‘Perfectly Parliamentary’? The Labour Party and the House of Commons in the Inter-war Years
Ralph Miliband’s influential Marxist critique of Parliamentary Socialism (1961) depicted a Labour Party that had condemned itself to futility by its dogmatic commitment to parliamentary methods. By contrast, Social Democratic writers such as Ben Pimlott have argued that Labour’s reformism secured concrete gains, whilst accepting the premise that the party’s electoralism/parliamentarism went unquestioned at the time. Both sides are right insofar as no group within the party suggested abandoning parliamentary methods. What has been forgotten, however, is that there was considerable debate after 1918 about how Parliament should be used. Not only was Labour’s commitment to Parliament challenged by other parties, which alleged extremism and disregard of the rhetorical conventions of the Commons, but Labour itself accused its opponents of riding roughshod over parliamentary liberties. Thus, the decision of some left-wing MPs to use parliamentary disruption tactics in their quest to present themselves as spokesmen of the unemployed was depicted by them as a proper use of the Commons to challenge capitalism and by Conservatives as proof of Labour’s innate extremism and unfitness to govern. Issues of class were central to these understandings, and gender was also important. This article examines the arguments about Parliament and parliamentary methods that were conducted within and without the Commons, often through symbolic manifestations such as rowdy ‘demonstrations’ within the Chamber. It concludes that the inter-war experience taught Labour not the possibilities of Parliament but its limits. The inter-war years were a rollercoaster ride for the Labour Party. In the years of flux from 1918 to 1931, the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) *R.Toye@exeter.ac.uk. I am grateful to Laura Beers, Glen O’Hara, David Thackeray, Andrew Thorpe, Mark Wickham-Jones and several anonymous referees for comments on an earlier version of this article. Any errors that remain are of course my own responsibility. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/I025298/1]. The research materials supporting this publication can be publicly accessed in the archives and publications identified in the article footnotes. Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2014, pp. 1–29 doi:10.1093/tcbh/hws049 Advance Access publication 21 December 2012 The Author [2012]. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. experienced rapid changes in size and personnel. It moved from the position of an embattled band of comrades to party of government and then back again, forcing the Labour cohort in the Commons to reinvent its role repeatedly. Moreover, Labour’s constitutional credentials and ‘fitness to govern’ were under consistent attack from its opponents, making the question of how the party should use Parliament inevitably controversial. Yet, historians across the ideological spectrum have frequently presented Labour’s relationship with Parliament as relatively uncomplicated. Ralph Miliband’s influential Marxist critique Parliamentary Socialism (first published in 1961) depicted a Labour Party that had condemned itself to futility by its dogmatic commitment to reformist parliamentary methods. He argued: ‘the leaders of the Labour Party have always rejected any kind of action which fell, or which appeared to them to fall, outside the framework and conventions of the parliamentary system . . . it has been a party deeply imbued with parliamentarism’. From a right-wing Conservative perspective, Maurice Cowling made the remarkably similar argument that Labour’s leaders, conceiving themselves as sober, moderate parliamentary politicians, posed no threat to the system: ‘even when they said the opposite, they assumed that the political and social system could not be overturned and that it was impossible to establish a hegemony of the poor over the rich’. Less idealistic than Miliband and less cynical than Cowling, Ben Pimlott’s work demonstrated a Social Democratic belief in the ability of reformism to secure concrete gains; but he too accepted the premise that ‘Labour’s Parliamentarism . . .has not merely been an orientation or predilection; it has been the very reason for its existence’. In one sense such claims are unarguable: it is quite right to suggest that Labour leaders never advocated methods ‘which appeared to them to fall’ beyond parliamentary conventions. At the same time, they beg some very important questions, not least, did everyone else agree that their behaviour was irreproachably parliamentary? These claims also appear to rest on the assumption that the ‘conventions of the parliamentary system’ were understood by contemporaries in the same way, a way similar, in effect, to more modern understandings. In other words, Parliament and the range of possible techniques for making use of it are largely taken for granted; it is imagined that 1 R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism: A Study in the Politics of Labour (2nd edn, London, 1972), 13. Miliband has found many followers, e.g. D. Coates, The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism (Cambridge, 1975); and G. Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Death of Labour England? (London, 1993). 2 M. Cowling, The Impact of Labour 1920–1924: The Beginning of Modern British Politics (Cambridge, 1971), 11. 3 B. Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge, 1977), 196. 2 RICHARD TOYE