The Independent Labour Party, 1914-1939

The Independent Labour Party, 1914-1939 PDF

Author: Keith Laybourn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9781315231778

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"Historians of political history are fascinated by the rise and fall of political parties and, for twentieth-century Britain, most obviously the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberal Party. What is often overlooked in this political development is the work of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) which was a formative influence in the growth of the political Labour movement and its leaders in the late nineteenth century and the early to mid-twentieth century. The ILP supplied the Labour Party with some of its leading political figures, such as Ramsay MacDonald, and moved the Labour Party along the road of parliamentary socialism. However, divided over the First World War and challenged by the Labour Party becoming socialist in 1918, it had to face the fact that it was no longer the major parliamentary socialist party in Britain"--

The Independent Labour Party, 1914-1939

The Independent Labour Party, 1914-1939 PDF

Author: Keith Laybourn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-05-14

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1351866060

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Historians of political history are fascinated by the rise and fall of political parties and, for twentieth-century Britain, most obviously the rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberal Party. What is often overlooked in this political development is the work of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was a formative influence in the growth of the political Labour movement and its leaders in the late nineteenth century and the early to mid-twentieth century. The ILP supplied the Labour Party with some of its leading political figures, such as Ramsay MacDonald, and moved the Labour Party along the road of parliamentary socialism. However, divided over the First World War and challenged by the Labour Party becoming socialist in 1918, it had to face the fact that it was no longer the major parliamentary socialist party in Britain. Although it recovered after the First World War, rising to between 37,000 and 55,000 members, it came into conflict with the Labour Party and two Labour governments over their gradualist approach to socialism. This eventually led to its disaffiliation from the Labour Party in 1932 and its subsequent fragmentation into pro-Labour, pro-communist and independent groups. Its new revolutionary policy divided its members, as did the Abyssinian crisis, the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Show Trials. By the end of the 1930s, seeking to re-affiliate to the Labour Party, it had been reduced to 2,000 to 3,000 members, was a sect rather than a party and had earned Hugh Dalton’s description that it was the ‘ILP flea’. In the following monograph, Keith Laybourn analyses the dynamic shifts in this history across 25 years. This scholarship will prove foundational for scholars and researchers of modern British history and socialist thought in the twentieth century.

The Failure of a Dream

The Failure of a Dream PDF

Author: Gidon Cohen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2007-03-30

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0857712519

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The Independent Labour Party began the 1930s as a significant force in dispute with the Labour Party proper. In 1932, as these conflicts led to a split, the party had more MPs in Scotland than the larger organisation and a membership five times that of the British Communist Party. In the first major study of the Independent Labour Party after disaffiliation from the mainstream in 1932, Gidon Cohen draws on archival material from Moscow and newly released police and secret service papers as well as other major British archives. In doing so he explores the culture and politics of an organisation which he argues, contrary to received scholarship, remained an important component of the British left throughout the 1930s. CONTENTS: 1. Introduction 2. The Split 3. Membership and Organisation 4. Electoral Arenas 5. Divided We Fall: Internal Politics 6. Intellectuals, Ideas and Policy 7. Infiltration: Communism and the National Unemployed Workers' Movement 8. The Mainstream: Labour and the Unions 9. Pacifism, Wars and the Internationals 10. Conclusion

Under Siege

Under Siege PDF

Author: Ian Bullock

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2017-11-30

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 1771991550

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During the period between the two world wars, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) was the main voice of radical democratic socialism in Great Britain. Founded in 1893, the ILP had, since 1906, operated under the aegis of the Labour Party. As that party edged nearer to power following World War I, forming minority governments in 1924 and again in 1929, the ILP found its own identity under siege. On one side stood those who wanted the ILP to subordinate itself to an increasingly cautious and conventional Labour leadership; on the other stood those who felt that the ILP should throw its lot in with the Communist Party of Great Britain. After the ILP disaffiliated from Labour in 1932 in order to pursue a new, “revolutionary” policy, it was again torn, this time between those who wanted to merge with the Communists and those who saw the ILP as their more genuinely revolutionary and democratic rival. At the opening of the 1930s, the ILP boasted five times the membership of the Communist Party, as well as a sizeable contingent of MPs. By the end of the decade, having tested the possibility of creating a revolutionary party in Britain almost to the point of its own destruction, the ILP was much diminished—although, unlike the Communists, it still retained a foothold in Parliament. Despite this reversal of fortunes, during the 1930s—years that witnessed the ascendancy of both Stalin and Hitler—the ILP demonstrated an unswerving commitment to democratic socialist thinking. Drawing extensively on the ILP’s Labour Leader and other contemporary left-wing newspapers, as well as on ILP publications and internal party documents, Bullock examines the debates and ideological battles of the ILP during the tumultuous interwar period. He argues that the ILP made a lasting contribution to British politics in general, and to the modern Labour Party in particular, by preserving the values of democratic socialism during the interwar period.

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