ABSTRACT
The most striking feature of the union leadership was its rejection of a class model of society and industrial relations. Market relations were not seen as class relations, but as functional relations governed by the laws of the market and in which conflicts arose mainly from misunderstanding alone. Until the early part of nineteenth century the miners' leadership rejected socialist doctrine and fiercely resented and resisted the concomitant idea of a new and independent working class party'. Methodism was a peculiarly ethical religion with immediate implications for conduct; the saved man was a new man upright, honest, sober, trustworthy, and respectable. The Liberal-Methodist view of class structure would not have stood up if the coal-owners had not in some way conformed to the expectations arising from the Methodist model. Most individuals can present a more or less consistent image of the class structure for so long as they are not confronted with issues to which their models are inadequate.
