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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_McKibbin
https://watermark.silverchair.com/297.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAq0wggKpBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKaMIIClgIBADCCAo8GCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQM_0LCMEs4e2vQGrJsAgEQgIICYGe4DCyNXykNVNr6J6v1HfhvWoyADKeWVpjwQBsCyQfJVmrKGYuJrvTXItDqJR352RX9_l2v-jqVxNehpXmOoYQhtb7f2AQI6LGhWkGAL6ht2Ypr4uFSNsisJWLBTRqMBBSyvCNOSZVUDjC3L-fDKXtbyodyqrsc3EZevCv_sKkguiePMZXDso4jo6PGSfbKCbb7WCKKMBA-56HB4jUEqBGGxPl3Q0PjFY5KDxHB14CMbzGUKT6_ZBYk47g8UQwsGwxQJY1sCVAQtoF9NxNiwNfzMgVLW_grw4vzKafz9vK3tpJYCzmIUJ4lO3qotvjJdxbNDRJZnSjck9auGK_VXau1VbGF0A33ijso7EM0ZZJcsq3yCKttHdLLAUCFdqdup-Dv54oINiHQlfpWenUwMKHNWWqwHBUBSEG4Ky1_sktF8pBJy2rCvuCvzmUKZTGYukq-DYU4vpclAZ1CSspTkj0FcROXEs0ldCDkkRuCwSjfrn57fgyB-e3VEhg94off7xI0nskfJh1rJ9em_S7eBQscWL2Sebp2-9vBDSMX4Gq3jBPc2WlpDEhuvuYZYzqbdxWldmZVsepEsbrukJGkvk-8B2zZ4yy_I8OGRDUbV5SvNo3Ej2uoutNLMenrsAhq-EK3FOA4iqWq8ffTBTy765I2YwMA-0SR5-pCbUiHesbrRwL2musnbgo7nejOBjPe1LLxfLOjTPxBh1IYS9RVDiw6SzG1ExKMYG00f8W7cnUIGVasGk1fjvsjpgrOKRx-c8FYUCISi5WmNwL97peMQtnIRRh1VE-jHoSgVwFCpTqI
"Before 1914 nowhere in Europe was seemingly more favoured to produce a mass working-class party than Britain. In 1901 about 85 percent of the total working population was employed by others, and about 75 per cent were manual workers. The agricultural sector was almost exiguous: slightly less than 12 per cent of the male population worked in agriculture, horticulture and forestry and the number was declining. In the broadest sense Britain was unquestionably aworking-class nation. But on closer analysis the huge Britishproletariat disperses itself, and its 'collective* element becomesremarkably thin. There are several ways by which this can be shown. If we take trade union membership as a reasonable index of collectivity we find that in 1901 of a total employed workforce of 13.7 million, a little under two million, about 15 per cent, were union members. The effective number is probably somewhat higher since this figure includes among the workforce children and adolescents who were not eligible for union membership. Even so, it is clear that about 80 per cent of the male workforce was ununionized ; the female workforce outside cotton was almost entirely non-union. By 1914 the proportion unionized was significantly higher —25.8 per cent— but on the eve of the war three-quarters of the male workforce was still ununionized, while the proportion of women workers in unions remained tiny. By itself that 25 per cent -four million workers— could have constituted a formidable proletarian vanguard ; but there is no simple identity between union membership and political inclination. Indeed, we know pretty well what union opinion was. The 1913 legislation which reversed the Osborne Judgement required union members to vote on the establishment of a political fund ; many did not vote at all and of those who did 40 per cent voted against affiliation to the Labour Party. Only in one union, the Engineers, was the ideological character of the Labour Party an issue and in that union alone can we assume that some of the opposition to affiliation came from the left. In other unions, in so far as the argument had a clear point, it was the 'socialism' of the Labour Party which was objectionable. Even if we simply leave aside those who did not vote at all we ough." (p.298)
"Although in the government sector (the Post Office particularly) and in the Co-operative Societies there was some advance in organization, private commerce remained almost immune from working-class politics, rendered so not only by the action of employers but by the social environment of the occupations, an environment dominated by snobbery and excessive respectability." (p.300)
"The success of the Hornbys in Blackburn, Chamberlain in Birmingham or Sir Howard Vincent in Sheffield (who, like Chamberlain, held his city for the Tories even in 1906) demonstrates how the structure of industry could foster a political affinity between masters and men. When Baldwin told the House of Commons that, as a boy, he knew by name every man who worked in Baldwin's iron works (Bewdley) he was invoking a political reality and not (or not only) uttering a Tory platitude. To foreign (middle-class) observers this was Britain's exemplary achievement. 'Nowhere', Schulze-Gavernitz wrote,
do we meet the social pessimism so familiar in Germany, nowhere the belief among the lower classes that salvation can only come through the overthrow and destruction of the existing order... Amongst the Englishworking classes, the economic investigator never meets that deep-seated mistrust which makes the German workman regard every man in a goodcoat as an enemy, if not a spy.
This suggests that the clientele likely to patronize a specifically working-class party based upon an occupational solidarity was acomparatively small one and even smaller if the party were Marxist or quasi-Marxist." (p.303)
« Poverty also implied mobility which implied votelessness; the poorer the area the more gross the disfranchisement. The consequence was that nearly half the male working class could not participate even in the elementary act of voting in parliamentary elections; only a negligible number of working-class women could vote in municipal elections and none at all, of course, in parliamentary ones.
The second reason comes from the sexual division of labour. A high degree of communitarian solidarity to some extent presupposes sexual solidarity: that the prime loyalties of a husband were to his family and neighbourhood. But is is doubtful if they were. » (p.304)
« Tensions within working-class communities almost certainly undermined local solidarity. While these communities were notoriously characterized by extraordinary mutuality they were also marked by backbiting, gossip and a jockeying for social superiority. If this was true, as Robert Roberts suggests, of parishes whose members were alike in most 'objective' ways, it was truer still of communities where there were real differences of income and status. All working-class communities were equally disrupted: single status ones by the usual neighbourhood disputes (between those who kept the front step washed and blacked and those who did not, for example) while multiple status communities displayed real social distances and much hostility between their members. The somewhat monolithic appearance the working class presented to strangers concealed divisions which were at least as intense within communities as they were within the workforce. Communal loyalties were, therefore, ambiguous; they were inert rather than active, and class consciousness was defensive rather than aggressive. Some of this changed after 1918. » (p.305)
« It could be supposed — certainly on the German model —that the success of a party based upon such an ideology almost demanded a working class without an already established associational culture, one whose organizing energies — political energies in the broadest sense - could be utilized and directed by the party. This condition did not exist in Britain. The first reason for this is the rural origin of so many working-class pastimes. Most sports, things to do with sports, religious affiliations and many hobbies were simply late-nineteenth-century souvenirs of country life. » (p.306)
« The second reason is rising real wages. In his study of the United States Sombart argued that high real wages in themselves partly accounted for the absence of socialism in America.
As a general rule, this seems doubtful. At a certain wage level socialism presumably becomes unattractive, but it would be a crude sociology that put much weight on wage-levels as such. For one thing, the governing wage-rates in pre-1914 Britain had nowhere near reached a point where socialism must become unattractive; for another, wage-rates as absolute factors acquire significance only as tokens of rights or comparative status. Rising real wages in themselves do not eliminate a sense of injustice; if they do it is only when circumstances deny men the power of comparison. In one area, however, they are pertinent. British wages did permit more or less everything that made up late-nineteenth-century working-class pastimes: the development of organized hobbies, mass sport, popular betting, a modest domesticity and the commercialization of much working-class entertainment. They gave the working classes a certain autonomy, an opportunity to choose between alternative activities not available to any other European workforce; and the choice was at least partly their own. The result was that any working-class party had to compete with an existing working-class culture which was stable and relatively sophisticated. » (p.307)
"Religious activities performed the same kind of quasi-political associational function. The extent to which the early leadership of the Labour Party was specifically Christian is well-known, but it is worth stressing how far that inhibited a 'continental' politics in Britain. Ideological incompatibilities were probably less significant than social ones: religious affiliation threw working-class churchgoers into the company of the middle classes and encouraged an egalitarian bonhomie. " (p.308)
« Whereas at the beginning of the century the crown was an active agent in ordinary political life, necessarily partisan and thus often unpopular, by the end it had apparently become the even-handed guarantor of the classneutrality of parliament, the institution which ensured that the rules of the game would be followed. This was acceptable to all classes: to the politically strong because the crown undoubtedly represented a conservative force; to the politically weak, because they, more than any, had an interest in seeing that the rules were followed. » (p.312)
"Keir Hardie's attacks on the monarchy did him no good at Mid-Lanark in 1888, and his later criticisms of it were not particularly popular." (p.312)
"By the end of the nineteenth century few doubted that a representative parliament was the proper focus of working-class aspirations. Thus a 'reformed' parliament had the same resonance in the nineteenth century as a 'free' parliament had in the seventeenth." (p.313)
"The state made little attempt to teach people to be British as (say) the Third Republic tried to turn out little Republicans. [...] It is hard to escape the conclusion that a sense of being British was widely and positively felt in the working classes — and that was partly why imperial honours were acceptable to them. Margaret Loane thought they were not particularly xenophobic, but that their knowledge of being British implied attitudes to the outside world, sometimes of contempt, usually of indifference. These attitudes, she thought, they undoubtedly shared with all other classes." (p.316)
"The British unions were given a freedom of action unique in Europe and (as far as I know) in the world, unencumbered by law or opinion. In part, Disraeli's 1875 legislation (actually, legislation drafted by the preceding Gladstone ministry) was simply an element in that corporate pluralism which was characteristic of the Liberal state; but the legislation not so much endowed the unions with rights as extended to them an almost archaic corporate immunity. The unions claimed and received the kind of associational privilege previously allowed to many upper and middle class institutions, such as Oxford and Cambridge colleges, West End clubs, and army messes. Whereas these self-governing bodies, however, ruled themselves within a clear legal framework, the unions notoriously operated within no framework at all. There was no other way the state could guarantee fairness in that area where the working classes were determined that fairness should prevail: any law was worse than no law. Civil society thus promoted its own stability by subverting the coercive powers of employers." (p.320)
"It is within this context alone that we can understand the centrality of free trade finance to the political economy of the British working classes. It is a truth, not perhaps sufficiently emphasized by historians, that the free trade fiscal system had, before 1914, an ideological value for the working class beyond any conceivable socialist doctrine. While 'socialism' meant little, if anything, to most workingmen — though that does not mean they were necessarily hostile to it — after 1903 there was hardly one who did not have a 'view' of the fiscal question ; and the great majority appear to have been hostile to any modification of free trade.
At first sight, this is surprising. Chamberlain, after all, specifically advocated tariff reform as an employment policy: 'Tariff reform means jobs for all.' As a political device it was aimed directly at the working-class electorate. No doubt much working-class opposition to protection was simply material: 'cheap food' was an effective counter at a time of inflationary pressure on real wages. But that alone hardly explains the intensity of the opposition; even the class harmony of Birmingham was disturbed. W. J. Davis of the Brassworkers, and the personification of vertical loyalty, was so outraged at Chamberlain's action that he was only with difficulty dissuaded from standing against him in West Birmingham. The ideological power of free trade lay in its analogy to unfettered collective bargaining; both stood for the same conception of politics. It is true that Peel and Gladstone understood by free trade something other than its later vulgarizers. But their assumption — that it was a self-regulating fiscal mechanism beyond merely contingent politics — was not so different from that of their successors. For them, too, it represented the exclusion of'economics' from 'politics' but in terms which turned out to be unexpectedly favourable to the working class. Free trade finance increasingly became a technique by which market capitalism was justified to workingmen, to such an extent that the 1905 Liberal government undertook a substantial programme of redistributive legislation in order to shore it up. Like the post-1875
industrial regime, 'free trade' permitted the relative autonomy and propriety of working-class politics and confirmed that no other class could govern against the working class. Tariff reform, however, proposed to re-unite the political and economic systems and, despite Chamberlain's personal disavowals, threatened the enforcement of a new social discipline. It was the closest to a continental political strategy Britain had ever reached; its failure meant the failure not only of a policy that would have subordinated the working class under a new fiscal-industrial order but the failure of any working-class
ideologies — Marxism, for instance — which, like Chamberlain, also believed that the country's political and economic systems should be re-united." (pp.322-323)
"The Edwardian Labour Party was overwhelmingly working class in its social origins; it was one of the few European working-class parties where there was an almost exact social identity between its leadership and those likely to support it. Nothing suggests that middle-class influence was important in its rank and file, and the parliamentary party was wholly working-class. Of the 51 individuals who sat as official Labour MPs between 1900 and 1914 all were of working-class birth. They were, it is true, different kinds of workingmen but only three." (p.324)
"The late-nineteenth-century working class had absorbed numberless organizations founded for their benefit by the bourgeoisie and had then gone on to found numberless more of their own, one of which was the Labour Party. That they were not middle-class was one of their more desirable features." (p.326)
-Ross McKibbin, "Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain ?", The English Historical Review, Volume XCIX, Issue CCCXCI, April 1984, Pages 297–331.
https://watermark.silverchair.com/297.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAAq0wggKpBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggKaMIIClgIBADCCAo8GCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQM_0LCMEs4e2vQGrJsAgEQgIICYGe4DCyNXykNVNr6J6v1HfhvWoyADKeWVpjwQBsCyQfJVmrKGYuJrvTXItDqJR352RX9_l2v-jqVxNehpXmOoYQhtb7f2AQI6LGhWkGAL6ht2Ypr4uFSNsisJWLBTRqMBBSyvCNOSZVUDjC3L-fDKXtbyodyqrsc3EZevCv_sKkguiePMZXDso4jo6PGSfbKCbb7WCKKMBA-56HB4jUEqBGGxPl3Q0PjFY5KDxHB14CMbzGUKT6_ZBYk47g8UQwsGwxQJY1sCVAQtoF9NxNiwNfzMgVLW_grw4vzKafz9vK3tpJYCzmIUJ4lO3qotvjJdxbNDRJZnSjck9auGK_VXau1VbGF0A33ijso7EM0ZZJcsq3yCKttHdLLAUCFdqdup-Dv54oINiHQlfpWenUwMKHNWWqwHBUBSEG4Ky1_sktF8pBJy2rCvuCvzmUKZTGYukq-DYU4vpclAZ1CSspTkj0FcROXEs0ldCDkkRuCwSjfrn57fgyB-e3VEhg94off7xI0nskfJh1rJ9em_S7eBQscWL2Sebp2-9vBDSMX4Gq3jBPc2WlpDEhuvuYZYzqbdxWldmZVsepEsbrukJGkvk-8B2zZ4yy_I8OGRDUbV5SvNo3Ej2uoutNLMenrsAhq-EK3FOA4iqWq8ffTBTy765I2YwMA-0SR5-pCbUiHesbrRwL2musnbgo7nejOBjPe1LLxfLOjTPxBh1IYS9RVDiw6SzG1ExKMYG00f8W7cnUIGVasGk1fjvsjpgrOKRx-c8FYUCISi5WmNwL97peMQtnIRRh1VE-jHoSgVwFCpTqI
"Before 1914 nowhere in Europe was seemingly more favoured to produce a mass working-class party than Britain. In 1901 about 85 percent of the total working population was employed by others, and about 75 per cent were manual workers. The agricultural sector was almost exiguous: slightly less than 12 per cent of the male population worked in agriculture, horticulture and forestry and the number was declining. In the broadest sense Britain was unquestionably aworking-class nation. But on closer analysis the huge Britishproletariat disperses itself, and its 'collective* element becomesremarkably thin. There are several ways by which this can be shown. If we take trade union membership as a reasonable index of collectivity we find that in 1901 of a total employed workforce of 13.7 million, a little under two million, about 15 per cent, were union members. The effective number is probably somewhat higher since this figure includes among the workforce children and adolescents who were not eligible for union membership. Even so, it is clear that about 80 per cent of the male workforce was ununionized ; the female workforce outside cotton was almost entirely non-union. By 1914 the proportion unionized was significantly higher —25.8 per cent— but on the eve of the war three-quarters of the male workforce was still ununionized, while the proportion of women workers in unions remained tiny. By itself that 25 per cent -four million workers— could have constituted a formidable proletarian vanguard ; but there is no simple identity between union membership and political inclination. Indeed, we know pretty well what union opinion was. The 1913 legislation which reversed the Osborne Judgement required union members to vote on the establishment of a political fund ; many did not vote at all and of those who did 40 per cent voted against affiliation to the Labour Party. Only in one union, the Engineers, was the ideological character of the Labour Party an issue and in that union alone can we assume that some of the opposition to affiliation came from the left. In other unions, in so far as the argument had a clear point, it was the 'socialism' of the Labour Party which was objectionable. Even if we simply leave aside those who did not vote at all we ough." (p.298)
"Although in the government sector (the Post Office particularly) and in the Co-operative Societies there was some advance in organization, private commerce remained almost immune from working-class politics, rendered so not only by the action of employers but by the social environment of the occupations, an environment dominated by snobbery and excessive respectability." (p.300)
"The success of the Hornbys in Blackburn, Chamberlain in Birmingham or Sir Howard Vincent in Sheffield (who, like Chamberlain, held his city for the Tories even in 1906) demonstrates how the structure of industry could foster a political affinity between masters and men. When Baldwin told the House of Commons that, as a boy, he knew by name every man who worked in Baldwin's iron works (Bewdley) he was invoking a political reality and not (or not only) uttering a Tory platitude. To foreign (middle-class) observers this was Britain's exemplary achievement. 'Nowhere', Schulze-Gavernitz wrote,
do we meet the social pessimism so familiar in Germany, nowhere the belief among the lower classes that salvation can only come through the overthrow and destruction of the existing order... Amongst the Englishworking classes, the economic investigator never meets that deep-seated mistrust which makes the German workman regard every man in a goodcoat as an enemy, if not a spy.
This suggests that the clientele likely to patronize a specifically working-class party based upon an occupational solidarity was acomparatively small one and even smaller if the party were Marxist or quasi-Marxist." (p.303)
« Poverty also implied mobility which implied votelessness; the poorer the area the more gross the disfranchisement. The consequence was that nearly half the male working class could not participate even in the elementary act of voting in parliamentary elections; only a negligible number of working-class women could vote in municipal elections and none at all, of course, in parliamentary ones.
The second reason comes from the sexual division of labour. A high degree of communitarian solidarity to some extent presupposes sexual solidarity: that the prime loyalties of a husband were to his family and neighbourhood. But is is doubtful if they were. » (p.304)
« Tensions within working-class communities almost certainly undermined local solidarity. While these communities were notoriously characterized by extraordinary mutuality they were also marked by backbiting, gossip and a jockeying for social superiority. If this was true, as Robert Roberts suggests, of parishes whose members were alike in most 'objective' ways, it was truer still of communities where there were real differences of income and status. All working-class communities were equally disrupted: single status ones by the usual neighbourhood disputes (between those who kept the front step washed and blacked and those who did not, for example) while multiple status communities displayed real social distances and much hostility between their members. The somewhat monolithic appearance the working class presented to strangers concealed divisions which were at least as intense within communities as they were within the workforce. Communal loyalties were, therefore, ambiguous; they were inert rather than active, and class consciousness was defensive rather than aggressive. Some of this changed after 1918. » (p.305)
« It could be supposed — certainly on the German model —that the success of a party based upon such an ideology almost demanded a working class without an already established associational culture, one whose organizing energies — political energies in the broadest sense - could be utilized and directed by the party. This condition did not exist in Britain. The first reason for this is the rural origin of so many working-class pastimes. Most sports, things to do with sports, religious affiliations and many hobbies were simply late-nineteenth-century souvenirs of country life. » (p.306)
« The second reason is rising real wages. In his study of the United States Sombart argued that high real wages in themselves partly accounted for the absence of socialism in America.
As a general rule, this seems doubtful. At a certain wage level socialism presumably becomes unattractive, but it would be a crude sociology that put much weight on wage-levels as such. For one thing, the governing wage-rates in pre-1914 Britain had nowhere near reached a point where socialism must become unattractive; for another, wage-rates as absolute factors acquire significance only as tokens of rights or comparative status. Rising real wages in themselves do not eliminate a sense of injustice; if they do it is only when circumstances deny men the power of comparison. In one area, however, they are pertinent. British wages did permit more or less everything that made up late-nineteenth-century working-class pastimes: the development of organized hobbies, mass sport, popular betting, a modest domesticity and the commercialization of much working-class entertainment. They gave the working classes a certain autonomy, an opportunity to choose between alternative activities not available to any other European workforce; and the choice was at least partly their own. The result was that any working-class party had to compete with an existing working-class culture which was stable and relatively sophisticated. » (p.307)
"Religious activities performed the same kind of quasi-political associational function. The extent to which the early leadership of the Labour Party was specifically Christian is well-known, but it is worth stressing how far that inhibited a 'continental' politics in Britain. Ideological incompatibilities were probably less significant than social ones: religious affiliation threw working-class churchgoers into the company of the middle classes and encouraged an egalitarian bonhomie. " (p.308)
« Whereas at the beginning of the century the crown was an active agent in ordinary political life, necessarily partisan and thus often unpopular, by the end it had apparently become the even-handed guarantor of the classneutrality of parliament, the institution which ensured that the rules of the game would be followed. This was acceptable to all classes: to the politically strong because the crown undoubtedly represented a conservative force; to the politically weak, because they, more than any, had an interest in seeing that the rules were followed. » (p.312)
"Keir Hardie's attacks on the monarchy did him no good at Mid-Lanark in 1888, and his later criticisms of it were not particularly popular." (p.312)
"By the end of the nineteenth century few doubted that a representative parliament was the proper focus of working-class aspirations. Thus a 'reformed' parliament had the same resonance in the nineteenth century as a 'free' parliament had in the seventeenth." (p.313)
"The state made little attempt to teach people to be British as (say) the Third Republic tried to turn out little Republicans. [...] It is hard to escape the conclusion that a sense of being British was widely and positively felt in the working classes — and that was partly why imperial honours were acceptable to them. Margaret Loane thought they were not particularly xenophobic, but that their knowledge of being British implied attitudes to the outside world, sometimes of contempt, usually of indifference. These attitudes, she thought, they undoubtedly shared with all other classes." (p.316)
"The British unions were given a freedom of action unique in Europe and (as far as I know) in the world, unencumbered by law or opinion. In part, Disraeli's 1875 legislation (actually, legislation drafted by the preceding Gladstone ministry) was simply an element in that corporate pluralism which was characteristic of the Liberal state; but the legislation not so much endowed the unions with rights as extended to them an almost archaic corporate immunity. The unions claimed and received the kind of associational privilege previously allowed to many upper and middle class institutions, such as Oxford and Cambridge colleges, West End clubs, and army messes. Whereas these self-governing bodies, however, ruled themselves within a clear legal framework, the unions notoriously operated within no framework at all. There was no other way the state could guarantee fairness in that area where the working classes were determined that fairness should prevail: any law was worse than no law. Civil society thus promoted its own stability by subverting the coercive powers of employers." (p.320)
"It is within this context alone that we can understand the centrality of free trade finance to the political economy of the British working classes. It is a truth, not perhaps sufficiently emphasized by historians, that the free trade fiscal system had, before 1914, an ideological value for the working class beyond any conceivable socialist doctrine. While 'socialism' meant little, if anything, to most workingmen — though that does not mean they were necessarily hostile to it — after 1903 there was hardly one who did not have a 'view' of the fiscal question ; and the great majority appear to have been hostile to any modification of free trade.
At first sight, this is surprising. Chamberlain, after all, specifically advocated tariff reform as an employment policy: 'Tariff reform means jobs for all.' As a political device it was aimed directly at the working-class electorate. No doubt much working-class opposition to protection was simply material: 'cheap food' was an effective counter at a time of inflationary pressure on real wages. But that alone hardly explains the intensity of the opposition; even the class harmony of Birmingham was disturbed. W. J. Davis of the Brassworkers, and the personification of vertical loyalty, was so outraged at Chamberlain's action that he was only with difficulty dissuaded from standing against him in West Birmingham. The ideological power of free trade lay in its analogy to unfettered collective bargaining; both stood for the same conception of politics. It is true that Peel and Gladstone understood by free trade something other than its later vulgarizers. But their assumption — that it was a self-regulating fiscal mechanism beyond merely contingent politics — was not so different from that of their successors. For them, too, it represented the exclusion of'economics' from 'politics' but in terms which turned out to be unexpectedly favourable to the working class. Free trade finance increasingly became a technique by which market capitalism was justified to workingmen, to such an extent that the 1905 Liberal government undertook a substantial programme of redistributive legislation in order to shore it up. Like the post-1875
industrial regime, 'free trade' permitted the relative autonomy and propriety of working-class politics and confirmed that no other class could govern against the working class. Tariff reform, however, proposed to re-unite the political and economic systems and, despite Chamberlain's personal disavowals, threatened the enforcement of a new social discipline. It was the closest to a continental political strategy Britain had ever reached; its failure meant the failure not only of a policy that would have subordinated the working class under a new fiscal-industrial order but the failure of any working-class
ideologies — Marxism, for instance — which, like Chamberlain, also believed that the country's political and economic systems should be re-united." (pp.322-323)
"The Edwardian Labour Party was overwhelmingly working class in its social origins; it was one of the few European working-class parties where there was an almost exact social identity between its leadership and those likely to support it. Nothing suggests that middle-class influence was important in its rank and file, and the parliamentary party was wholly working-class. Of the 51 individuals who sat as official Labour MPs between 1900 and 1914 all were of working-class birth. They were, it is true, different kinds of workingmen but only three." (p.324)
"The late-nineteenth-century working class had absorbed numberless organizations founded for their benefit by the bourgeoisie and had then gone on to found numberless more of their own, one of which was the Labour Party. That they were not middle-class was one of their more desirable features." (p.326)
-Ross McKibbin, "Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain ?", The English Historical Review, Volume XCIX, Issue CCCXCI, April 1984, Pages 297–331.
