusion arising from conflicting policies.” The scheme is described as one which enables Labour to speak with one voice on all questions of national importance, and to pursue one uniform policy in support of its common ends.

The Parliamentary Labour Party

What the Parliamentary Labour Party is, must also be explained. In 1906, 29 Labour members were, we have seen, returned to Parliament; they were then constituted into a distinct Parliamentary party, Mr. J. Keir Hardie, M.P., being elected Chairman, and a Vice-Chairman, Secretary and Whips being also appointed. It is the practice of the Parliamentary Party at the beginning of each session to review the resolutions passed at the various conferences of the Labour Party and to take them as indicating the principles on which the Parliamentary Party should proceed. About the commencement of the session there is a joint meeting between the Parliamentary Party and the National Executive of the Labour Party for the purposes of deciding the various objects in respect of which Bills should be introduced into Parliament or motions made. A general review of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s activity since 1906 will be found in the Labour Year Books for 1916 and 1919.

The Labour Party, a Class Party

The Labour Party claims to be “the true national democratic party” in challenge of the old party system. It recommends itself to the electorate as “the party of the producers, whose labour of hand and brain provides the necessities of life for all and dignifies and elevates human existence,” “Producers have been robbed,” it says, “of the major parts of the fruits of their industry under the individualist system of capitalist production; and that is justification for the Party’s claims.”

The constitution of the Labour Party when examined definitely disproves the contention that the Party either is or ever can be, while that constitution lasts, a national democratic political party. By a political party one understands, according to our British traditions, a party whose members are united in support of common political principles, and not a party whose object is to advance its own material interests. Whatever the Labour Party may call itself, it is in fact a class party—that appears clearly from its history. Up to 1900, when the Labour Representation Committee was constituted, it was definitely Trade Unionist in its organization. In 1900, as has been shown, seven local Trades Councils were, for the first time, brought in along with three Socialist Societies, but they only accounted for 22,861 out of 375,931 affiliated membership. Between 1900 and the revision of the constitution in 1918, the Party was obviously still comprised, in the main, of industrial Trade Unionists. Individual members were, as has been explained, nominally introduced into the Party in 1918, by throwing membership open to members of Local Labour Parties and Trade Councils. It is impossible, because the Labour Party has not the figures itself, to give any comparison between the number of individual members of Local Labour Parties and Trades Councils who are not Trade Unionists and the 4,317,537 members of the affiliated Trade Unions in 1920. But one thing is quite clear—the individual member is wholly swamped by the Trade Unions’ membership and power. If the accounts of the Labour Party are examined for 1920, it will be found that of the total affiliation fees of £49,000, only about £1,382 is contributed by Trades Councils and Local Labour Parties, which include a certain number of individual members, and £524 from five Socialist bodies; so that practically the whole of the income of the Labour Party comes from the Trade Unions; they naturally exercise the right to dictate policy and run the Party machine. When it comes to the selection of the local Parliamentary candidate, if a Local Labour Party or Trades Council runs a candidate they must themselves provide for the whole expenses of the election, and that puts a serious difficulty in their way; on the other hand, if a Trade Union selects a candidate it is enabled, by means of its parliamentary levy, to pay the whole costs of his election. As a result, in the great number of cases, Trade Unionist candidates, with the financial backing of their Unions, are accepted as Local Labour candidates—true carpet-baggers in the real sense of the term, and probably wholly unknown to the district. One may learn from experience the basis on which the Trade Unions select candidates. It is considered a matter of prime importance by every Union to have members of its own in Parliament, and its first consideration is whether he is a sound and trusty member of his particular organization. As it is considered essential that only men should be selected by a Union who have an intimate knowledge of the working of the Union, the branch secretary or the district delegate or district secretary or a member of the executive or the general secretary of the Union is generally chosen, and he, it should be noted, is picked out, not for his political experience or enthusiasm, but as a trusty protagonist of his own trade body; he, therefore, goes into Parliament primarily to advance the industrial interests of his own particular Union and, so far as is compatible with that, of Labour in general. This needs clearly to be understood by the general public of this country. The Labour Party has no right to protest against those who would institute a campaign against it on the ground that the Labour movement, as at present constituted, is definitely class and sectarian in its objects. There is ample justification for that attack in the Labour Party’s own pamphlet Trade Unionism and Political Action. The Labour Party will not for a very long time, if ever, be a Party solely of individual membership; that would mean that the Party would have to cut itself off from the enforced contributions of affiliated Trade Unions, and rely upon the voluntary contributions of its individual members.

The Labour Party prides itself on being the party of brotherhood—an admirable sentiment, one too seldom encountered in the industrial world to-day. We are entitled to test such a profession by examining to what extent the spirit of fraternity operates amongst the 122 different Trade Unions which are members of the Party. If any one part of the community is torn by internecine strife it most certainly is the Trade Union section. Consider for example the question of demarcation of work. If we take trades like those of the shipwrights and the joiners, they are separated by thin divisions; so much so that in one port shipwrights do work which in another port is done by joiners. If anywhere there is the least invasion by one trade into the work of the other the most unbrotherly struggles ensue, resulting almost invariably in one Union or the other calling their respective members out and so stopping work in the port. Time after time during the war I had the fitting out or refitting of urgently needed vessels held up by these kinds of fratricidal disputes. Again, take trades like engineers, members of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and plumbers, members of the Plumbers’ Union—between them there is the most bitter animosity. Certain pipes on board ship are, according to the custom of the port, bent and fitted by the members of one Union, and certain other pipes, possibly of the same material but a little larger or smaller, or of the same size but of a different material, are bent and fitted by members of the other Union. After the Jutland fight, I had most vital naval repairs held up owing to the whole of the engineers in one large district going on strike because plumbers had been put on to bore a few holes in the outer casings of searchlights, as there were no available engineers to do the work. Instances might be multiplied indefinitely of this industrial enmity which is to form the basis of the new political brotherhood. We have again the perennial dispute between the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the National Union of Railwaymen in respect of the men in the railway engineering shops, or the acrimonious controversy, growing in intensity, between the General Workers’ Union, representing the unskilled or semi-skilled men, and the Amalgamated Engineering Union. The former Union asserts the right of an engineering employer to promote its members from the job of general labourer “on the floor” to work semi-automatic or other similar machines “in the shop,” which without question the man is usually quite competent to do; on the other hand the Amalgamated Engineering Union, or its district committee, claims that no person, however competent, can be put on to work any of those machines unless he is a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and receives in respect of the work the prescribed rates of pay. So then we have this curious paradox that the Labour Party, which knows that there exists, and is quite incapable of extinguishing, this spirit of industrial hostility amongst the various sections of its Trade Union membership, still professes its ability to instil and enforce the spirit of social brotherhood throughout the whole electorate. “By their works ye shall know them,” The truth of the matter is that the sole cohesive political force which the Labour Party can exert, apart from the Trade Unions’ industrial compulsion on their members, are the promises of better times, less work, more time for leisure, more money to spend, by the abolition of what it calls the “capitalistic” or private employer, and the suggestion that thereby there will be some fund of money made available for distribution amongst the members of the Party.

The Party’s Want of Leadership

What about the Labour Party’s leaders? Labour undoubtedly possesses outstanding men of tried experience, ability and judgment, and others, untried as yet, but of equal capacity and ability. I had the good fortune during the war of serving at different times directly under the Right Hon. A. Henderson, the Right Hon. G. N. Barnes, the Right Hon. John Hodge, and the Right Hon. G. H. Roberts. I had also the opportunity of comparing their ministerial gifts with those of other Cabinet Ministers and Ministers of State. The Labour Ministers did not suffer from the comparison; their respective records are unsurpassed for foresight, decision, balance of judgment, statesmanship, organizing and administrative ability, power of evoking the loyalty of their departments and commanding the confidence of the public. The weakness of a Labour Government will assuredly not lie in the personnel of its Ministers if they lead—but will they be allowed to lead? So far the signs are not encouraging.

Nobody who has not seen the working of the Trade Union machine from inside has the remotest conception of the difficulties of the Trade Union leader, or of the tyranny to which he is subject. He is in the first instance usually a paid official of his Union, and if he takes or advocates any political or parliamentary action which is considered in any way to invade or infringe the trade rights and privileges of his Union, he will assuredly fall from office at the next Union election. Every leader must, therefore, keep one eye upon his own position and the other upon the political principle which he is disposed to advocate. This makes it exceedingly difficult for any Labour leader to take a strong independent line which may excite even the suspicions of ill-informed sections of his followers, still less their hostile opposition. I saw over and over again during the war how frequently large committees of Trade Unionist leaders would agree with the Government in London on the adoption of some measure—it may have been for the suspension of a trade custom in order to expedite production—and how it became quite impossible to obtain their active assistance afterwards to put the agreement into operation among their members, with the notable exception of some few whose sturdy independence I never ceased to admire. But these, unfortunately, perhaps as the result of their qualities, have little influence in political Labour.

There is another aspect: the great unwritten law of the Labour movement is solidarity at any price, and it frequently happens that the leaders, in order to avoid splitting the Party, will adopt, against their own better judgment, the proposals of extremists rather than face disruption. The action of constitutionalists in the Labour movement, in ultimately taking part in the recent formation of the Council of Action, notwithstanding their own earlier protests, is a case in point.

No political party is immune from intrigue or from cabals and conspiracies against its accepted leaders, but it is not an exaggeration to say that the Labour movement is more impregnated than any other movement in this country with those unlovely tendencies. You have only to follow the course of a branch committee or a district committee election, or the election of an executive committee-man or general secretary of a Trade Union, to realize the prevalence and power of personal jealousies. This is notoriously so in the political Labour world. Nothing cuts so deeply at the roots of independent leadership as incessant conspiracy and intrigue.