ABSTRACT
The attitudes of the Labour Party towards the various early forms of state welfare and its underlying motivations have been a matter of some contention among historians. Labour spoke for a mass of people whose interests it knew to be varied and often conflicting. Labour members contributed little to the debate on an uncontroversial bill. The normal practice was to avoid uncontroversial debates where Labour had no distinctive interest, in order to conserve the energies of their small number of heavily worked members. Labour has been accused of having no clear unemployment policy other than a vague conception of the ‘right to work’. Labour had no objection to the method of matching vacancies and jobs; indeed several unions ran similar schemes for their own members. A succession of Labour speakers vigorously attacked the spectre of the malingerer which – predictably – was evoked by members of the other parties.
