ABSTRACT
Historians are fascinated by the rise and fall of political parties and, most obviously for early twentieth-century Britain, the rise of the Labour Party, the decline of the Liberal Party and the amazing political revival of the Conservative Party from its political malaise on the eve of the Great War. The loss of about a third of Independent Labour Party (ILP) members in the immediate wake of disaffiliation, and a steady decline, thereafter, doomed it to political oblivion as it effectively became a lens for all of the major disputes that dominated the Left in Britain during the 1930s. The ILP was always identified with community influence, guild socialism in the inter-war years and freedom of opinion, generally rejecting the democratic centralism which shaped the thinking of Marxist organisations.
