United Kingdom

There were significant changes in terms of the impression organized labour made on politics. Some of the new union leaders were confessed socialists, anxious to use political as well as economic power to secure their objectives, and a number of socialist organizations emerged between 1880 and 1900—all conscious, at least intermittently, that, whatever their differences, they were part of a “labour movement.” The Social Democratic Federation, influenced by Marxism, was founded in 1884; however, it was never more than a tiny and increasingly sectarian organization. The Independent Labour Party, founded in Bradford in 1893, had a more general appeal, while the Fabian Society, founded in 1883–84, included intellectuals who were to play a large part in 20th-century labour politics. In February 1900 a labour representation conference was held in London at which trade unionists and socialists agreed to found a committee (the Labour Representation Committee), with Ramsay MacDonald as first secretary, to promote the return of Labour members to Parliament. This conference marked the beginning of the 20th-century Labour Party, which, with Liberal support, won 29 seats in the general election of 1906. Although until 1914 the party at Westminster for the most part supported the Liberals, in 1909 it secured the allegiance of the “Lib-Lab” miners’ members. Financially backed by the trade unions, it was eventually to take the place of the Liberal Party as the second party in the British state.

The return of the Liberals

The Liberals returned to power in December 1905 after Balfour had resigned. Between the end of the South African War and this date, they had become more united as the Conservatives had disintegrated. In 1903 Chamberlain had taken up the cause of protection, thereby disturbing an already uneasy balance within Balfour’s cabinet. He failed to win large-scale middle- or working-class support outside Parliament, as he had hoped, and the main effect of his propaganda was to draw rival groups of Liberals together. In the general election of 1906, the Liberals, led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a cautious Scot who had stayed clear of the extreme factions during the South African War, won 377 seats, giving them an enormous majority of 84 over all other parties combined. The new cabinet included radicals and Liberal imperialists, and when Campbell-Bannerman retired in 1908, H.H. Asquith moved from the Home Office to the premiership.

Asquith, H.H.H.H. Asquith.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Social reform had not been the chief cry at the general election, which was fought mainly on the old issues of free trade, temperance reform, and education. In many constituencies there was evidence of Nonconformist grievances against the Balfour-engineered education act of 1902 that had abolished the school boards, transferred educational responsibilities to the all-purpose local authorities, and laid the foundations of a national system of secondary education. Yet local and national inquiries, official and unofficial, into the incidence of poverty had pointed to the need for public action to relieve distress, and from the start the budget of 1909, fashioned by Lloyd George, as chancellor of the Exchequer, set out deliberately to raise money to “wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.” The money was to come in part from a supertax on high incomes and from capital gains on land sales. The budget so enraged Conservative opinion, inside and outside Parliament, that the Lords, already hostile to the trend of Liberal legislation, rejected it, thereby turning a political debate into a constitutional one concerning the powers of the House of Lords. Passions were as strong as they had been in 1831, yet, in the ensuing general election of January 1910, the Liberal majority was greatly reduced, and the balance of power in Parliament was now held by Labour and Irish nationalist members. The death of King Edward VII in May 1910 and the succession of the politically inexperienced George V added to the confusion, and it proved impossible to reach an agreement between the parties on the outlines of a Parliament bill to define or curb the powers of the House of Lords. After a Liberal Parliament bill had been defeated, a second general election in December 1910 produced political results similar to those earlier in the year, and it was not until August 1911 that the peers eventually passed the Parliament Act of 1911 by 131 votes to 114. The act provided that finance-related bills could become law without the assent of the Lords and that other bills would also become law if they passed in the Commons but failed in the Lords three times within two years. The act was finally passed only after the Conservative leadership had repudiated the “diehard peers” who refused to be intimidated by a threat to create more peers.