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International audience

International audience; Spanning a period which stretches from the 19th century to the present day, this book takes a novel look at the British labour movement by examining the interaction between trade unions, the Labour Party, other parties and groups of the Left, and the wider working class, to highlight the dialectic nature of these relationships, marked by consensus and dissention. It shows that, although perceived as a source of weakness, those inner conflicts have also been a source of creative tension, at times generating significant breakthroughs. The book brings together labour historians and political scientists who provide a range of case studies as well as more wide-ranging assessments of recent trends in labour organising. It will therefore be of interest to academics and students of history and politics, as well as to practitioners, in the British Isles and beyond.

On 30-31 August 2014, an international conference entitled ‘The Music of War: 1914-1918’ will be held at the British Library to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The call for papers published by convenors Jane Angell and Rachel Moore (Royal Holloway, University of London) reads as the perfect introduction for the book under review: “In recent years there has been a welcome increase in scholarly attention to musical activity during the First World War, and this has beg...

This chapter re-examines the GNCTU’s emergence, workings and historical significance through a look at its divisions. As barometers of social relations, they reveal the nature, structure and purposes of political movements, and as such, they are a powerful tool to move beyond the teleogical assumptions that have plagued the study of early socialism. In 1833-34, the GNCTU aimed to unite all trades in the country and secure workers’ labour control, from production processes to fair wages and access to equitable markets. Building on growing claims for national union among the British working classes, and under the chairmanship of Robert Owen (1771-1858) the GNCTU attracted strong popular support from the spring of 1834, but was torn apart by internal rivalry between moderate, orthodox Owenites opposed to any kind of violent action, and more radical members. Historians have seen the GNCTU at best as a missed opportunity for trade unionism, at worst as a diversion of labour’s alleged true goals through the collusion with Owen’s ‘utopian’ socialism, two conceptions this chapter seeks to challenge.

Founded in 1872, the Hull Trades Council, like its counterparts in other towns and cities, was created to unite the efforts of trade-union activists pertaining to different industries. Yet its unifying vocation did not prevent it from internal conflicts. This chapter seeks to identify the diverging factors at the root of those conflicts, from the Trades Council’s origins to 1914, to understand the way the question of working-class unity was debated, and how those conceptions changed over time. The chapter illuminates the role of Trades Councils in general in the growth of class-consciousness, the possibilities they offered to encourage a kind of proletarian unity different from the one elaborated in the parliamentary milieu, as well as the obstacles that left-wingers had to face in their attempts to build that unity. The Hull scenario, although it shows that Trades Council activists often displayed more imagination, initiative and firmness than national leaders, also makes clear how difficult it was to overcome at the local level the powerful tendencies that went contrary to their efforts at the broader national or even international levels.

The legitimacy of Scottish Labour as a party representative of the Scottish people has been called into question for much of its recent history, not only by disgruntled members of the Scottish electorate and political commentators, but also by Labour members and leaders themselves. Although there have been recent moves towards a more autonomous Scottish Labour Party, the post-devolution period for Labour has been marked overall by the difficulties entailed by the paradoxical centralisation of the organisation and structure of the party in a decentralised political environment where the constitutional issue has become the main political divide. This chapter therefore seeks to examine the current soul-searching crisis experienced by Scottish Labour through the analysis of the party’s experience of devolution in light of the two contradictory forces exerted by a traditionally centralised party in a unitary polity on the one hand and an overarching constitutional debate in a devolved environment on the other hand.