Onwards from the year 1842, although individual Trade Unionists and certain societies, which included no doubt members of the working-classes, continued to promote Socialism, the British Trade Unions advocated no scheme of Socialism as part of their official objects. They contented themselves with improving their organizations, increasing their members, making provision for friendly society benefits and of introducing methods of collective bargaining instead of class-war and of strikes. Mr. Beer again states the position at p. 195 of Vol. II, History of British Socialism:
“The twenty years following upon the collapse of Chartism formed the golden age of middle-class Liberalism. The glamour of its doctrines as set forth by Mill in his essay ‘On Liberty,’ the phenomenal growth of British trade and commerce, the unrivalled position of Great Britain as the workshop of the world, made British Liberalism the lodestar of all nations striving for freedom and wealth. Competition as the regulator of economic relations, free trade as the international bond of peace and goodwill, individual liberty as the sacred ideal of national politics, reigned supreme, and under their weight the entire formation of social revolutionary ideas of the past disappeared from view. The working-classes formed a part of triumphant Liberalism.
“Gladstone, surveying his hosts in 1866, appeared quite justified in telling his Conservative opponents that there was no use fighting against his social forces, ‘which move onwards in their might and majesty and which ... are marshalled on our side.’ He might have addressed the same eloquent words to the leaders of the International Working Men’s Association, who with Karl Marx at their head, were precisely at that time making a serious attempt to resuscitate Chartism and detach the masses from the Liberal Party. Socialism and independent Labour politics came to be regarded as exotic plants which could never flourish on British soil.
“The trade unions renounced all class-warfare and merely tried to use their new citizenship (1867) and their growing economic organization—the first trade union congress took place in 1869—with a view to influencing the distribution of the national wealth in their favour. Their aim and end was that of a plebs striving for equality with the possessing and ruling-classes. It was, despite some struggle for the legalization of trade unionism, a period of social peace, and it lasted till about 1880.”
This state of things continued in fact up to about 1885, and until that date Socialism formed really no part of official Trade Union principles.
The Era of Constitutional State Socialism, 1885-1905
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb in their History of Trade Unionism, revised edition, 1920, p. 374, describe the principles of the Labour Party about 1885 as follows:
“Laissez faire then was the political and social creed of the Trade Union leaders of this time; up to 1885 they undoubtedly represented the views current among the rank and file; at that date all observers were agreed that the Trade Unions of Great Britain would furnish an impenetrable barrier against Socialist projects. Within a decade we find the whole trade union world permeated with collectivist ideas, and, as The Times recorded as early as 1893, the Socialist Party supreme in the Trades Union Congress. This revolution in opinion is the chief event of Trade Union history at the close of the nineteenth century.”
These two talented authors analyse the causes. They attribute it in great measure to the “new unionism” of 1889 which was itself largely the result of the wide circulation in Great Britain of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty during the years 1880-1882; the lecturing of the late Mr. H. M. Hyndman and Mr. William Morris and other disciples of Karl Marx; revelations of certain “well-intentioned if somewhat sentimental philanthropists” of their experiences in the sweated industries and slums of our great cities, as, for example, Mr. Charles Booth’s great work, Life and Labour in London; depression in trade; the great Dock Strike in 1889.
The attitude observed by the Trades Union Congress in regard to socialistic proposals is instructive. Up to 1887, at five successive conferences, amendments in favour of the nationalization of land had been continuously rejected; at the Swansea Conference in 1887, a resolution in no very definite terms was accepted in its favour. The extreme socialistic conception of the advanced Trade Unionist of the nineties was State Socialism to be secured by constitutional political action. The power of action was to be derived from every working-class Socialist becoming a member of his Trade Union, of his local Co-operative Society, of his borough council, urban or rural district or county council. This represented substantially the full socialistic creed of official Labour up to about the year 1905. Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb thus epitomize it: