Socialism in the United Kingdom


in the United Kingdom is thought to stretch back to the 19th century, with roots arising in the English Civil War. It has taken many different forms from the utopian philanthropism of Robert Owen through to the reformist electoral project enshrined in the Labour Party that was founded in 1900 and nationalised a fifth of the British economy in the late 1940s.

Origins

In the turmoil of the English Civil War in the 1640s, several proto-socialist groups emerged, most notably the Levellers. They advocated electoral reform, universal trial by jury, progressive taxation and the abolition of the monarchy and aristocracy and of censorship. This was strongly opposed by Oliver Cromwell's government, which also persecuted the moderate reformist group the Fifth Monarchy Men and the radical utopian group the Diggers.

19th century

Industrial Revolution and Robert Owen

The Industrial Revolution, the transition from a farming economy to an industrial one, began in the UK over thirty years before the rest of the world.
Textile mills and coal mines sprang up across the whole country and peasants left the fields to work down the mines, or into the "Dark, Satanic Mills", the chimneys of which blackened the sky over Lancashire and Yorkshire. Appalling conditions for workers, combined with support for the French Revolution, turned some intellectuals to socialism.
The pioneering work of Robert Owen, a Welsh radical, at New Lanark in Scotland, is often credited as being the birth of British Socialism. He stopped employing children under the age of ten, and instead arranged for their education, and improved the working and living conditions of all his workers. He also lobbied Parliament over child labour and helped to create the co-operative movement, before attempting to create a utopian community at New Harmony in the United States.

Trade unions

The trade union movement in Britain gradually developed from the Medieval guild system. Unions were subject to often severe repression until 1824, but were already widespread in cities such as London. Workplace militancy had also manifested itself as Luddism and had been prominent in struggles such as the Radical War in Scotland in 1820, when 60,000 workers went on a general strike, which was soon crushed.
From 1830 on, attempts were made to set up national general unions, most notably Robert Owen's Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in 1834, which attracted a range of socialists from Owenites to revolutionaries. It played a part in the protests after the Tolpuddle Martyrs' case, but soon collapsed.
Militants turned to Chartism, the aims of which were supported by most socialists, although none appear to have played leading roles.
More permanent trade unions were established from the 1850s, better resourced but often less radical. The London Trades Council was founded in 1860, and the Sheffield Outrages spurred the establishment of the Trades Union Congress in 1868. Union membership grew as unskilled and women workers were unionised, and socialists such as Tom Mann played an increasingly prominent role.

Christian socialism

The rise of Non-Conformist religions, in particular Methodism, played a large role in the development of trade unions and of British socialism. The influence of the radical chapels was strongly felt among some industrial workers, especially miners and those in the north of England and Wales.
The first group, calling itself Christian Socialists, formed in 1848 under the leadership of Frederick Denison Maurice. Its membership mainly consisted of Chartists. The group became dormant after only six years, but there was a considerable revival of Christian socialism in the 1880s, and a number of groups sprang up. Ultimately, Christian socialists dominated the leadership of the Independent Labour Party, including Keir Hardie.

Chartist movement

The Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s was the first mass revolutionary movement of the British working-class. Mass meetings and demonstrations involving millions of proletariat and petty-bourgeois were held throughout the country for years.
The Chartists published several petitions to the British Parliament, the most famous of which was called the People's Charter in 1842, which demanded:
  1. Universal suffrage for men.
  2. The secret ballot.
  3. Removal of property qualifications for members of parliament.
  4. Salaries for members of parliament.
  5. Electoral districts representing equal numbers of people.
  6. Annually elected parliaments.
The government subsequently subjected the Chartists to brutal reprisals and arrested their leaders. The remaining party then split as a result of a divide in tactics: the Moral Force Party believed in bureaucratic reformism, while the Physical Force Party believed in workers' reformism.
The Chartist movement's reformist goals, although not immediately and directly attained, were gradually achieved. In the same year as the People's Charter was created, the British Parliament instead responded by passing the 1842 Mining Act. Carefully valving the steam of the working-class movement, Parliament reduced the working day to ten hours with the Factories Act 1847.

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Marxism

and Friedrich Engels worked in England, and they influenced small émigré groups including the Communist League. Engels' book The Condition of the Working Class in England became a popular expose of conditions for workers, but initially Marxism had little impact among Britain's working class.
The first nominally Marxist organisation was the Social Democratic Federation, founded in 1882. Engels refused to support the organisation, although Marx's daughter Eleanor joined.
The party soon split, with the Socialist League of William Morris becoming divided between anarchists and Marxists such as Morris and Eleanor Marx. A much later split produced the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Britain's oldest existing socialist party, and the Socialist Labour Party.
Although Marxism had some impact in Britain, it was far less than in many other European countries, with philosophers such as John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill having much greater influence. Some non-Marxists theorise that this was because Britain was amongst the most democratic countries of Europe of the period, the ballot box provided an instrument for change, so a parliamentary, reformist socialism seemed a more promising route than elsewhere.

Liberal–Labour and the Independent Labour Party

The Reform League, which was founded in 1865 to press for universal male suffrage and vote by secret ballot, qualified its demand for suffrage with the phrase "registered and residential" shortly before the passing of the 1867 Reform Act. This qualifier excluded a great number of British labourers, casual workers, and the unemployed. The change in policy has been attributed to donations received by the League from Liberal Party politicians in 1866 and 1867. At the time, Marx wrote that he and Engels had been "betrayed in the Reform League where, against our wishes, have made compromises with the bourgeoisie".
However, a great deal of collaboration came to exist between the Liberal Party and the leaders of the labour movement, though Marx saw these as effective bribes by the bourgeoisie and the government. The 1867 Reform Act was passed and enfranchised roughly three million people, around half of whom were working class. This was extended to five million by the Representation of the People Act 1884, which extended the householder's franchise. The Liberal Party was worried about the prospect of a socialist party taking the bulk of the working-class vote, while their great rivals, the Conservatives, initiated occasional intrigues to encourage socialist candidates to stand against the Liberals.
In 1874, the Liberals 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. Other miners' leaders entered Parliament via the same route.
In 1888, Robert Cunninghame-Graham, the MP for Lanarkshire North-West since the 1886 general election, left the Liberal Party and formed his own, independent, Scottish Labour Party, becoming the first socialist MP in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
At the 1892 general election, Keir Hardie, another Liberal politician who had joined Cunninghame-Graham in the Scottish Labour Party, was elected as an Independent Labour MP, and this gave him the spur to found a UK-wide Independent Labour Party in 1893.

20th century

The early twentieth century saw a number of socialist groups and movements in Britain. As well as the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation, there was a mass movement around Robert Blatchford's newspaper The Clarion from the 1890s to the 1930s; the more intellectual gradualist Fabian Society; and more radical groups such as the Socialist Labour Party. However, the movement was increasingly dominated by the formation of the British Labour Party.

Birth of the Labour Party

In 1900, representatives of various trade unions and of the Independent Labour Party, Fabian Society and Social Democratic Federation agreed to form a Labour Party backed by the unions and with its own whips. The Labour Representation Committee was founded with Keir Hardie as its leader. At the 1900 general election, the LRC won only two seats, and the SDF disaffiliated, but more unions signed up.
The LRC affiliated to the Socialist International and in 1906 changed its name to The Labour Party. It formed an electoral pact with the Liberals, intending to cause maximum damage to the Unionist government at the forthcoming election. This was successful, and in the process, 29 Labour MPs were elected to the House of Commons.