ABSTRACT
These failings have not been unique to the historical analysis of the labour movement in London. Recent studies of the early development of the Labour Party have used a similar abstraction of organization and leadership from economic and social structures. McKibbin’s assertion that Labour advances were ‘the political mobilization of an already existing industrial class consciousness: in practice it concentrated more on the extension of organization than upon the perfection of policy’ are based on this essentially
passive relationship of Labour and its members and supporters.3 By examining an area of London marked by the lack of rapid structural change in its dominant industrial and labour market structures, this essay suggests a more productive direction in which research should proceed. Instead of assuming that the Labour Party was merely ‘a vehicle for working-class representation’, an expression of class unity and consciousness of corporate identity, any analysis should start from the complex set of shifting alliances which constituted the party at a local as well as national level. Increased state intervention in the local economy before and during the First World War combined with an opening of local political institutions to working-class control with the extension of the franchise in 1918 to establish a new relationship between politics and the local economy. It was this changed framework which made possible both Poplarism and the new strength of Labour in East London. The politics of social class which dominated the East End of the 1920s was founded on a series of alliances between groups sharing a common political interest in the control of the institutions of local government. The use of borough councils and boards of guardians to advance the interests of Labour’s constituency provided the basis of political unity, not any sense of class unity engendered by the workplace. Throughout the political conflicts of the early 1920s this sense of local political identity, although frequently expressed in the language of inter national socialism, provided the basis for Labour’s strength in the face of attacks from the London County Council and Whitehall.4
