The original title of the Labour Party, the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), makes clear what the party was originally about. It existed to get representatives elected to parliament as direct spokespeople for the interests of the industrial working class, but not as advocates of socialismper se. The LRC was founded, in 1900, by co-operation between existing working-class political movements, particularly the Independent Labour Party (ILP), middle-class socialists (the Fabians) and the trade union movement. At the 1906 general election, 30 of the LRC’s 51 candidates were elected, demonstrating the movement’s real potential, and it subsequently adopted the name the Labour Party. It began to gain respectability and, during the First World War, several leading members had government posts in Lloyd George’s post-1916 cabinet. It became more overtly socialist when it adopted a new constitution in 1918 which called, among other things, for ‘the common ownership of production, distribution and exchange’ (Clause IV). Labour’s first taste of power was as a minority government, with Ramsay MacDonald as prime minister, for the first 10 months of 1924, but it was easily beaten by the Conservative Party in a general election at the end of that period. It again formed a minority government in 1929 when it was the largest party after that year’s election, and struggled on until 1931. The world-wide slump forced it to adopt increasingly conservative measures and the cabinet split when the more left-wing members refused to support these. Although the ensuing ‘National Government’ was a grand coalition led by the Labour leader, MacDonald, and went into the election as a single entity, the rump of the Labour Party held the party machinery and gained 52 seats. These events were bitterly hated by the Labour Party, who ever afterwards saw MacDonald as a traitor.
Labour did not gain power again until 1945, at the end of the Second World War, when for the first time it gained an overall majority—and a large one too. The 1945–51 Labour governments, with Clement Attlee as prime minister, essentially created the modern welfare state and nationalized several major industries. The almost inevitable austerity of this post-war period, however, led to the return of the Conservatives, who then presided over a post-war boom that kept them in power until 1964. During this period Labour went through a period of fierce internal debate over how socialist they should be, culminating in victory for the moderates under Hugh Gaitskell, and then Harold Wilson, who became prime minister from 1964–70. This period of Labour administration was very different from the post-war government, and introduced Labour as a technocratic party sharing a wide consensus with the Conservatives and committed to managing a mixed economy alongside a welfare state. Labour returned to power again after two general elections held in 1974, at first as a minority and then with a small majority; James Callaghan succeeded Wilson as prime minister in 1976, and after by-election losses and parliamentary defections Labour again found itself as a minority government, and was forced to rely on the Liberal Party for support through the ‘Lib-Lab pact’, which lasted from March 1977 to May 1978.
During this period the behaviour of the trade unions, in contributing to inflation by demanding large wage increases and through frequent damaging strikes (including those in the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978/79), and their dominant role in Labour Party policy and administrative affairs, may have contributed to the onset of a long-term decline in the party’s popularity. Its defeat in 1979, and replacement by a more determinedly right-wing Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, renewed the party debate over ideological principles. In 1981 several prominent moderates left the party to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and the Labour Party manifesto for the 1983 general election, while the left was temporarily dominant under the leadership of Michael Foot, has been described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. The Conservatives duly won a landslide victory, with Labour only just holding on to second place, in terms of votes cast, from the new SDP which campaigned in alliance with the Liberal Party. For the next eight years Neil Kinnock, who had himself come to prominence in the party as a left-winger, fought a lengthy battle to return the party to a more managerial, ‘Wilsonite’, mixed-economy position. Although the Conservatives won another large majority at the 1987 general election, Labour did appear to be well on the way towards assuming a position in the centre of the political spectrum. At the 1992 general election, however, despite opinion poll predictions of a Labour victory, the Conservatives were returned to office for a fourth consecutive term, even though with a much reduced majority. Kinnock promptly announced his resignation as party leader and was succeeded by John Smith. After Smith’s early death in 1994 the party was taken over by Tony Blair, leader along with several others (of whom the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, was pre-eminent) of a reformist group. This group succeeded in remaking the party, indeed in effectively (though unofficially) renaming it as ‘New Labour’. The new party, which dropped even its symbolic Clause IV commitment to nationalization, became a purely centrist party, committed to most free-market principles and to mon-etarism. It won the 1997 and 2001 elections easily, expounding a rather vague doctrine of the Third Way meant to replace even social democracy from its past ideological commitments.
The British Labour Party has always had the problem of its close links to the trade-union movement, to which it owes its birth. Although these have provided it with most of its funds and much of its membership, they have also tied the party to often unpopular positions on industrial relations and in general acted as a restraint on the party developing policies that could be advantageous electorally. Part of what made Blair’s reformulation possible was the decline in power of the trade unions following Thatcherite reform in employment law under the preceding Conservative governments.
Many other countries have labour parties, some of which pre-date the British Labour Party. All of these parties follow socialist or social democratic paths, and many also have links with their countries’ trade-union movements. Australia, Norway and Sweden are examples of countries with powerful labour parties.
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