Labour Party (UK)

“ Thus Great Britain, the mother country from which Americans have inherited so many institutions, laws, and traditions, passed in turn through the periods of extreme paternalism, glorified competition, and governmental antagonism to labor combinations, into what may be called the age of conciliation. And today the Labour Party in the House of Commons has shown itself strong enough to impose its programme upon the Liberals and, through this radical coalition, has achieved a power for the working man greater than even Francis Place or Thomas Carlyle ever hoped for. ”

“ The so-called Independent Labour Party is independent only that it is free to sell to the highest bidder. The I.L.P. is in reality run by a set of job-hunters whose only apparent political principle is to catch votes on varying pretexts and by still more varying means. ”

“ The Labour Party as a Labour Party is no more inherently reconstructive than the Banking Interest or the Shipping Interest. Like them, it merely wants an excessive and inconsiderate share of present power and satisfactions. ”

“ The efforts of the past twenty-five years to establish a separate socialist party in parliament have not been directly successful, but the Labour Party has managed to return a group of some thirty workmen to the House of Commons, and these men are the responsible and trusted leaders of the trade-unions and the Independent Labour Party. ”

“ The new Labour Party came into existence, and joined with the opponents of Tory Imperialism, the Nonconformists alienated by the Education Act, the people of all classes who had been offended by the Licensing Act, the Conservative Free Traders, and those who were anxious to resume the work of economic reconstruction, to overwhelm the Tory Party at the General Election. ”

“ The hardest work in connection with some of the measures has been done by Liberals who, though not members of the Party, are generally found working in connection with that body. But it must be conceded that most of the planks which have been carried owe their early success to the fact of their adoption on the programme of the United Labour Party, and the persistent advocacy and solid votes of its members. ”

“ Is not self-interest the ruling passion in the human heart? Then how should any party be so true to Labour and so diligent in Labour's service as a Labour Party would be?
What is a Trade Union? It is a combination of workers to defend their own interests from the encroachments of the employers.
Well, a Labour Party is a combination of workers to defend their own interests from the encroachments of the employers, or their representatives in Parliament and on Municipal bodies. ”

“ Now Labour has been tarnished by office I doubt whether it will exercise the same compelling magic upon intellectually adventurous people. There is all the difference in the world between encouraging a Labour Party which promises everything glorious, and bolstering up a Labour Government which does nothing amusing. ”

“ The surprising and encouraging result of such association is the announcement that the new Labour Party is today publicly thrown open to all workers, both by hand and by brain, with the object of securing for these the full fruits of their industry. ”

“ Together they are elevated, together they are depressed, and any Tory reaction which swept the Liberal Party out of power would assuredly work at least proportionate havoc in the ranks of Labour. That may not be a very palatable truth, but it is a truth none the less.
Labour! It is a great word. It moves the world, it comprises the millions, it combines many men in many lands in the sympathy of a common burden. Who has the right to speak for Labour? ”

“ What is, however, much more crippling to the Labour Party than the scanty funds with which its constituent societies supply it, and this insufficiency in the staff of trained election organisers, is the scarcity of trained Parliamentary represent- atives. ”

“ Taken together with the intellectual bankruptcy of the Liberal Party and its apparent incapacity to formulate any positive policy, whether with regard to the redistribution of wealth within our own community or with regard to our attitude towards other races within or without the British Empire, the emergence of the Labour Party programme meant that the Party stood forth, in public opinion, as the inevitable alternative to the present Coalition Government when the time came for this to fall. ”

“ The two other traditional parties in British politics are no doubt undergoing remarkable changes and internal disruptions, and the constructive spirit of the time is at work within them; but it does not seem that either is likely to develop anything nearly so definitely a Socialist programme as the Labour Party. ”

“ The Liberal Party had already crumbled before the rise of a nominally Socialist Labour Party, placed in office, though hardly in power, by a popular vote largely drawn from former Liberals. The payment of Members helped to bring into keen politics the trade unions whose leaders saw their way to an honourable career in the House of Commons. ”

“ At a recent conference of the Social-Democratic Federation the chairman declared, in his opening address: "There can be but one Independent Labour Party, and there ought to be a united Socialist party. ”

“ The Conservatives have at their disposal a great political machine. The Labour party could command the support of all the trade unions, with their elaborate machinery for organising the wage-earning population. The Independent Liberals had in England and in Scotland captured the Liberal machine almost in its entirety, and had spent six years in perfecting it, their leaders having no other occupation. ”

“ We have determined to give back that charter to the trade unions. The Bill is even now passing through the House of Commons.
We are often told that there can be no progress for democracy until the Liberal Party has been destroyed. Let us examine that. Labour in this country exercises a great influence upon the Government. That is not so everywhere. It is not so, for instance, in Germany, and yet in Germany there is no Liberal Party worth speaking of. Labour there is very highly organised, and the Liberal Party there has been destroyed. ”

“ But briefly, what all men were engaged in searching after—the Labour party, no more and no less than the Radicals and the Tories—was how we could raise the character and material conditions of our people; how by better organisation we could root out needless misery of mind and body; how we could improve the health and the intelligence, stimulate the sense of duty and fellowship, the efficiency and the patriotism of the whole community. ”

“ LABOUR PARTY, in Great Britain, the name given to the party in parliament composed of working-class representatives. As the result of the Reform Act of 1884, extending the franchise to a larger new working-class electorate, the votes of “labour” became more and more a matter of importance for politicians; and the Liberal party, seeking for the support of organized labour in the trade unions, found room for a few working-class representatives, who, however, acted and voted as Liberals. ”

“ The Labour Party, as it was understood ten years ago, was a pitiful conglomeration of selfish atoms without the faintest idea of coordination. It is for the souls of the people we stand, we Democrats, whether they belong to trades unions or not, whether they till the fields or sweat in the factories, whether they bend over a desk or go back and forth across the sea, whether they live in small houses or large, whether they belong to the respectable middle classes whom the after-the-war legislation did its best to break, or to the class of actual manual laborers. ”

“ The rise of the Labour Party has been the most remarkable feature of the situation during the past three or four years, and the whole history of the Labour Party is the most conspicuous illustration of the general truth of what has just been said. ”

“ The case against the Government from the Labour standpoint was therefore unrelieved black, and the Society, in whose name the Manifesto appeared, called on the working classes to abandon Liberalism, to form a Trade Union party of their own, to raise £30,000 and to finance fifty candidates for Parliament. ”

“ Indeed, the program of the new British Labour Party seems to point to a distinctly American solution, one in harmony with the steady growth of Anglo-Saxon democracy. For it is now announced that the word “labour,” as applied to the new party, does not mean manual labour alone, but also mental labour. The British unions have gradually developed and placed in power leaders educated in social science, who have now come into touch with the intellectual leaders of the United Kingdom, with the sociologists, economists, and social scientists. ”

“ That is to say, while it does not represent the working people exclusively, it is a class organization standing for the interests of that group of classes which has joined its ranks, and for other classes of the community only in so far as their interests happen to be the same.
Already the majority of the Labour Party voters are undoubtedly working people. ”

“ Trade Union and Labour Party are both class defences against class aggression.
If you oppose a man as an employer, why do you vote for him as a Member of Parliament? His calling himself a Liberal or a Tory does not alter the fact that he is an employer. ”

“ For nearly ten years past each of these Parliaments has been dominated by a small section of its members, known as the Labour Party, mostly men of the working class, elected for the sole purpose of advocating and enforcing their class interests. ”

“ The chief immediate danger in the case of the two older parties is that, owing to the growing expense of electioneering and the growing effect of legislation on commerce and finance, an increasing proportion of the members and candidates may be drawn from the class of 'hustling' company-promoters and financiers. The Labour Party, on the other hand, can now draw upon an ample supply of genuine public spirit, and its difficulties in this respect will arise, not from calculated individual selfishness, but from the social and intellectual environment of working-class life. ”

“ If formulation on paper of ideals of humanitarianism, and quixotic Utopianism, without any consideration of cost or practicability, is statesmanship, the Labour Party’s policy is truly admirable. It outlines in glowing splendour a wonderful new mechanism of politics, society and industry, in which every exterior part falls into place with the smoothness and precision of a model engine constructed out of a box of parts—but, like the toy, with no works inside. ”

“ Many political organisations professed to exist only for the purpose of assisting the working class. The Conservative Party, Liberal Party, Labour party, Communist Party and a host of others drew up programmes of social reforms which they all guaranteed would, if the workers would only trust them and vote for them; solve all the ills which afflicted the working class. The Socialist Party of Great Britain had no reforms on its programme and was opposed to all parties who asked the workers to support a reformist policy. ”

“ For the rank and file of Labour is not enamoured of bureaucratic rule, and, if there were a reasonable likelihood of coalition with a powerful Liberal Party along the lines of the “Five Years’ Plan,” many electors who now vote Labour, without a close Labour attachment, would vote Liberal. ”

“ In Parliament itself, and on Municipal Councils, the World of Labour, by hand or by brain, will need to give a continuous and an equal backing to its own political party, in order to see to it that it has its own representatives—specialised and trained for this supreme political function—not by ones and twos, but in force ”

“ The Labour Party in Parliament's disappointed all its supporters so far, but it's going to justify itself at last. One thing. They can't trample on us this time, the Fats canna. We're too well organised. ”

“ Every man and woman, therefore, may now join a Local Labour Party. It is intended to form a Labour Party in every parliamentary constituency, as a unit of organization to which Trade Union local branches and Local Trade Councils, Co-operative, Socialist, and other such societies will be affiliated, and to which each individual local supporter of the Labour Party will adhere. Every candidate for Parliament must be chosen or approved by the local organization and accepted by the National Executive. ”

“ Hence the deliberate and formal opening of the Party, through the Local Labour Parties, to “workers by brain” as well as “workers by hand”; and the explicit adoption, as a programme, of Labour and the New Social Order were not such innovations as the newspapers made out and as the public generally supposed. But they created a sensation, not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States and in the British Dominions ”