CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

Yorkshire and Wales, less ‘traditional’ areas where membership decline had been lower came to
carry a greater weight within the organisation. But the picture was not one of universal decline;
some areas saw substantial new growth in membership and branches. And in elections the party
achieved some modest success in some of its strongholds.
Though the ILP became more consciously orientated towards the trade union movement following
disaffiliation its impact was patchy and, overall, modest. It should have done better with women.
One of the features of the early ILP back in the 1890s and 1900s had been that it was far less
‘masculine’ in tone than its rival socialist organisations, notably the SDF. Women had played a
relatively large part in its organisation at all levels and in a variety of roles, with, for example
Katherine Bruce Glasier taking over the editorship of the Labour Leader for several key years
either side of the end of the Great War. In the post-disaffiliation period there were only three
women members of the NAC. Two of them, Dorothy Jewson and Jennie Lee, lasted only until 1934
and 1935 respectively, leaving Kate Spurell as the sole female member. Separate representation of
women within the party, already declining in previous years, was brought to an end – with the
support of the ‘revolutionary’ element – soon after the breach with Labour.
Another area where the impact of this wing of the membership can be seen concerned the
organisation of the party. Since its inception, the ruling body – between national conferences – had
been the National Administrative Council. The name was deliberately chosen to suggest that this
body would not behave in the authoritarian way attributed to many, if not all, executive
committees. At a time when such issues as whether the ILP should have a ‘president’ caused much
debate and when the Clarion, weekly rival of Labour Leader, would inevitably leap on any
pretensions to ‘leadership’ among the notables of the party and was prone to spot the slightest sign
of incipient bureaucracy this was very much in accord with the times.
But in the 1930s sterner attitudes came to the fore. In 1934, against the inevitable objection of
many, notably Jowett, the ILP adopted its own version of ‘democratic centralism’ involving the
creation not only of an executive committee but also the rather sinister sounding Inner Executive.
The latter was supposed to enable the party to function ‘underground’ should the ILP be made
illegal; but by 1935 it consisted of three MPs – James Maxton, Campbell Stephen, and John
McGovern – who met in a committee room of the House of Commons, rather than the Doge’s
Palace as the name might have led one to anticipate. It became a controversial force, accused of
dictatorship, especially in relation to the ‘Abyssinian crisis’. I would have welcomed more about the
arguments on both sides of the ‘democratic centralism’ debate and the subsequent criticisms and
defences of the new structure.
The key chapter of the book in explaining ‘the failure of a dream’ seems to be ‘Divided We Fall’. It is
always difficult to draw the line between productive critical debate and destructive factionalism
and this was exemplified by what took place in the ILP during the years in question. Apart from
those wishing to remain affiliated to the Labour Party who helped form the Socialist League, there
were at least three distinct groupings pulling in very different directions. The Revolutionary Policy
Committee’s notion of a ‘revolutionary’ policy did not correspond to the interpretation of other
would-be revolutionaries in the party. It stood among other things for closer co-operation with the
communists, nationally and internationally: an approach which seemed to flourish for a couple of
years and then become untenable after events in Spain, above all in Barcelona, put the two
organisations at loggerheads. Soon after the RPC left en masse to join the CP. In the meantime,
unimpressed by the progress being made by the RPC, the CPGB had infiltrated both the ILP’s youth
movement and the ILP itself. The CP’s central committee set up a Committee for Affiliation to the
Comintern within the ILP. Those who had been ILP members in 1920 and 1921 must have recalled
the attempts of the ‘Left-Wing of the ILP’ to secure the party’s affiliation to the Third International.
But this time the ILP also attracted the attentions of trotskyists in the shape of the ‘Marxist Group’.
Moves in these directions were opposed by a ‘Unity Group’ – whose title was not of course intended
to be ironic, though much of it left to form the Independent Socialist Party in 1934. The group was
committed to ‘ethical socialism’. It would have been good if this had been explored more fully,
though Cohen does supply some interesting examples of the related social activities of the party. To
some extent at least the ILP by the 1930s had become a sort of residuary legatee of much of the preleninist
radical left, including aspects of the Clarion movement, the guild socialists, the syndicalists
and perhaps even the old SDF as well as the ILP’s ‘traditional’ features. Its opponents within the
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