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British Labour and Ireland, 1918–1921: The Retreat to Houndsditch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Fred D. Schneider
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Extract

Houndsditch, near Bishopsgate, was once the daily scene of traffic and bustle as dealers in second-hand clothing assembled after their daily rounds to pick up what they might sell for a few pence or a shilling. In 1901, Sidney Webb praised Lord Rosebery for his “escape” from Houndsditch—his casting off of his “Gladstonian old clothes” and especially such features of the Liberal program as Irish Home Rule—and provided him with a richly embroidered collectivist cloak to hide his political nakedness. In 1918, partly at Webb's urging, the Labour party adopted a socialist platform. Thereafter, in defining their attitude towards the Empire, a few class warriors within the labor movement advocated an alliance between British workers and the colonial proletariat. The majority, however, returned to Houndsditch: they borrowed their imperial ideas from liberalism, including a variant of the Gladstonian solution for the Irish question.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , July 1978 , pp. 368 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1978

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References

1 These developments have been subjected to minute analysis, which in addition to the Irish dimension, has proceeded in four directions. Maurice Cowling, from the perspective of “high politics,” has described The Impact of Labour 1920–1924 (Cambridge, 1971)Google Scholar; and what emerges from his study is that the thinking of the fifty or sixty Conservatives and Liberals who really mattered was colored by a fear of socialism. McKibbin, Ross, examining The Evolution of the Labour Party, 1910–1924 (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar, after tracing the drafting of Labour's constitution of 1918, demonstrates that it embodied the aspirations of the right-wing trade unions who were wedded to the collectivism of the war years, and who henceforth dominated the development of the party. Gupta, Partha Sarathi has described Imperialism and the British Labour Movement 1914–1964 (London, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and concludes that the radical wing of the party supported the general idea of national self-determination, against the socialists who spoke the language of class struggle. Finally, Boyce, D. G. has explored the topic of Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy 1918–22 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972)Google Scholar. Each of these approaches— Cowling's explication of the priorities and pressures which shaped the attitudes of politicians; McKibbin's dismissal of the possibility of a “Progressive Alliance” between the Liberal and Labour parties; Gupta's analogies and contrasts between Liberal and Labour views of empire; and Boyce's examination of the effect of public opinion on the Irish policy of the Coalition—provides a partial explanation of the significance of the rise of Labour and the development of its views on the “Irish question.” What is missing is an appreciation of the importance of the question in Labour's postwar search for an identity and a purpose.

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