Ross McKibbon, The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924. (New York, Oxford University Press, 1975), 261 pp.

Abstract

This is a carefully researched and elegantly written monograph on what remains, despite all the work that has been done on it, one of the most fascinating and treacherous questions in British working class history. How was it that the Labour Party, which in 1910 was little more than a pressure group on the Liberal left, had by January 1924 become a mass party capable of forming a government? The question continues to fascinate because, revolutionary coups apart, no working class party has ever moved so rapidly from a minority sect to a position of power than the British Labour Party. It is also treacherous because, with a rapidly changing situation to contend with, with only a handful of war-time by-elections to serve as electoral guides, and with a vast range of variables to choose from including World War One, the Russian Revolution, and post-war industrial disputes the historian must draw up his balance sheet extremely carefully if he is not to oversimplify. Dr. McKibbon is nothing if not bold. Within the space of little more than 250 pages he sets out to "explain the decline of the Liberal Party and its supersession by the Labour Party, to examine the character of the Labour Party by looking at it as a mass party, and to look at the part played by ideology and class consciousness in its growth". On the first point he strikes some shrewd blows against the Trevor Wilson-Samuel Beer school of thought by arguing that since the Liberals had recovered from a previous split between Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain in the 1880's, and since Labour was itself badly divided over the issue of the First World War, the Liberal decline cannot be attributed to internal conflicts, or to antagonism towards state interference alone. Here the author may well be on strong ground, although he muddies the waters somewhat by equating Labour's opposition to conscription during the war with Liberal antagonism to collectivisn generally. This did not mean, as Dr. McKibbon seems to imply on p. 238, that on other matters Labour was not more receptive to state intervention than the Liberals. On the second point, the author also puts us into his debt by taking considerably further the researches of a younger group of scholars such as Roy Gregory and Stanley Pierson into the developing internal structure of Labour as a national party. His main argument here is that since the Liberal break-up was not the main reason for Labour's rise, it is to be found, instead, "in the nature of the relationship between the Labour Party and the trade-unions on the one hand, and between the trade-unions and the industrial working classes on the other", (p. 241). He is particularly effective in documenting the role of trades union leaders, and of Arthur Henderson, in moving the party from its old, pre-war status as a loose agglomeration of unions, trades councils and socialist societies into a cohesive national organization capable of fighting elections in most constituencies. It was these