ABSTRACT

The diverse minorities on the British Left can be treated as a whole if it is assumed that they possessed a common outlook and ideology. Such an assumption may seem questionable in view of their frequent disputes. Yet many of these disputes were tactical rather than fundamental. Even the ILP and the extremist groups which came to form a ‘lunatic fringe’ of the Left, disagreed on tactics rather than on the ultimate aim of converting the Labour movement to radical socialism. Many groups on the Left claimed to be Marxist. All believed that society should be fundamentally reorganized. All were in opposition to established policies and institutions. The Left was primarily oppositionist. Its vision of the future society was either Utopian or was based on an abstract notion of the Soviet Union which bore little relation to reality. Even the Socialist League, which inherited the outlook of the Fabians through the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda, soon succumbed to the more sweeping philosophy of the former ILP members who led it. The Left played a more effective role in focusing opposition to the policies of the National government than in formulating concrete alternatives. While the Left presented few practical programmes for the immediate present, it moulded the general attitudes of a whole generation of activists and kept alive a radical strand in British socialist thought.