- See Independent Labor Party for the political party in Burundi, and Independent Labour Group for the Irish party.
The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a socialist political party in the United Kingdom.
Foundation and growth
The party was formed as a consequence of the Manningham Mills strike in Bradford on January 14, 1893 making it one of
the earliest democratic socialist political parties operating in the United
Kingdom. Its founder chairman was James Keir Hardie who had been elected as independent
labour MP for West Ham South in the previous year's general election. Others involved in the formation included Robert Smillie, Tom Mann, John
Bruce Glasier, Henry Hyde Champion, Ben
Tillett, Philip Snowden, and Edward Carpenter.
The early years of the ILP were characterised by a number of amalgamations with small socialist and leftist groups, and in the 1895 General Election they contested 28
seats. The party polled well in some urban centres but Hardie lost his seat.
The ILP played a central role in the formation of the Labour Representation
Committee in 1900 and when the Labour Party was
formed in 1906 the ILP affiliated to it. This affiliation allowed the ILP to continue to hold its
own conferences and devise its own policies which ILP members were expected to argue for within the Labour Party. Also, as in
most constituencies the Labour Party did not operate individual membership until 1918 the ILP
provided much of Labour's activist base in the early years.
The relationship between the ILP and the Labour Party was characterised by conflict. Many ILP members viewed the Labour Party
as being too timid and moderate in their attempts at social reform, and consequently many ILP branches chose to amalgamate with
the Social Democratic Party of H. M.
Hyndman in 1912 to found the British Socialist
Party. However the new party was little more than the SDP rebranded and the ILP soon resumed its position as the largest
of a number of small socialist parties and groups in Britain.
On April 11, 1914 the party celebrated its 21st anniversary
with a congress in Bradford. However, the coming of World War I exposed the gulf between the
Labour Party, based on the trade union bureaucracy, and the ILP when the latter opposed war on ethical principles based on a
pacifism grounded in the Christian beliefs of much of both the leadership and rank and file membership.
The 21st anniversary congress certificate
The 21st anniversary congress of the ILP occurred in April 1914, four months before the outbreak of World War I and later World War II. Perhaps tragically and ironically,
the flags pictured are those of the major combatants. Shown from left to right, they are:
-
The inter-war period
Between the Second International and the Third International
When the Second International was relaunched after the war, the ILP was involved
in the organising discussions (see Berne International). However, the majority of
members saw the International as compromised by its support for war. The ILP disaffiliated from the International in August
1920.
Meanwhile, the right-wing leadership of the ILP, notably Ramsay MacDonald and
Philip Snowden, opposed affiliation to the newly formed
Third International. None the less, a great deal of sympathy was evidenced within the ILP for
Soviet Russia (i.e. the USSR). A compromise was sought whereby the ILP proposed to
affiliate to the Third International on condition it need not accept the idea of armed revolt - a proposal rejected by the Third
International.[1]
The "centrism" of the ILP, caught between the reformist
politics of the Second International and the revolutionary politics of the Third
International, led it to leading a number of other European socialist groups into the "Second and a Half International" between 1921 and 1923.
A small minority in the ILP, including Emile Burns and S
Saklatvala, formed the "ILP Left Wing" around the journal International and local "Left-Wing Committees" to
continue a campaign to join the Third International. When their position was again defeated in 1921, they left to join the Communist Party of Great
Britain.[2]
The ILP and the Labour Party
At the 1922 general election several ILP members became MPs
(including future ILP leader Jimmy Maxton) and the party grew in stature. The ILP provided
many of the new Labour MPs, including John Wheatley, Emanuel Shinwell, Tom Johnston and
David Kirkwood. However, the first Labour government (returned to office in
1924) proved to be hugely disappointing to the ILP. Their response was to devise their own
programme for government but the Labour Party leadership rejected this.
For the duration of the second Labour government (1929-31) 37
Labour MPs were sponsored by the ILP and they provided the left opposition to the Labour leadership. The 1930 ILP conference decided that where their policies diverged from the Labour Party their MPs should break the
whip to support the ILP policy.
It was becoming clearer that the ILP was diverging further away from the Labour Party and at the 1931 ILP Scottish Conference the issue of whether the party should still affiliate to Labour was discussed. It was
decided to continue to do so, but only after Maxton himself intervened in the debate to speak up to continue to do so.
At the 1931 general election the ILP candidates refused to
accept the standing orders of the parliamentary Labour Party, resulting in them standing without official Labour Party support.
Five ILP members were returned to Westminster and created an ILP group outside the Labour Party. In 1932 the ILP held a special conference and voted to disaffiliate from Labour. The same year, it co-founded the
"London Bureau" of left-socialist parties (later called the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre).
The Labour left-winger Aneurin Bevan described the ILP's disaffiliation as a decision
to remain "pure, but impotent", and in the long run his criticism was arguably vindicated, as once outside of the Labour Party
structure the ILP's political influence went into decline. Some members of the ILP who chose to remain within the Labour Party
were to be instrumental in creating the Socialist League.
In the 1930s the party suffered a massive decline in membership owing to the decision to
disaffiliate from Labour, but they remained active. Moving to the left as a result of pressure from the more active layers of the
membership in the Depression they also recruited many young people and workers as a result. But while winning new members they
also lost members to the right, to the Labour Party, and to their left to the Communist Party and to the Trotskyists as well as losing a breakaway in the north west the Independent Socialist Party in 1934.
They were particularly active in supporting the Republican side in the
Spanish Civil War, and around twenty-five members and sympathizers (including
George Orwell) actually went to Spain to assist the POUM as part of an ILP Contingent of
volunteers. (The POUM was the ILP's sister party in the "Three-and-a-Half International" of democratic socialist parties, which the ILP administered and Fenner Brockway chaired for most if its existnce in the 1930s.)
From the mid-1930s onwards the ILP also attracted the attention of the Trotskyist movement with various Trotskyist groups
working within it, such as the Marxist Group of which CLR James, Denzil Dean Harber and Ted Grant were members. This was in addition to the presence within the party of a group of members
sympathetic to the CPGB, the Revolutionary Policy Committee, who
eventually left to join that party.
WWII and beyond
As in 1914 the ILP opposed World War II on ethical grounds and turned to the left. One
aspect of its leftist policies in this period was that it opposed the war time truce between the major parties and actively
contested Parliamentary elections. In one such by-election in Cardiff this was with the result that Fenner Brockway, the ILP candidate, found himself opposed by a Conservative candidate
for whom the local Communist Party actively campaigned.
The end of war can be said to mark the final descent of the ILP into the political wilderness as its conference rejected calls
to reaffiliate to the Labour Party. A major blow came in 1946 when the party's best known public
spokesman, James Maxton MP, died. Although the ILP narrowly held his seat in the
Glasgow Bridgeton by-election, 1946, all their MPs had defected to
Labour by 1948, and the party was roundly defeated at the Glasgow Camlachie
by-election, 1948, in a seat they had won easily only three years earlier. The party was never again able to take a
significant vote in a Parliamentary election.
Despite these blows the ILP continued and throughout the 1950s and into the early
1960s pioneered opposition to the nuclear bomb and sought to publicise ideas such as workers'
control. The small party also maintained links with the remnants of its fraternal groups, such as the POUM, who were in exile, as
well as campaigning for de-colonisation.
In the 1970s the ILP reassessed its views on the Labour Party, and in 1975 they renamed themselves Independent Labour
Publications and became a pressure group inside the mainstream Labour Party.
List of chairs
- 1893: Keir Hardie
- 1900: Bruce Glasier
- 1903: Philip Snowden
- 1906: Ramsay MacDonald
- 1909: Frederick William Jowett
- 1911: William Crawford Anderson
- 1913: Keir Hardie
- 1914: Frederick William Jowett
- 1917: Philip Snowden
- 1920: Richard Wallhead
- 1922: Clifford Allen
- 1926: James Maxton
- 1931: Fenner Brockway
- 1934: James Maxton
- 1939: C. A. Smith
- 1941: John McGovern
- 1943: Robert Edwards
- 1948: David Gibson
- 1951: Fred Barton
- 1953: Annie Maxton
- 1958: Fred Morel
- 1962: Emrys Thomas
Source: Online catalogue of the ILP papers at the London School of Economics
See also
Archives
The archives of the Independent Labour Party are held at the Archives Division of the Library of the London School of Economics. An online catalogue of these
papers is available.
References
|
The references in this article would be clearer with a different or consistent style of citation, footnoting, or external
linking. |
- BBC. Victorians: Independent Labour Party founded 1893. Brief timeline article. Retrieved June 16, 2006.
- Byers, Michael. ILP: Independent Labour Party. Published on Red Clydeside: a history of the labour movement in Glasgow, a project of the Glasgow Digital Library. Retrieved June 16, 2006.
- Ryan, Mordecai. Britain’s biggest
left party, 1893-1945, and what became of it - The history of the ILP. Published in Solidarity, organ of the Alliance for Workers'
Liberty Issue 3/85, 8 December 2005. Published online on 10 December, 2005 - 13:03. Retrieved June 16, 2006.
- Cox, Judy Skinning a live
tiger paw by paw: reform, revolution and Labour IS (Leninist critique)
- Independent Labour Party Archives. Archive abstracts available via Archives Hub. Retrieved June 16, 2006.
Further reading
- David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888-1906 (Manchester University Press, 1983) ISBN
0-7190-1791-2
- Alan McKinlay and R.J. Morris (editors), The ILP on Clydeside, 1893-1932: From Foundation to Disintegration
(Manchester University Press, 1991) ISBN 0-7190-2706-3
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
