Liberalism and the Rise of Labour 1890-1918 by Keith Laybourn Jack Reynolds

Author:Keith Laybourn, Jack Reynolds [Keith Laybourn, Jack Reynolds]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social Science
ISBN: 9780429803215
Google: JKp-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-07T01:33:57+00:00

In recent years the political impact of the Boer War has been subjected to close scrutiny. In the early 1970s, Richard Price took to task those historians who have suggested that the Conservative government’s conduct of the war attracted significant support from the working classes who were largely in support of aggressive imperial policies. Price suggests that most working-class organisations were divided over the war, that despite the relief of Mafeking, and ‘Mafeking Night’, the war did not spark widespread interest and that this is reflected in the fact that the ‘Khaki’ election of October 1900 provoked much less interest, and a smaller turnout, than did the 1895 General Election.18

It is clear that the implications of the Boer War for the ILP and LRC, who opposed the war, would either be politically disastrous as the tide of working-class support for imperialism swept Labour’s parliamentary, and local, challenge aside, or irrelevant owing to the relatively unimportant nature of the issue amongst working-class supporters. The evidence of West Yorkshire tends to support the latter assumption. On the whole the Boer War made little difference to the prospects of the independent Labour movement in West Yorkshire, and there is no evidence to suggest that the movement found its political hopes blighted by the war.

Part of the reason for the drop in Labour’s proportion of the parliamentary vote in the 1900 General Election, as indicated in Table 5.3, is that the West Yorkshire Labour movement fielded fewer candidates than in 1895. In the 1895 General Election there were five Labour candidates whilst in the 1900 General Election there were only three, and only two of those, Jowett, in West Bradford, and Parker, in Halifax, could be accurately described as Labour candidates.19 Byles, who stood for East Leeds, was, as previously suggested, imposed upon Labour with the support of the ‘Irish party’.

All three ILP/Labour candidates were opposed to the Boer War, supporting the official ILP line, presented forthrightly at the Seventh Annual Conference of the ILP, at Leeds in 1899, that it was ‘a capitalist clique, who are seeking, through Mr. Chamberlain, his colleagues or the Government, and an unscrupulous Press, to further their own ends against what we believe to be the true interests of England’ and calling the Government to cease the war and ‘submit all subjects of difference to arbitration’.20 Jowett promoted the joint ILP and Trades Council anti-war public meeting which was held in the Bradford Mechanics’ Institute in September 1899 and was prominent in organising and speaking at a peace demonstration at Peckover Walks, Bradford, in March 1900.21 Byles was the leading force in the Bradford South African Conciliation Committee, and James Parker actively opposed the war.22

Fenner Brockway, in his biography of Jowett, suggested that despite the unpopularity of the pro-Boer stance adopted by Jowett he continued to press the ‘peace’ campaign during the election.23 More recently this view has been challenged by two historians, one of whom has argued that Jowett and the ILP ‘deliberately avoided the issue during the election’.

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