Labour united and divided from the 1830s to the present
Emmanuelle Avril
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Yann Béliard
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The troubles inside the Labour Party, which followed Jeremy Corbyn's election and the Brexit referendum, have rekindled the interest of both academics and practitioners in organisational matters. This book shows that the present disunities are nothing new and are far from capturing every source of disagreement within the British labour movement. The first section covers the long nineteenth century, an era spanning from the Industrial Revolution to the First World War. It discusses Robert Owen's Grand National Consolidated Trades' Union (GNCTU), the first working-class association ever in Britain to try to unite all trades in the country to secure workers' control of their labour, and the biggest one so far. It examines the British branch of the American Knights of Labor, internal tensions during the Edwardian years, the Great Labour Unrest, and attempts made by domestic servants to form trade unions. The second looks at unity and disunity in the wider left. It focuses on the Co-operative movement, the concept of Resale Price Maintenance, and inter-organisational divisions. The divergences, in the 1944-1947 period, between the Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) as well as the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party are discussed. The third section zooms in on the Labour Party, with particular focus on the post-New Labour years. It provides a sweeping account of the Parliamentary Labour Party's (PLP) post-war division, crisis of party management, Scottish Labour Party, and the deep transformation that the Labour Party is currently undergoing.
Part I: Labour's first century: disputed solidarities
Chapter 1: The Grand National Consolidated Trades' Union, 1833–1834
Chapter 2: The Knights of Labor and the British trade unions, 1880–1900
Chapter 3: The struggle for control of the Durham Miners' Association, 1890s–1915
Chapter 4: Contested coordinator
Chapter 5: Domestic servants and the labour movement, 1870s–1914
Part II: Convergences, divergences and realignments on the left
Chapter 6: 'The people's main defence against monopoly'?
Chapter 7: The British left's attitude towards the Battle of Athens, December 1944–February 1945
Chapter 8: The decline of revolutionary pragmatism and the splintering of British communism in the 1980s
Chapter 9: Re-framing the debate on breakaway trade unions in an era of neoliberalism
Chapter 10: English teachers' unions since 2010
Part III: The Labour Party today: fragmentation or mutation?
Chapter 11: Dissent in the Parliamentary Labour Party, 1945–2015
Chapter 12: 'What dire effects from civil discord flow'
Chapter 13: The conflicting loyalties of the Scottish Labour Party
Chapter 14: The 'movementisation' of the Labour Party and the future of labour organising
American Knights of Labor; British labour movement; Co-operative movement; Communist Party of Great Britain; First World War; Grand National Consolidated Trades' Union; Great Labour Unrest; Industrial Revolution; Labour Party; Parliamentary Labour Party; party management; post-New Labour years; Resale Price Maintenance; Scottish Labour Party; trade unions; Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party
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Nina Fishman
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