the kind of ancient omnicompetence which Parliament still possessed in the 1940s.

The fact that every schoolchild is taught (or are they still?), that the British labour movement was intensely Parliamentary and non-revolutionary, was not the consequence of some magic trait of the British which enabled them to avoid the turmoils of the revolutionary years on the Continent, and indeed in America (for what else was the Civil War but a vast revolutionary moment?). Marx and Engels observed from their vantage point in Victorian England that the bourgeoisie had taken different routes in France and England to hamper the industrial working-class from gaining power. In France they had conceded universal male suffrage, first in 1792 and again and permanently in 1848, but they had bound the legislature with aconstitution which secured things such as private property (broadly defined) against legislative encroachment. In England, there were no such constraints on the legislature, and therefore the proletariat had to be denied the vote – which in this country, we should remember, was finally extended to the entire adult male population only in 1918, the same year that the first women received it (or rather recovered it – women lost the vote in 1832). So Marx and Engels concluded that the only thing necessary to bring about socialism in England was the extension of the Parliamentary franchise, whereas in France it required revolutionary and extra-constitutional action. Exactly the same logic activated the early leaders of the Labour Party in Britain: they had every confidence that the Parliamentary route to