The British Labour Party in the General Elections, 1906-1945

1950 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-404
Author(s):  
Lowell H. Harrison ◽  
Fred E. Crossland
2018 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Olha Buturlimova

The article examines the processes of growth of the British Labour Party in the early XXth century. The reasons of Labour Party’s success on parliamentary and municipal elections in the 1920s have been analyzed. The main attention is paid to the party’s activities in constituencies and analysis of Labour Party General Election Manifestos, General Elections Results and other statistic data. The relations between the Labour Party and churches in Great Britain have also been investigated. The support of the Anglican Church and denominations in Great Britain gave the Labour Party some votes but they lost some votes of believers in the next election in 1924 because of Labour government’s failure to acknowledge Bolshevik persecution of the Christians in the USSR. The Labour attempts to win the countryside were also not so fruitful. It is emphasized that 1918 was the turning point in the formation of the Labour Party as mass, widely represented and influential parliamentary party. The reorganization of the Labour party in 1918, Representation of the People Act (1918), adoption of the “Labour and the New Social Order” party constitution have proved to be favorable for its further evolution. But some difficulties such as conflicts between left and right views in the party, absence of convincing majority, black mass-media technologies from political opponents and problems in economics of the country, seriously influenced on its abilities to win success in 1920-s.


1924 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertram Benedict

There is little need to point out the growing strength of the British Labor party. At the recent general elections, it achieved approximately one-third of both the House of Commons and the popular vote; and the fact that at the preceding election it had rolled up twenty-two per cent of the House and thirty per cent of the ballots proves that its recent achievement was not merely occasional. Throughout Great Britain there is thoughtful consideration as to whether Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald will prove as able a prime minister as he proved a leader of His Majesty's Opposition.What may not be so widely appreciated is that the British Labor party is fundamentally, in fact no less than in theory, a socialist party. At its annual conference held in June, 1923, the following resolution was proposed:“This Conference … asserts that the supreme object of the Labour Party should be the supersession of Capitalism by the Socialist Commonwealth … ;” and with hundreds of delegates representing several million members, the resolution was passed unanimously. Indeed, as the chairman, Sidney Webb, remarked in putting the resolution to a vote, it was largely unnecessary, for everyone in Great Britain recognized that the British Labour party was a socialist movement.


Race & Class ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-107
Author(s):  
John Newsinger

2009 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hopkin

This article addresses the relationship between political decentralization and the organization of political parties in Great Britain and Spain, focusing on the Labour Party and the Socialist Party, respectively. It assesses two rival accounts of this relationship: Caramani's `nationalization of politics' thesis and Chhibber and Kollman's rational choice institutionalist account in their book The Formation of National Party Systems. It argues that both accounts are seriously incomplete, and on occasion misleading, because of their unwillingness to consider the autonomous role of political parties as advocates of institutional change and as organizational entities. The article develops this argument by studying the role of the British Labour Party and the Spanish Socialists in proposing devolution reforms, and their organizational and strategic responses to them. It concludes that the reductive theories cited above fail to capture the real picture, because parties cannot only mitigate the effects of institutional change, they are also the architects of these changes and shape institutions to suit their strategic ends.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-187
Author(s):  
Nikola Mijatov

The article analyses the influence of the leadership of the British Labour Party on the first Cold War dissident, Milovan Djilas. Up until his dissidence in 1954, the main Yugoslav official for official relations with the British Left was Djilas. He had many contacts with the members of the British Labour Party such as Morgan Phillips, Aneurin Bevan and Jennie Lee. While many of these contacts were professional, Djilas established a firm friendship with Bevan, under whose influence Djilas gradually abandoned communism and embraced the Labour movement. When he called for another party in Yugoslavia (one similar to the Labour Party), he was condemned by Tito’s regime.


Author(s):  
N. Rabotyazhev

The article is devoted to the evolution of the West European social democracy in the late 20th and early 21st century. The author analyses the causes of the social democracy crisis in 1980-90s and considers its attempts to meet the challenges of globalization and the “new economy”. Modernization of the British Labour Party under Tony Blair's leadership and updating of the German Social Democratic Party initiated by Gerhard Schröder are thoroughly examined in the article. Political and ideological processes ongoing in such parties as the French Socialist Party, the Dutch Labour Party, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the Austrian Social Democratic Party are also considered. The author comes to a conclusion that the radical shift towards social liberalism took place merely in the British Labour Party. Schröder’s attempt to modernize the German Social Democratic Party turned out to be unsuccessful, while other European social democratic parties did not regard Blair’s “Third Way” as a suitable model for them.


Author(s):  
Sheri Berman

The decline of the centre-left over the past years is one of the most alarming trends in Western politics. During the latter part of the 20th century such parties either ran the government or led the loyal Opposition in virtually every Western democracy. Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), once the most powerful party of the left in continental Europe, currently polls in high 20s or 30s. The French Socialist Party was eviscerated in the 2017 elections, as was the Dutch Labour Party. Even the vaunted Scandinavian social democratic parties are struggling, reduced to vote shares in the 30 per cent range. The British Labour Party and the US Democrats have been protected from challengers by their country’s first-past-the-post electoral systems, but the former has recently taken a sharp turn to the hard-left under Jeremy Corbyn, while the latter, although still competitive at the national level, is a minority party at the state and local levels, where a hard-right Republican Party dominates the scene....


2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Vickers

When British Prime Minister Harold Wilson urged Lyndon Johnson not to escalate hostilities in Vietnam in 1965, he did so not because he was morally opposed to the war or thought the war was intractable but because he was concerned about the likely impact of U.S. actions on his own domestic power base. Wilson's stance of providing moral but not military support for U.S. policy in Vietnam caused anger and disillusionment among leftwing Labour Party activists and members of Parliament, spurring them to active opposition against Wilson's government. Even so, Wilson managed to prevent a major schism within his government and party over the Vietnam War. His attempts to broker a peace deal between the combatants were largely designed to placate Labour Party activists while raising Wilson's profile as a world statesman. Although the initiatives did not generate any progress toward a ceasefire, they were relatively successful on the domestic front.


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