[705] These extracts from a speech by Mr. Hodges are put together from the separate imperfect reports in the Times, Daily News, and Daily Herald of October 27, 1919. A more explicit statement of Mr. Hodges’ views will be found in his speech at the Annual Conference of the Miners’ Federation in July 1918: “For the last two or three years a new movement has sprung up in the labour world which deals with the question of joint control of the industry by representatives from the side which represents, for the most part, the consumer, and representatives of the workmen, who are the producers. Nationalisation in the old sense is no longer attractive. As a matter of fact, you can have nationalisation, but still be in no better position than you are now under private ownership. That is the experience of institutions which have been State owned and State controlled for many years. The most remarkable scheme worked out during the last year is the theory worked out by the ... Postmen’s Federation. He has endeavoured to provide a scheme by which the postal workers should have a definite amount of control, a definite form of control, in the postal service, and in working it out he has demonstrated beyond all doubt how at every point he is up against the power of the bureaucrats, as exemplified by the State. Now, is it any good to have these mines nationalised unless we are going to exercise some form of control as producers? If not, the whole tendency will be towards the power of bureaucracy. We shall be given no status at all in the industry, except to be the mere producers, as we have been in the past years. Under State ownership the workmen should be desirous of having something more than the mere question of wages or the mere consideration of employment; the workmen should have some directive power in the industry in which they are engaged. Now, how are we going to have this directive power under State control? I think we must admit that the side representing the consumers (the State) should have some form of control on property which will be State property, and when a national industry becomes State controlled you must have permanent officials to look after the consumers’ interests, and from the purely producers’ point of view the Miners’ Federation must represent the producers in the central authority and in the decentralised authority, right down to the separate collieries. Are we ready to do this? Are we prepared for this, starting at the separate collieries, indicating how the industry is to be developed locally? Men must take their share in understanding all the relations embodied in the export side of the trade; they must take a share even in controlling the banking arrangements which govern the financial side of the industry, and with that comes a very great deal of responsibility. Now, are we prepared to assume that responsibility, a responsibility which is implied in the term workmen’s control? It is going to be a big task and a test of the educational attainments of the miners themselves if they assume control of the industry, and if it did not thrive under that control there is the possibility we should have to hark back to private ownership in order to make it successful.... I hold these views, and unless they are accompanied by an effective form of working-class control, I do not believe that nationalisation will do any good for anybody” (Report of Annual Conference of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, July 9, 1918, pp. 49-51).
[706]Report of the Committee on Combinations and Trusts, 1919.
CHAPTER XI
POLITICAL ORGANISATION
[1900-1920]
Fifty years ago, when Professor Brentano described the British Trade Union Movement with greater knowledge and insight than any one else had then shown,[707] nothing seemed more unlikely than that the Movement would become organised as an independent political party, appealing to the whole electorate on a general programme, returning its own contingent of members to the House of Commons, and asserting a claim, as soon as that contingent should become the strongest party in Parliament, to constitute a national administration. For nearly a quarter of a century more, as we have described in a previous chapter, though Trade Unionism was making itself slowly more and more felt in politics, it was still possible for economists and statesmen to believe that “Labour” in Great Britain would organise only to maintain its sectional industrial interests, and that it would impinge on politics, if at all, only occasionally, in defence of Trade Unionism itself, or in support of some particular project of industrial law. By 1894, when the first edition of this book was published, there was already manifest, as we then stated, a great shifting of Trade Union opinion on the
“pressing question of the position to be taken by the Trade Union world in the party struggles of To-day and the politics of To-morrow. In our chapter on ‘The Old Unionism and the New,’ we described the rapid conversion of the superior workman to the general principles of Collectivism. This revolution of opinion in the rank and file has been followed by a marked change of front on the part of the salaried officials, and by a growing distrust of the aristocratic and middle-class representatives of both the great political parties. To the working-man politician of 1894 it seems inconceivable that either landlords or capitalists will actively help him to nationalise land and mining royalties, to absorb unearned incomes by taxation, or to control private enterprise in the interests of the wage-earner. Thus we find throughout the whole Trade Union world an almost unanimous desire to make the working-class organisations in some way effective for political purposes. Nor is this a new thing. The sense of solidarity has, as we have seen, never been lacking among those active soldiers and non-commissioned officers who constitute the most vital element in the Trade Union army. The generous aid from trade to trade, the pathetic attempts to form General Unions, the constant aspirations after universal federation, all testify to the reality and force of this instinctive solidarity. The Collectivist faith of the ‘New Unionism’ is only another manifestation of the same deep-rooted belief in the essential Brotherhood of Labour. But, as we have seen, the basis of the association of these million and a half wage-earners is, primarily, sectional in its nature. They come together, and contribute their pence, for the defence of their interests as Boilermakers, Miners, Cotton-spinners, and not directly for the advancement of the whole working class. Among the salaried officers of the Unions, it is, as we have said, the Trade Official, chosen and paid for the express purpose of maintaining the interests of his own particular trade, who is the active force. The effect has been to intensify the sectionalism to which an organisation based on trades must necessarily be prone. The vague general Collectivism of the non-commissioned officers has hitherto got translated into practical proposals only in so far as it can be expressed in projects for the advantage of a particular trade. Some organised trades have known how to draft and to extort from Parliament a voluminous Labour Code, the provisions of which are exceptionally well adapted for the protection of the particular workers concerned. The ‘particulars clause’[708] and the law against the ‘over-steaming’ of weaving sheds are, for instance, triumphs of collective control which could hardly have been conceived by any one except the astute trade officials of the Cotton Operatives. But there is no attempt to deal with any question as a whole. Trade Unionists are, for instance, unanimously in favour of drastic legislation to put down ‘sweating’ in all trades whatsoever. But no salaried officer of the Trade Union world feels it to be his business to improve the Labour Code for any industry but his own. Thus, whereas the Factory Acts have been effectively elaborated to meet the special circumstances of a few trades, for all the rest they remain in the form of merely general prohibitions which it is practically impossible to enforce. How far it is possible, by the development of Trades Councils, the reform of the Trades Union Congress, the increased efficiency of the Parliamentary Committee, the growth of Trade Union representation in the House of Commons, or, finally, by the creation of any new federal machinery, to counteract the fundamental sectionalism of Trade Union organisation, to supplement the specialised trade officials by an equally specialised Civil Service of working-class politicians, and thus to render the Trade Union world, with its million of electors, and its leadership of Labour, an effective political force in the State, is, on the whole, the most momentous question of contemporary politics.” [709]
The quarter of a century that has elapsed since these words were written has seen an extensive political development of the Trade Union Movement, taking the form of building up a separate and independent party of “Labour” in the House of Commons, which we have now to record. [710]
The continued propaganda of the Socialists, and of others who wished to see the Trade Union Movement become an effective political force, which we have described as active from 1884 onwards, did not, for nearly a couple of decades, produce a political “Labour Party.” So strong was at that time the resistance of most of the Trade Union leaders to any participation of their societies in general politics, even on the lines of complete independence of both Liberal and Conservative Parties, that “Labour Representation” had still, for some years, to be fought for apart from Trade Unionism. The leaders, indeed, did not really care about Trade Union influence in the House of Commons.[711] Many of them, as we have described, remained for a whole generation averse even from legal regulation of the conditions of employment. In national politics they were mostly Liberals, with the strongest possible admiration for Gladstone and Bright; or else (as in Lancashire) convinced Conservatives, concerned to defend the Church of England or Roman Catholic elementary schools in which their children were being educated or carried away by the glamour of an Imperialist foreign policy. They asked for nothing more than a few working-class members in the House of Commons, belonging to one or other of the “respectable” parties, to which they could thus obtain access for the adjustment of any matters in which their societies happened to be interested.
In 1887, at his first appearance at the Trades Union Congress, J. Keir Hardie,[712] representing a small Union of Ayrshire Miners, demanded a new start. He called upon the Trade Unionists definitely to sever their connection with the existing political parties, by which the workmen were constantly befooled and betrayed, and insisted on the necessity of forming an entirely independent party of Labour, to which the whole working-class movement should rally. On the Congress he produced no apparent effect.[713] But, six months later, when a Parliamentary vacancy occurred in Mid-Lanark, Keir Hardie was nominated, against Liberal and Tory alike, on the principle of entire independence; and in spite of every effort to induce him to withdraw,[714] he went to the poll, obtaining only 619 votes. A society was then formed to work for independent Labour representation, under the designation of the Scottish Labour Party, having for chairman Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, M.P., who had been elected as a Liberal but who had become a Socialist. The “new spirit” of 1889, which we have described, put heart into the movement for political independence; and after much further propaganda by the Socialists,[715] at the General Election of 1892 Keir Hardie was elected for West Ham, avowedly as the first member of an independent Party of Labour; together with fourteen other workmen,[716] whose independence of the Liberal Party, even where it was claimed, was less marked than their obvious jealousy of Keir Hardie. There was apparently still no hope of gaining the adherence of the Trade Unions as such; and at the Glasgow Trades Union Congress of 1892 arrangements were made by a few of the delegates to hold a smaller conference, which took place at Bradford, in 1893, under the chairmanship of Keir Hardie, when those who were determined to establish a separate political party formed a society, made up of individual adherents, which was styled the Independent Labour Party. In this the Scottish Labour Party was merged, but it remained without the affiliation of Trade Unions in their corporate capacity. The Independent Labour Party, of which throughout his life Keir Hardie was the outstanding figure, carried on a strenuous propagandist campaign, and during the next two years put up independent candidates at by-elections, with uniform ill-success. At the General Election of 1895, no fewer than twenty-eight “I.L.P.” candidates went to the poll, every one of them (including Keir Hardie himself at West Ham) being unsuccessful. With two or three exceptions, the Trade Unionist members in alliance with the Liberal Party successfully maintained their seats. The establishment of an aggressively independent Labour Party in Parliament still looked hopeless.
With the new century an effort was made on fresh lines. The continuous propaganda had had its effect, even on the Trades Union Congress. In 1898 it could be suggested in the presidential address[717] that a “committee should be appointed to draft a scheme of political organisation for the Trade Union world on the ground that just as trades federation is a matter of vital necessity for industrial organisation, so also will a scheme of political action be of vital necessity if we wish Parliament to faithfully register the effect of the industrial revolution on our social life.” The very next year a resolution—which had been drafted in London by the members of the Independent Labour Party—was carried on the motion of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, against the votes of the miners as well as of the textile workers, directing the convening of a special congress representing Trade Unions, Co-operative Societies, and Socialist organisations, in order to devise means of increasing the number of Labour members.[718] It was urged on the Parliamentary Committee that the Socialist organisations had a right to be strongly represented on the proposed Committee; and the Parliamentary Committee, which had no faith in the scheme and attached little importance to it, nominated four of its members (S. Woods, W. C. Steadman, R. Bell, and W. Thorne), all of whom afterwards became Members of Parliament, to sit with two representatives each from the Independent Labour Party (Keir Hardie and J. Ramsay MacDonald), the Fabian Society (G. Bernard Shaw and E. R. Pease), and the Social Democratic Federation (H. Quelch and H. R. Taylor). This Committee took the business into its own hands, and drew up a constitution, upon a federal basis, for a “Labour Representation Committee,” as an independent organisation, including Trade Unions and Trades Councils, along with Co-operative and Socialist Societies; and in February 1900 a specially summoned congress, attended by 129 delegates, representing Trade Unions aggregating half a million members, and Socialist societies claiming fewer than seventy thousand, adopted the draft constitution, established the new body, appointed its first executive, and gave it, in Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, not merely its first secretary but also a skilful organiser, to whose patient and persistent effort no small part of its subsequent success has been due.