A British political party formed in 1893 with the objective of sending working men to parliament. It was socialist in aim, but wished to gain the support of working people whether they were socialist or not. One of its leading figures was Keir Hardie. Many of its leaders played a major part in founding the Labour Representation Committee (1900), which became the Labour Party in 1906. It was affiliated to the Labour Party but put up its own candidates, and was disaffiliated in 1932. It continued to have a few members of parliament up to 1946. In 1975, the ILP returned to the Labour Party as a publishing body and pressure group, and also changed its name to Independent Labour Publications.
The Independent Labour Party (ILP) was a socialist political party in the United Kingdom.
Foundation and growth
The party was formed as a consequence of the Manningham Mill strike in Bradford on January 14, 1893 making it one of the earliest democratic socialist political parties operating in the United Kingdom.
The early years of the ILP were characterised by a number of amalgamations with small socialist and leftist groups, and in the 1895 General Election they contested 28 seats.
The ILP played a central role in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and when the Labour Party was formed in 1906 the ILP affiliated to it. This affiliation allowed the ILP to continue to hold its own conferences and devise its own policies which ILP members were expected to argue for within the Labour Party. Also, as the Labour Party did not operate individual membership until 1918 the ILP provided much of Labour's activist base in the early years.
The relationship between the ILP and the Labour Party was characterised by conflict. Many ILP members viewed the Labour Party as being too timid and moderate in their attempts at social reform, and consequently many ILP branches chose to amalgamate with the Social Democratic Party of H. However the new party was little more than the SDP rebranded and the ILP soon resumed its position as the largest of a number of small socialist parties and groups in Britain.
On April 11, 1914 the party celebrated its 21st anniversary with a congress in Bradford. However, the coming of World War I exposed the gulf between the Labour Party, based on the trade union bureaucracy, and the ILP when the latter opposed war on ethical principles based on a pacifism grounded in the Christian beliefs of much of both the leadership and rank and file membership.
The 21st anniversary congress certificate
The 21st anniversary congress of the ILP occurred in April 1914, four months before the outbreak of World War I.
At the 1922 general election several ILP members became MPs (including future ILP leader Jimmy Maxton) and the party grew in stature. Their response was to devise their own programme for government but the Labour Party leadership rejected this.
For the duration of the second Labour government (1929-31) 37 Labour MPs were sponsored by the ILP and they provided the left opposition to the Labour leadership. The 1930 ILP conference decided that where their policies diverged from the Labour Party their MPs should break the whip to support the ILP policy.
It was becoming clearer that the ILP was diverging further away from the Labour Party and at the 1931 ILP Scottish Conference the issue of whether the party should still affiliate to Labour was discussed.
At the 1931 general election the ILP candidates refused to accept the standing orders of the parliamentary Labour Party, resulting in them standing without official Labour Party support. Five ILP members were returned to Westminster and created an ILP group outside the Labour Party.
The Labour left-winger Aneurin Bevan described the ILP's disaffiliation as a decision to remain "pure, but impotent", and in the long run his criticism was arguably vindicated, as once outside of the Labour Party structure the ILP's political influence went into decline. Some members of the ILP who chose to remain within the Labour Party were to be instrumental in creating the Socialist League.
In the 1930s the party suffered a massive decline in membership owing to the decision to disaffiliate from Labour, but they remained active. But while winning new members they also lost members to the right, to the Labour Party, and to their left to the Communist Party and to the Trotskyists as well as losing a breakaway in the north west the Independent Socialist Party in 1934. This was in addition to the presence within the party of a group of members sympathetic to the CPGB, the Revolutionary Policy Committee, who eventually left to join that party. In one such by-election in Cardiff this was with the result that Fenner Brockway, the ILP candidate, found himself opposed by a Conservative candidate for whom the local Communist Party actively campaigned.
The end of war can be said to mark the final descent of the ILP into the political wilderness as its conference rejected calls to reaffiliate to the Labour Party.
In the 1970s the ILP reassessed its views on the Labour Party, and in 1975 they renamed themselves Independent Labour Publications and became a pressure group inside the mainstream Labour Party. Smith 1941: John McGovern 1943: Robert Edwards 1948: David Gibson 1951: Fred Barton 1953: Annie Maxton 1958: Fred Morel 1962: Emrys Thomas
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