Ten times the Labour party stood behind striking workers in Britain
The story is that Labour is the only major socialist party in the world that emerged directly from organised labour — every other important party — from the DSA to the SPD to the PS and the JSP — was the product of an actual revolution or of a popular socialist movement. Labour founders Keir Hardie and Arthur Henderson had both been union leaders and many early Labour parliamentarians were well-known workplace leaders or campaigners for workers’ rights.
(note labour and Labour are used throughout, for obvious reasons).
So there’s a logic to the statement that Labour is ‘the party of organised labour’ or ‘the Parliamentary wing of the trade union movement’. And to the reminders that it’s the unions who still largely fund the party. And to the shock and upset amongst supporters when Labour’s parliamentary leadership fails to support union action or even opposes it.
It turns out, though, that the will of those early Labour leaders — and of their comrades at the top of the union movement for that matter — was not to win a victory for workers, to challenge or overthrow the parties of power at the time, to replace or diminish the landowner and business elites, or even to offer a pro-worker counterweight in the Commons. The will of those leaders — as of the current generation — was always to gain access, to join the club, to get their bums on the green benches and to form a polite left-hand hump to the Crown-Parliamentary camel, supplanting the previous occupants of the less-favoured benches and becoming ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’.
This sounds cynical. I don’t mean for a moment to discount the contribution of those pioneer socialists to the pushing back of the multi-century stasis of Tory (and Whig) domination, the epochal introduction into an ancient elite legislature of working people. And, of course, individual Labour members have provided the backbone to countless labour disputes over the years — but it is vital to be clear-eyed about this. Labour in Parliament, from its very beginnings, was not a workers’ party. In the present day it’s a progressive party, a party of the Parliamentary centre-left, but it is not a workers’ party.
