Historians of political history are fascinated by the rise and fall of
political parties and, for twentieth-century Britain, most obviously the
rise of the Labour Party and the decline of the Liberal Party. What is
often overlooked in this political development is the work of the
Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was a formative influence in the
growth of the political Labour movement and its leaders in the late
nineteenth century and the early to mid-twentieth century. The ILP
supplied the Labour Party with some of its leading political figures,
such as Ramsay MacDonald, and moved the Labour Party along the road of
parliamentary socialism. However, divided over the First World War and
challenged by the Labour Party becoming socialist in 1918, it had to
face the fact that it was no longer the major parliamentary socialist
party in Britain.
Although it recovered after the First World War, rising to between
37,000 and 55,000 members, it came into conflict with the Labour Party
and two Labour governments over their gradualist approach to socialism.
This eventually led to its disaffiliation from the Labour Party in 1932
and its subsequent fragmentation into pro-Labour, pro-communist and
independent groups. Its new revolutionary policy divided its members, as
did the Abyssinian crisis, the Spanish Civil War and the Moscow Show
Trials. By the end of the 1930s, seeking to re-affiliate to the Labour
Party, it had been reduced to 2,000 to 3,000 members, was a sect rather
than a party and had earned Hugh Dalton's description that it was the
'ILP flea'.
In the following monograph, Keith Laybourn analyses the dynamic shifts
in this history across 25 years. This scholarship will prove
foundational for scholars and researchers of modern British history and
socialist thought in the twentieth century.
