MPs were elected, 29 of them supported by the Labour Representation Committee, and others by the Parliamentary Committee of the TUC.
The LRC had been set up in February 1900, largely in response to a series of intensifying legal attacks on the
Although it initially only involved minority of unions, the LRC constituted a significant advance for a trade union movement whose main leaders until the final decade of the 19th century had been Liberal party supporters.
As recently as 18/2 gas workers had been jailed for 12 months for "conspiracy" to break contracts after striking to challenge the victimisation of union members. In 1873 16 women married to agricultural workers had been sentenced to prison with hard labour for intimidating scabs.
Trade union leaders began to recognise the urgent need for new laws to guarantee their right to organise. In 1874 the TUC's Parliamentary Committee tabled test questions on policies to candidates from the main parties, and endorsed ten 'working class' candidates. Two trade unionists were also endorsed as candidates by the Liberals, and were elected as the first "Lib-Lab" MPs.
In 1875 new legislation ended the use of the conspiracy laws in trade disputes, limited the penalties for breach of contract, and legalised peaceful picketing: the Parliamentary Committee pronounced these to be 'perfect' reforms, satisfying all their demands!
However in the mid 1880s socialists, of them members or adherents of the Social Democratic Federation, began to agitate for a noTe aggressive, militant approach by the union leaders, especially centred on the fight for a legal 8-hour day.
New unions, influenced and led by socialists, began organising unskilled workers, including gas workers and dockers, in new, militant and successful struggles, and in the early 1890s Keir Hardie from the Scottish miners began to argue for a new party for the labour movement.
From 1893 onwards, despite heated opposition, the TUC Congress agreed resolutions calling for support only to Parliamentary candidates pledged to the collective ownership of the means of production and distribution.
A succession of legal judgments exposed the gaping holes 1n the 1875 Act. Employers went to court demanding compensation for the impact of union action including the blacklisting of unfair employers: and in 1896-7 came the landmark Lyons v Wilkins ruling which effectively outlawed even peaceful picketing.
In 1897-98 a newly-militant employers' federation imposed a 6-month lock-out against the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and in 1898 the Employers' Parliamentary Council was established, to press for even further restrictions on trade union rights.
In August 1900 came a farreaching legal challenge in the torm of the Taff Vale Judgement, which found that the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS) was liable to pay £23,000 damages to the rail companies in compensation for losses inflicted by an official strike.
When ruling was upheld by the House of Lords in 1901 it was clear that it would potentially undermine the unions' ability to wage successtul strike action: but 11 had also become clear that with the House of Commons dominated by two capitalist parties, lnere were oniy limited possibilities to reverse uniust laws. Fresh efforts were put into political organisation in the run-up to the
After negotiations at top level between the Labour Representation Committee, the TUC's Parliamentary Committee and the Independent Labour Party, 40 candidates were endorsed by the unions and the LRC; another ten standing under the banner of the LRC were sponsored by the ILP; and 15 candidates, mainly from mining unions were backed by TOe Parliamentary Committee, in addition to a few other Lib-Labs running independently.
Even though the LRC immediately after the election changed its name to the Labour Party, and established itself with officers and whips in the Commons, this did not reflect any genuine political break from the Liberals by many of the 54 elected, few of whom were socialists.
However the weight of the new working class representation was sufficient to press the newly-elected Liberal government to introduce a new Trades Disputes Act, restoring the trade unions' immunities from action for damages and peaceful picketing.
While embryonic Labour Party, lacking any coherent programme or indeScottish miners'
leader, called for a
new party for the
labour movement in the 1890s, and
became the first
leader of the Labour Party pendent policy, then largely lost its way, the Liberals attempted to head off any further political differentiation by carrying a number of progressive social measures offering and unemployment insurance.
100 years on, the trade union movement again stands at a political crossroads: Tony Blair's "modernisation" of the Labour Party has stripped it of any connection even to the reformist, parliamentary notions of "socialism" that it developed in the early 20th century, while New Labour proudly boasts its commitment to uphold Thatcherite anti-union legislation which leaves unions fewer rights that they secured in 1906.
New Labour's 'modernisation' has cast it in the mould of the Liberal Party a century ago, and Blairism has killed any possibility of reclaiming' the party for the cause of labour.
Once again a new party is needed ...and once again union leaders and left Labour MPs cling on desperately to the wreckage of the organisation they think they know, for fear of taking the vital steps that are required to form a new mass workers' party.
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claim. A more empathic