CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

to entirely go along with Cohen’s characterisation of it as developing in the direction of a ‘think
tank’ in the 1920s under the chairmanship of Clifford Allen. It was surely much more than this. For
a start, it was much bigger than most organisations designated in this way today. It was more than
five times the size of the CPGB at the time of disaffiliation in 1932 as we are reminded in the very
first sentence of the introduction.
Cohen rejects the view that disaffiliation was simply an act of ‘insanity’. But he is clear that most
ILPers would have preferred to remain affiliated and that the majority of members who supported
disaffiliation came to this position with the greatest reluctance. As late as the beginning of 1932, the
year of the breach with Labour, six of the nine ILP divisions, accounting for about 80 per cent of
the membership, voted to remain affiliated to Labour at their meetings preceding the party’s
national conference. Yet within a quite short period thereafter the decision to disaffiliate was taken,
with the result that about a third of the membership departed. So, why, if there was so much
reluctance to part company with Labour and so much opposition to doing so, did the delegates to
the crucial conference resolve on disaffiliation?
There were groupings, notably the ‘Revolutionary Policy Committee’ formed the previous year,
which had their own reasons for supporting disaffiliation; but Cohen is clear that the key role was
played by the conflict over the standing orders of the Parliamentary Labour Party. This went back
to 1929 after a period when the more militant ILP MPs, notably Maxton, had been fierce left-wing
critics of the Labour leadership and, from the latter’s point of view, had signally failed to display
the loyalty it expected from its parliamentary supporters. Incompatible decisions by both parties
were then taken. The ILP for its part resolved that all ILP MPs and candidates should formally
undertake to support the policies determined by its conferences while the Parliamentary Labour
Party introduced new standing orders which precluded MPs from voting against the decisions of
the PLP. This might have seemed something that concerned mainly the ILP parliamentary group;
but when at by-elections and subsequently the general election of 1931 Labour failed to endorse
ILP candidates – nineteen of them at the general election – resentment and anger were widespread
among their supporters.
Nevertheless, at the regular ILP annual conference in 1932 delegates voted against immediate
disaffiliation and resolved by a very large majority to re-open negotiations with Labour on a
compromise solution for the standing orders conflict. This was, says Cohen, ‘a victory for the
politics of Micawber’. Labour had already made it crystal clear that it was not prepared to give any
ground at all on the question and the hope that something would turn up to rescue the ILP from its
dilemma was doomed to failure. A special conference in July 1932 bowed to the inevitable and took
the decision to disaffiliate. But it would have been interesting to hear a little more about exactly
how the decision to call the ‘disaffiliation conference‘ was made. And anyone could be forgiven for
wondering how the Labour Party, so soon after the MacDonald defection and the disastrous 1931
election – which reduced its number of MPs from the 287 won in 1929 to just forty-six – could
contemplate the loss of the ILP so calmly.
One outspoken supporter of the ILP line on the standing orders was the veteran ILPer and former
MP, and indeed former minister, Fred Jowett. For him what was at issue was the electorate’s right
to elect MPs who would honour the pledges made during the campaign – in the case of those
supported by the ILP, the policies determined by the party’s conference. Again, it would have been
very interesting if these arguments had been explored further. Jowett had a long record as a critic
of what passed for representative government going back well before the Great War. He had
doggedly pursued the celebrated ‘Bradford Resolution’ for years and – though he served in
MacDonald’s first cabinet – continued to advocate the replacement of cabinet government by a
committee system. His position on the PLP standing orders was closely related to his more general
stance on democracy. So much is clear from Brockway’s account in his biography of Jowett. How
big a part did this play in ILP attitudes more generally at the time of disaffiliation?
As far as ILP membership is concerned, the book presents a more nuanced picture than the usual
one of inevitable and precipitate decline. Significant fluctuations in membership were new neither
to the ILP nor to other left-wing parties where, for example, the CPGB suffered a much greater
percentage of loss during the first ten months of the disaffiliated ILP. What was more worrying for
the ILPers that remained was that membership continued to fall by slightly larger proportions in
the following two years. And as a result of serious declines in old strongholds such as Lancashire,
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