L

Labour Party

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 ofsocialismper se. The LRC
was founded, in 1900, by co-operation between existing working-class poli-
tical movements, particularly the Independent Labour Party (ILP), middle-
class socialists (theFabians) and thetrade unionmovement. 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 Partyin 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 modernwelfare stateand 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