LABOUR PARTY IN GOVERNMENT DURING INTER-WAR PERIOD

Labour Party In Government During The Inter-War Period

Labour Party In Government During The Inter-War Period

The British Labour party is essentially a twentieth century phenomenon, which came in this century to essentially take the place of the Liberals as the main opposition to the traditionally strong forces of conservatism. The question which is to be addressed then is how and why this change came about, and whether this was mainly to do with the increasing popularity of socialism as a political creed or whether it was based on much wider social and class issues. Certainly many working class people were becoming disturbed at the striking contrast between the poverty of the poor and the comfortable existence enjoyed by the upper and middle classes. However what remains to be addressed is whether most of these people saw the solutions to these problems in socialist terms or simply regarded them as issues which should be addressed, regardless or not of any socialist objective.

The setting up of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 caused no great stir at the time, and there were few who regarded it as more than another pressure group aiming to strengthen the labour cause. However, by 1931 the Labour Party had been in office on two occasions and had overtaken the Liberals as the second party in Britain. How did this situation arise? What factors, social, economic, and political played a part? What contribution did individuals make? What effect did circumstances such as the First World War and the decline of the Liberal party have on Labour's dramatic rise? And how did the party's own legislative record contribute to its increased popularity?

In this essay I have paid particular attention to a factor inextricably linked to Labour's rise, the fortunes of Britain's 'second-party' in 1900 - the Liberal Party. The interaction of these two parties over the first 30 years of the century go most of the way to explaining why in 1924 and 1929 Labour was able to win general elections. Certainly, during the decade before the First World War there seemed no inevitability about Labour's rise, at least to contemporaries. The basic fact about British politics then was the domination of the great Liberal Party. This meant, therefore, that far from expanding as an independent after 1900 there was a distinct possibility that the Labour Party would be absorbed by the Liberals, as the Liberal Unionists had been by the Conservatives after 1895, or become a small and dwindling left-wing group like the I.L.P. in the 1930s. In the event, partly due to MacDonald's much-maligned leadership, this did not happen and Labour independence was maintained. But the ideal of Labour independence implied expansion based on capturing a larger section of the working-class vote: and this could only be done at the expense of liberalism. Hence the relationship between the Liberal and Labour parties during the pre-war period is one of the crucial problems in the history of the rise of the Labour ...