ABSTRACT

Despite its shattering defeat in 1931 the Labour Party had established itself as the dominant political force opposed to the Conservative Party, as the unchallenged controller of local government on the major coalfields and as the Party to which the great majority of trade-union officials gave their loyalty. All this had been achieved at the expense of the Liberal Party which had monopolized all three areas before 1910. In another sense the domination of the Labour Party had also been achieved at the expense of other claimants to the leadership of the socialist movement and the working class. Prior to 1910 it was by no means clear either that Labour would replace the Liberals or that it would move so far ahead of these rivals as to reduce them to marginal sects. Between 1910 and 1914 the whole concept of parliamentary Labourism was seriously threatened by syndicalism in those areas such as South Wales where the parliamentary representation of unionized workers had first been pioneered. The Liberal loyalties of the older generation of miners’ officials had been challenged not merely by the idea of independent labour representation but also by the notion of direct action, based on industrial power and leading to a system of ‘workers’ control’ which would supplant parliamentary institutions. Such ideas had their major influence in South Wales where nearly all men were engaged in mining and could envisage a pure ‘class struggle’ between themselves and the coalowners which would at the same time be a political struggle between the great majority and the rich minority.1 In other parts of Britain such ideas were more difficult to put across except to relatively small minorities or in the pre-dominantly proletarian areas of central Scotland where miners, engineers and shipbuilders also constituted the majority of wage earners.