Party News from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard
Socialist Standard September 1904 to December 1909 at [the following link.]
When the Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded in June 1904 there was a Tory government, under Arthur Balfour, in office. The Second Boer War had only ended two years previously. The main issues of concern to workers were unemployment and worker representation in parliament. Propertied women were beginning to step up the campaign to give women the vote on the same restricted terms as men.
The general election at the start of 1906 gave the Liberals a landslide victory and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman took over as Prime Minister. Twenty-nine members of the Labour Representation Committee were elected and formed themselves into the Parliamentary Labour Party. Most of them had been elected as a result of a deal, not revealed at the time, between Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Gladstone, the Liberals’ national agent. Under the deal, in selected two-member constituencies, where the electors had two votes, the Liberals and Labour only fielded one each, urging their supporters to vote for both. That there must have been such a deal was obvious and an article in the March 1906 issue provided the detailed evidence for this. This policy was defended by Keir Hardie as well as MacDonald and implemented in by-elections too. The early Labour Party was just the tail-end of the Liberal Party.
The Socialist Standard was all for working class representation in parliament but only as socialist delegates elected by socialist votes, not working men elected through deals with the Liberals or even independently of them on a programme of ‘palliatives’ as reforms within capitalism were then called.
The ‘competition’ was the SDF (which became the SDP in 1908), the ILP and Robert Blatchford’s Clarion which had a circulation in tens of thousands. The LRC did not claim to be socialist but were, most of them, working class Liberals or ‘Lib-Labs’. Readers will get a good idea of what these organisations were really like as opposed to the myths that have grown up about them since.
Internal debates on trade unions and the materialist conception of history are also recorded as were debates against other political organisations, ‘whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist’.
International affairs were also covered such as the 1905 Russian revolution and Rosa Luxemburg’s trial in December 1906 for incitement to violence. During this period the Party considered itself a part of the anti-revisionist wing of international Social Democracy and the Socialist Standard carried translations from French and German. This did not stop it taking Bebel and Lafargue to task for congratulating the Labour Party on its success in the 1906 elections.
Essential reading, then, not only for its presentation of the unchanging case for socialism, but also as a contemporary source of information on politics, particularly working-class politics, in the Edwardian period.
Adam Buick
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