How Labour Became the Main Opposition

Welcome back to Origin Story season eight: The Story of Socialism. This week, in the year of its 125th anniversary, we begin the tale of the UK Labour Party, from Keir Hardie to Keir Starmer.

“The British Labour Party is an expression of the Socialist movement adapted to British conditions,” wrote Clement Attlee. But British socialism meant different things to different people. When the Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1900, its socialism was a tense alliance of Marxists and liberals, hard-nosed trade unionists and Fabian intellectuals, puritans and hedonists, pragmatists and romantics. From the start, they were arguing about everything from alcohol to war. It was the job of two remarkable Scotsmen to keep it united: the eccentric idealist Keir Hardie and the canny, charismatic Ramsay MacDonald.

The social upheaval of the First World War turned Labour into a mass party which supplanted the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories and took office for the first time in 1924. MacDonald’s minority government lasted for just over eight months but it proved that Labour could be a respectable party of government and not reckless “wild men” under the spell of Moscow.

MacDonald returned to Number 10 in 1929 but his second government was capsized by the Wall Street Crash and ended two years later in rupture, betrayal and trauma. While some Labour MPs joined MacDonald’s National Government, most lost their seats, leaving the surviving leadership troika of George Lansbury, Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps to rebuild the party amid the turmoil of the Great Depression and rising fascism. The challenge was existential. In 1935, Lansbury was felled by his untimely pacifism and Attlee took the job that nobody predicted he would hold for the next 20 years.

We conclude, as tradition dictates, on the eve of the Second World War: the cataclysm that will be the making of the Labour Party.

Why did British socialism break from Marx? What different traditions did Labour pull together and how did Hardie and MacDonald make them cohere? How did MacDonald go from hero to villain? Has the Labour Party always been at war with itself? And — pub quiz! — which four Labour leaders had the first name James?

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Reading list

Histories and Biographies

• John Bew – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016)

• Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024)

• Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022)

• Bob Holman – Keir Hardie: Labour’s Greatest Hero? (2010)

• David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999)

• Henry Pelling – The Origins of the Labour Party 1880-1900: Second Edition (1965)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Donald Sassoon – One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (1996)

• Andrew Thorpe – A History of the British Labour Party: Fourth Edition (2015)

• David Torrance – The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government (2024)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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