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XIV. THE LABOR MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH POLITICS.

By EDWARD PORRITT.

A singular fact about the labor movement in English politics is that it began in Parliament and worked downward into municipal politics. Labor representation in the House of Commons dates back twenty years, while labor representation on town and county councils dates back only to about 1889. Yet it is easy to account for what at first seems an inversion of the traditions concerning beginning at the bottom and working upward. Thirty years ago organized labor in England stood in an uncertain and anomalous position before the law. It had then a series of legislative demands to press upon Parliament, and to the existence of these demands and to its uncertain legal position was due the first movement of tradeunionism into national politics.

The political movement began before the trade-unionists were possessed of the parliamentary franchise. Workingmen living in the towns first exercised the parliamentary vote in 1868; those living in the rural districts in 1885. In 1867, however, a royal commission was appointed to inquire into the organization and conduct of trade unions. The commission owed its origin to trade-union outrages in Sheffield in the early sixties, and from the circumstances under which it was called into being the trade-unionists were apprehensive that any legislation the commission recommended would be to their disadvantage. Moreover, about a year previous to the appointment of the commission the trade-unionists had suffered a severe blow in the law courts. It had been laid down from the bench that as trade unions were not recognized by the law, the law could give no protection to their funds. This decision in the law courts and the apprehension of further legal restraints as a result of the Sheffield inquiries brought

about a crisis in the history of trade unions; and at this juncture a special representative committee was appointed to watch over trade-union interests. The committee sat in London. At first the idea was that it should be a temporary organization, but the usefulness of the committee commended itself to the trade-unionists all over the country, and the committee became what since 1868 has been known as the Trade Unions Congress. The congress held its first annual meeting in Manchester. Its second was held in Birmingham in 1869, and at this conference labor representation in Parliament first became a definite policy with the trade-unionists.

Before this time two trade-union leaders, both active members of the trade congress, had sought seats in the House of Commons. There was a general election in 1868, and at this election Mr. George Howell contested Ailesbury and Mr. W. R. Cremer was a labor candidate at Warwick. Neither caudidate was elected. At the 1868 general election many of the candidates in the Liberal interest were compelled to adopt programmes calculated to arouse and enlist the sympathies of the newly enfranchised working-class electors. The new electors, however, did not succeed in sending to the House of Commons a single representative of their own class, and it was not until the general election of 1874 that labor members found their way into the House of Commons.

For the last thirty years the English coal miners have been exceptionally well organized in their trade unions. The miners are perhaps not better organized than the men in the iron and shipbuilding trades, or the London printers; but they were the first trade-unionists to elect members of their own organizations to the House of Commons, and to appropriate money from their union funds for political purposes. The coal miners were the first trade unionists to avail themselves of the new democratic conditions established in the towns by the reform act of 1867, and again when the reform act of 1884 came into operation in 1885 the miners turned it to account more generally than any of the other trade-unionists; in fact, the agricul. tural laborers of Norfolk and the miners of Wales and the north of England were the only trade-unionists who went actively into national politics after the reform act of 1884.

No class of workmen in England is touched more frequently by the law than miners. In other trades the factory laws interfere with adult labor only indirectly through the regula

tion of the working hours of young people. With miners the interference of the law is direct and constant. It regulates their descending and ascending of the mine, their work below ground, and also their connection with much of the work that is done on the pit head. Again, unlike the members of many other trade unions, miners are frequently the dominating force in the electorate in many of the constituencies in the mining counties. It is so in Durham and Northumberland, in some parts of Lancashire, and in many parts of South Wales. In these constituencies the parliamentary candidate who secures the unanimous support of the miners is certain of election. The trade-union leaders of the miners have also always been more given to politics and public speaking than the secretaries of the other trade unions. Nearly all the leaders of the miners are or have been temperance lecturers and local preachers of the Methodist Church.

At the general election in 1874, although only a very small proportion of the miners were then enfranchised, they returned two members to Parliament. Those of Northumberland secured the election of Mr. Thomas Burt for the borough of Morpeth. In the Midlands the miners were instrumental in returning the late Mr. Alexander Macdonald as member for the borough of Stafford. These were the only labor members in the 1874 House of Commons. Both of them acted with the Liberal party. About 1880, when this Parliament was drawing to a close, a labor candidate came forward to contest a byelection in Southwark. The Liberals nominated a candidate for the seat; the labor candidate persisted in going to the polls, and, as a Conservative candidate was already in the field the presence of the labor candidate led to a three-cornered fight, the first contest of the kind due to the labor movement in national politics.. Such contests were not infrequent at the general elections of 1886 and 1892, and at the election which is now approaching more than a score of these three-cornered contests are threatened by the action of the Labor and Socialistic parties.'

At the general election in 1880 Messrs. Burt and Macdonald were again returned, and a seat was secured at Stoke-uponTrent for Mr. Broadhurst, who was then the parliamentary

At the general election in July, 1895, the Independent Labor Party put forward 28 candidates, and the Social Democratic Federation 4 candidates in September, 1895.

secretary of the Trade Unions Congress. When the 1880 Parliament came to an end, Mr. Burt and Mr. Broadhurst were the only labor members. Mr. Macdonald died soon after his election, and the seat at Stafford passed out of the hands of the trade-unionists.

In the next Parliament, that chosen in 1885, the number of labor members was largely increased. At the 1885 election the newly enfranchised voters in the rural districts exercised the parliamentary franchise for the first time, and the labor movement became a distinct force in English politics. Mr. Burt and Mr. Broadhurst were reelected, and the labor group was brought up to ten by the election of four more miners' members, a representative of the agricultural laborers of Norfolk, and of three trade-unionists who were chosen for workingclass constituencies in London. All the five mining members in the 1885 Parliament were officials of miners' unions, and their unions not only paid their election expenses, but made them extra allowances to defray the cost of attendance at Westminster. Mr. Broadhurst was in receipt of a salary from the Trade Unions Congress. The representative of the Norfolk farm laborers was also a unionist official, so that seven of the ten labor members were at Westminster at the direct expense of trade unions. The other three were former trade-union officials, but they received no financial help from trade unions at their elections nor were trade-union funds drawn upon to maintain them in Parliament.

The Parliament to which these ten representatives of labor were elected in 1885 went to pieces over the home-rule bill in 1886, and three of the labor members failed of election to the next House of Commons. The other seven were returned, and in the Parliament which lasted from 1886 to 1892 the labor group was increased from seven to twelve by the adhesion of members who, although elected as Radicals and unconnected with trade unions, were men of pronounced working-class sympathies, actively interested in the trade-union movement, and who for all practical purposes could be counted as of the parliamentary labor group as it existed from 1886 to 1892.

It was in the closing years of the 1886 Parliament that what is now known as the new trade-unionism came into existence. The new unionism originated with the strike of gas workers in London in 1888, and immensely increased its strength as a result of the dock strike in 1889. It differs in several important

particulars from the old unionism-from the unionism which up to this time had dominated the Trade Unions Congress, and which from trade-union exchequers had maintained six or seven representatives of labor in the House of Commons. The outstanding difference between the old and the new unionism is that the old unionism concerns itself exclusively with skilled labor, while the new unionism seeks to organize and combine unskilled laborers. The new unionism is much less cautious and infinitely more aggressive than the old unionism. As one of the old unionism leaders described it, "the new unionism first orders a strike and then seeks to organize a union among the strikers." Out-of-work allowances, sick and buria benefits, superannuation allowances, and aids to widows and orphans have been important factors in the old unionism from its earliest days. With the new unionism little attention is given to these matters. The new unionists concern themselves almost exclusively with the relations of labor toward capital.

The new unionism was at its strongest in the two years following the dock strike of 1889. It was waning a little in 1892, but it was still strong enough to make its influence felt at the general election, and was responsible for a number of threecornered electoral contests like that at Southwark. In other places it forced the Liberals to accept its candidates. Mr. John Burns is one of three members in the present House of Commons forced upon the Liberals by the new unionism. Eight mining members were elected in 1892, and the net result of the general election in that year and of the by-elections up to December, 1894, is that in the present House of Commons there are sixteen or seventeen members each of whom owes his presence there to the labor vote. Seven or eight of these members are in the pay of trade unions.

Since the Trades Union Congress in 1869 first declared in favor of the representation of labor in the House of Commons, five Parliaments have been elected. In the first there were two labor members; in the second there were three; in the third, the first elected after the reform act of 1884, there were ten; in the fourth there were twelve; and in the fifth there are sixteen.

From 1874 to 1892 labor members grouped themselves with the Liberals. It was in keeping with the existing order of things that they should do so. In the days when labor members were new at Westminster, and, in fact, until the great H. Mis. 91-16

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