ABSTRACT
To some elements of the Labour Party, particularly the trade unions, the concern of the party’s 1918 constitution with the interests of workers by both hand and brain may have been little more than a disingenuous concession to the defeated middle-class socialist elements of the party. But for the London Labour Party and its secretary, Herbert Morrison, that concern expressed political necessity, the sine qua non of Labour progress in the capital. Webb’s article, with its suggestion that London was ‘probably the most extensively “middle-class” community in the world’, initiated a series1 in which Hamilton Fyfe of the Herald, Emile Davies of the LCC, W. J. Brown of the Civil Service Clerical Association, and Morrison himself spelt out the grounds of Labour’s appeal to the middle-class vote. Throughout the 1920s London Labour Party propaganda, closely edited by Morrison, alluded at every opportunity to the common interests of Labour and the middle classes.
