Abstract
As soon as the 1906 Parliament assembled, the L.R.C. assumed the name of ‘Labour Party’ and its twenty-nine M.P.s elected officers and whips. The life of the party in the following eight years, 1906–14, although undergoing many vicissitudes, yet has a certain unity for analytical purposes. The great tide of Liberal feeling, which had brought the Labour Party to Parliament, ebbed considerably, as was shown by the two elections in 1910; and the Labour Party, only too much like a cork, ebbed with it, and lost a few seats in the 1910 elections. The apparent increase in the number of Labour M.P.s — from twenty-nine in 1906 to forty after the first 1 g 1 o election and forty-two after the second 1 g 1 o election — is entirely accounted for by the accession of most of the miners’ M.P.s, formerly ‘Lib-Labs’, after the Miners Federation decided to join the Labour Party in 1909. Furthermore, after the second 1910 election the Labour Party strength was reduced by the loss of by-elections, and at the outbreak of war numbered only thirty-seven, of whom twelve were miners’ representatives. It will be seen, then, that the record of the parliamentary party in these eight years was not one of numerical advance in any real sense.
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Further Reading
Documented narratives of Labour Party history covering this and later periods are to be found in Carl F. Brand, The British Labour Party: A Short History (Stanford, Calif., 1965)
and R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (1961)
which has a strong left-wing bias. But the most valuable recent contribution to the study of the party in 1906–14 is Clegg, Fox and Thompson, op. cit. (see p. 17), though its narrative ends in 1910. Here, the records of the Joint Board have been drawn upon to show that friction developed when Shackleton, as chairman of the Parliamentary Committee of the T.U.C., discussed details of legislation with Liberal ministers without consulting Henderson, the Labour Party’s chairman.
The book by W. P. Maddox, cited above, provides valuable analysis of policy formation within the party. W. S. Adams makes some interesting suggestions in his article ‘Lloyd George and the Labour Movement’ in Past and Present 3 (1953), 55–62.
In addition, some biographies — e.g. Godfrey Elton, Life of James Ramsay MacDonald (1939) — and some memoirs — e.g. Philip Snowden, Autobiography, i (1934) — are useful.
For the ‘labour unrest’, see G. D. H. Cole, Short History of the British Working Class Movement (new ed., 1948);
for Syndicalism and Guild Socialism, see Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition (1946)
chs. xv and xvi; for the S.D.F. and B.S.P. see C. Tsuzuki, H. M. Hyndman and British Socialism (1961).
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© 1972 Henry Pelling
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Pelling, H. (1972). A Pressure-group under Pressure (1906–14). In: A Short History of the Labour Party. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15474-6_2
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