Head of education, campaigns and organising for the General Federation of Trade Unions HENRY FOWLER explains why it is launching a fund to support trades councils and give them access to a new range of courses and resources
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The Labour Party: a complicated birth
The formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 marked the beginning of interconnected and contested strategies — parliamentary and industrial — seeking ways to advance working-class interests, writes KEITH FLETT
Leaders of the Labour Representation Committee in 1906. From left to right: Arthur Henderson, G N Barnes, Ramsay Macdonald, Philip Snowden, Will Crooks, Keir Hardie, John Hodge, James O'Grady and David Shackleton
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125 YEARS AGO on February 27 1900, a meeting took place at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon St to form the Labour Representation Committee (LRC).
The building still stands although today it is a modern office with a plaque to mark the founding of the Labour Party. For many years I represented workers there as a union officer.
The meeting marked the start of a decade and more of events that still provide much of the framework for the Labour Party, the labour movement and the left today.
The period covered the election of the first Labour MPs, the beginnings of the welfare state and parliamentary reforms in favour of working people and the Great Unrest, one of the biggest and most militant strike waves in British history.
At the root of this range of strategies and tactics was the same idea: how to defend and promote the interests of working people in a market-capitalist society.
Historically, the formation of the LRC, the Liberal governments from 1906 and the syndicalist wave of the period from 1910 are often see as separate and opposing developments.
Yet they are linked by this underlying theme of how to effectively change society in the interests of labour. We find often the same players are involved in debates and discussions in all three spheres — party, Parliament and union.
Once you start to look at the historical detail of how the LRC was formed, who was responsible and what happened then, a picture far more complex than the stereotypical view that Labour was formed by the unions emerges — although it should be noted that like all successful stereotypes, there is some truth in that point.
The man who moved the motion at the 1899 TUC that an LRC should be set up was James [JH] Holmes. He was an organiser for the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), and it with its general secretary Richard Bell was a “moderate” union. Moderate not in the sense that it was particularly linked to the Liberal Party, as some unions were, but by virtue of the fact that it did not generally support militant industrial action or strikes.
But Holmes, the organiser in the west and Wales, was a militant and he built union membership against a backdrop of decline by aggressive recruitment tactics and taking on the railway employers.
He was at that time based in south Wales and lived in Cathays Cardiff. He was central in the early 1900s to the Taff Vale dispute, one of the landmark issues in the development of trade union and Labour politics in Britain.
His political and union activity is a fascinating snapshot of the transition in the labour movement from Liberal to independent Labour politics and a reminder of the role that trade union officials had in the formation of the Labour Party. Holmes stood as a Labour candidate in the West Midlands in the 1906 election but lost out to a Liberal.
The wider issues — of the effectiveness of industrial or parliamentary action in protecting and advancing the cause or workers remained hotly contested, as did the relationship between the two.
Historically it is worth noting that the Labour Party and its current configuration did not come ready-made but were built, and much argued over particularly around what mechanism was most effective to promote the cause of labour itself.
It is noteworthy that 125 years on the successor to the ASRS, the RMT, is not affiliated to the Labour Party any more and the debate about how best to effectively represent and promote the interests of working people continues.
Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on X @kmflett.
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