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Britain has had an unusual history, part of Europe yet also an island, it has almost always been affected by the same social and religious pressures as the mainland, but due to its geographical isolation these pressures have occured at different times and in different ways.
Like the rest of Europe various proto-socialist thinkers such as Thomas More were active in Britain at the time of the Reformation, which of course happened later in Britain than in the Mainland.
But a crucial difference in the Reformation in Britain, was the emergence of the radical Puritans who wanted to reform both religion and the nation.
The Puritans were oppressed by the Monarchy and by the Established Church, which only served to harden their resolve and make a bloody revolution inevitable.
Eventually these pressures exploded in a violent revolution, one of the worlds first sucessful social revolutions.
What happened in the revolution is covered by the English Civil War.
After the war several proto-socialist groups emerged. The most importent of these groups were:
The Industrial Revolution, the transition from a agrarian economy to an industrial one, began in the UK over 30 years before the rest of the world.
Textile Mills and Coal Mines sprang up across the whole country and peasants were taken from the fields and thrown down the mines, or worse still, into the "Dark, Satanic Mills" the chimneys of which blacked the sky over Lancashire and West Yorkshire.
Living conditions were appalling and working conditions were worse.
These appalling conditions forced the birth of a socialism that came earlier and was very different to later versions of the ideology.
The pioneering work of Robert Owen, a Welsh radical, at New Lanark in Scotland, is usually credited as being the birth of British Socialism.
What Owen did at the mill was:
The first "real" Trade Unionists were the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were deported to Australia for trying to organise a Union.
After this, the Trade Union movement began to grow at a rapid rate, especially among coal miners, and the first attempt to unify the movement was the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, formed by Owen in 1834.
Methodism played a large role in the development of the Unions and of British Socialism.
The influence of the radical Chapels were strongly felt among the industrial workers, especially the miners and many saw socialism as a way to create a "New Jerusalem", a phrase that has dominated socialism in the U.K ever since.
Interestingly, Marxism failed to have much influence on the socialist movement, despite the fact that Karl Marx lived(and died) in London.
Why this was the case is something that historians still don't agree on, although the influence of the Methodists seems the most likely cause.
A Marxist organisation was formed and the Social Democratic Federation had a strong following among intellectuals (including William Morris), but had little influence on the workers.
After the 1867 Reform Act, the Working Class made up a majority of the electorate and could no longer be ingnored.
The Liberal Party was worried about the possibility of a socialist party taking the bulk of the working class vote (although their great rivals the Tories were secretly very keen on the idea), and decided to extend the olive branch to the Unions.
In 1874 they agreed not to put candidates against Thomas Burt and Alexander Macdonald, two miners leaders who were standing for Parliament.
Both were elected and became known as Liberal-Labour or Lib-Labs for short.
Soon other miners leaders were getting to Parliament via the same route, but one of them, Keir Hardie was discontented with the laissez faire economic policies of the Liberals.
In 1888 Hardie stood as an Independent Labour candidate for Mid Lanark, although he finished bottom of the poll, by 1892 he was elected as Independent Labour M.P for West Ham.
In 1893 Hardie founded the Independent Labour Party, but lost his seat in the 1895 General Election. However Hardie had proved that it was possible for socialists to win seats in the commons without the backing of the Liberals.
In 1900 representatives of various unions and socialist groups(including the SDF) met at Farringdon Street in London to discuss Hardie's proposal that a Labour Party backed by the Unions and with its own whips should be formed.
The motion was passed and the Labour Representation Committee was founded with Keir Hardie as its leader. At the 1900 election the LRC won 2 seats, with Hardie elected in Merthyr Tydfil.
In 1906 the LRC changed its name to Labour Party, agreed on a deal with the Liberals to cause maximum damage to the Unionist Government in the forthcoming election.
The election of 1906 has gone down in history as one of the biggest landslides ever won by any party. The Liberals soundly defeated the Tories up and down the country and 29 Labour MP's were elected.
More Labour MPs were elected in 1910, and in 1918 Labour created a new constitution which laid out several aims of the party, including nationalisation of industry. After the 1918 election Labour grew and grew, stunning political observers by forming their first minority government in 1924 led by Ramsay MacDonald. This government was undermined by the infamous Zinoviev Letter, which was used as evidence of Labour's links with the Soviet Union. It was later shown to be a hoax.
In the early 1920's a unique and very radical strand of socialism developed in Scotland.
It was called Red Clydeside and it panicked the right wing press into believing that the workers were plotting to establish bolshevism.
In 1926 the Welsh Miners went on strike over their appalling working conditions.
The Conservative government is widely viewed as having badly mis-managed the strike which soon escalated into the General Strike. Eventually the TUC, worried about reports of starvation in the pit villages, ended the strike.
This is something that the left never forgave them for.
Labour won a minority government in 1929 again under MacDonald, but following the Wall Street Crash, an economic crisis engulfed the government. Several government ministers failed to support their leader and he was forced to form a coalition government with the Liberals and the Conservatives. The core of the Labour party regarded this as a betrayal and expelled him.
The Great Depression devastated Labour's heartlands of Northern England, Wales and Central Scotland, and the Jarrow March of unemployed workers from the North East to London to demand jobs defined the period.
In 1945 Labour won a landslide victory over popular war leader Winston Churchill. In this election 2 communists were elected (one in London and one in Fife).
After that election(which President Harry S Truman described as a revolution) the new Labour government began a series of reform changed the face of Britain forever, nationalising some industry (eg. the mines) and creating the National Health Service (mostly the titanic effort of the charismatic Welsh Miners leader, Aneurin Bevan) and the Welfare State.
Labour lost office in 1951 (despite polling 200,000 more votes than the Conservatives), and after Clement Atlee retired as leader in 1955, he was suceeded by the figurehead of the "right-establishment" Hugh Gaitskell, in an elected that supporters of the defeated candidate, Bevan, regarded as rigged.
Although there were some disputes between the Bevanites and the Gaitskellites, these disputes were more about personality than ideology, and the rift was healed when Harold Wilson, a Bevanite, was elected leader after Gaitskell's death.
Throughout most of the rest of the twentieth century, Labour alternated in office with the Conservatives, most notably in the Wilson-Heath years(1964-1976) and until a World Recession resulted in the election in 1979 of a right-wing Conservative government headed by Margaret Thatcher. They were never however able to secure more than one full term in office.
After the 1979 defeat, Jim Callaghan tried in vain to keep the left of the party (led by Tony Benn) and the right (led by Roy Jenkins) from tearing the party apart. In 1980 the party conference was dominated by factional disputes and what Callaghan regarded as bennite motions. He resigned as party leader, and was replaced by Michael Foot, a left-winger who distanced himself from Benn but failed to transmit this to the media, and the voters. In 1981 the right-wing left the party to found the Social Democratic Party. In 1983 Labour, ripped apart by infighting, suffered their worst election result since 1918. Their manifesto was famously described by Gerald Kaufman as 'the longest suicide note in history', and the Labour Party were somehow unable to capitalise on the unprecedented levels of unemployment.
After the election the moderate leader Neil Kinnock was chosen as Foot's successor. He initiated a reform process, expelling the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyist entryist group who had substantial influence in Merseyside, but could not find an answer to the "Benn Question" and Labour suffered another humiliating defeat in 1987. However, the SDP and their Liberal allies had been beaten off and Kinnock stayed on as leader.
During this time, Thatcher was becoming increasingly unpopular among electorate at large. The introduction of the poll tax was seen as the last straw and the Tories, many fearing for the safety of their own seats, deposed her and replaced her with John Major. In the run-up to the 1992 general election, polling showed that there might be a hung Parliament, but possibly a small Labour majority. In the event, Major got in again with a majority of 21. This has been attributed to both triumphalism of the Labour Party (in particular the infamous Sheffield Rally) and the Tories "Tax Bombshell" advertising campaign.
After Kinnock's resignation, popular scottish leader John Smith was elected leader of the Labour Party and performed much better, helped by the apparent implosion of the Government. He unexpectedly died in 1994 from a heart atttack.
The modernising MP for Sedgefield (in County Durham), Tony Blair was elected leader with the backing of fellow moderniser Gordon Brown.
Blair was determind to avoid a repeat of the 1992 disaster, and believed that Clause IV, the commitment to worker control of industry, was a sitting target for Major's embattled government. Blair and his allies decided to re-write Clause IV to drop the commitment to worker control.
Much of the party was unhappy with the proposed changes and several unions were considering using their block vote to kill the motion, but in the end backed down (won over in part by more traditionalist MPs who backed the changes).
Several party members, such as Arthur Scargill regarded this as a betrayal of Labour's ideology and left Labour in disgust.
Others, such as Tony Benn and the Campaign Group, also regarded the changes as a betrayal, but were still unpopular with the party membership over the disputes of the 1980's and were unable to stop the changes. However unlike Scargill they were also unwilling to leave Labour.
Labour also launched a massive PR campaign to rebrand as New Labour, introduced women-only shortlists and central vetting of Parliamentary candidates, to ensure that its candidates were seen as young and on-message. They set up an effective media database allowing them to refute government claims within minutes.
This was in stark contrast to a Conservative Party that was dominated by ageing, un-telegenic, "grandees".
On the 1st of May 1997, Labour won it's largest election victory to date and have been in power ever since.
Supporters argue that the "New" Labour government has redistributed more than any government since Atlee, critics argue that they have have pandered to big business and especially the City, and that Labour's foreign policy is too interventionalist and too pro-American.
But on the whole the current Labour leadership have had far less trouble with the left than any since its birth after the 1970 defeat. This may be due to electoral sucess or just down to some very intelligent awards of ministerial positions.
There have been two exceptions to this trend; in London, Ken Livingstone won the London mayoral election as an Independent Labour candidate after he was not selected as the official candidate(although he has co-operated with the Labour group on the GLA and is likely to be readmitted to the party in time for next years mayoral election).
The other is in Scotland where the old Clydeside Radical tradition has been reborn in the hard-left SSP, which now has several PR seats in the Scottish Parliament.
Labour supporters contend these are the exceptions that prove the rule, and Labour have acquired all the trappings of the "Natural Party of Government" something that had been Conservative territory for years.
Other articles relating to the History of British Socialism:
In the beginning
Civil War and Revolution
Although the Levellers had little effect on Oliver Cromwell's government, they did have a big effect on later generations.The Industrial Revolution and Robert Owen
Owen also lobbyed Parliament over child labour, and helped to create the Trade Union and Co-operative movements.The Union makes us strong
Lib Labs and the ILP
The Birth of Labour
British Socialism after the birth of Labour
After the "Revolution"
"New" Labour?
See also
