ABSTRACT
On February 8, 1886, while the “political world” was busily following Gladstone’s difficult construction of a Cabinet pledged to the consideration of Irish self-government, there occurred the first of a series of “unemployed riots” which ushered in a new era of politics even more certainly than the Home Rule controversy. To make an examination, year by year, of the records of the Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.) and its Parliamentary Committee is to become convinced that the impulse of “Labour” towards Socialism had to come from the outside. It is not that the T.U.C. programmes did not agitate reforms very important to the working classes. On the contrary, the reforms pressed for were of the highest value. There was no body of coherent Socialist doctrine to compete against Radicalism for British working-class support until the middle 80’s—and even then the new doctrine was for long years under the suspicion of the middle-aged and elderly as “unpractical.”.
