In Labour’s case, the change followed Keir Hardie’s resignation as chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). His increasing restiveness in the post had been accompanied by rumbling dissatisfaction on the part of many of his colleagues. Ramsay MacDonald was irritated by his failure to take the parliamentary responsibilities of leadership more seriously, while Hardie himself felt that his views were ignored and that his real work lay outside the House of Commons. Even Independent Labour Party (ILP) colleagues such as Philip Snowden began to feel that some kind of crisis was inevitable. Hardie’s leadership, he wrote privately, was ‘a hopeless failure’ because ‘He seems completely absorbed with the suffragettes. I can assure you there is intense dissatisfaction amongst the ILP members. I doubt if he would get two votes if the leadership were voted upon today.’[1]
The PLP was proving tricky to manage on a number of levels, but that was not the only problem the leadership faced. Hardie’s support for Victor Grayson in the Colne Valley by-election had been seen as unhelpful while, fairly or otherwise, there was a belief in some quarters that, had he wanted to, he could have prevented or mitigated the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)’s actions in Cockermouth. It was all too easy to see why people thought that he was disproportionately committed to the limited suffrage cause, and this came to a head at the Labour Party conference in Belfast in 1907. One of the major issues discussed – controversial then as now – was the degree to which MPs should be bound by Conference decisions. The parliamentary leadership had a very clear line: Conference decisions were advisory only and the PLP had to have the freedom to act as it saw fit. Given that the Party was made up of two separate socialist and trade unionist strands, Hardie argued, there had to be some give and take. ‘There must,’ he said, ‘be some free play between the two sections. Otherwise they were in for a spill.’[2] Delegates agreed with him, and the leadership’s position was passed by a comfortable margin. There was also a victory for them on the question of whether the Labour Party should be a specifically socialist organisation, on which Conference agreed a neutral position. Delegates even decided against making it compulsory for all members to join trade unions.
But the debate on suffrage turned into a major row, with Hardie strongly opposing a move to mandate the PLP to vote against a limited suffrage bill. Not only did he argue against the principle of being bound by Conference, he also put a positive case for a limited suffrage based on a property qualification. Not surprisingly, he was forcefully opposed by women delegates as well as men: Mabel Hope of the Postal Telegraphs Clerks’ Association, who was also a founder member of the Women’s Labour League (WLL) and a member of its executive, told him that although she had some respect for the campaign for women’s suffrage ‘they had created a sex antagonism instead of a class antagonism and it was contrary to the spirit of socialism’.[3]
Hardie’s position was comprehensively defeated, and the Party retained its commitment to universal suffrage. At the end of the conference he made a closing speech as leader and shocked delegates by threatening to resign from the Party if they insisted on binding him to vote for universal suffrage. He said that he ‘could not be untrue to his principles, and he would have to [resign] in order to remove the stigma of women being accounted unfit for political citizenship’. This was a staggering announcement and not surprisingly served to reinforce the general impression that he was committed to suffrage over socialism. In the event the PLP arrived at a compromise by which they agreed that suffrage was a matter of conscience and members should therefore be allowed a free vote. This was the first time that such a device had been used and formed the precedent upon which the current rules around conscience votes are still based. Embarrassment on this occasion had been avoided, but the whole episode was an indication of how little wedded Hardie was to formal leadership of the Party.
During the rest of 1907 things continued to unravel. Hardie himself reconsidered his position on suffrage and by March had come around to the view that there was, after all, something to be said for the adultist case. Unfortunately, he chose an appearance on a platform with Emmeline Pankhurst to announce this, and she was predictably furious. Then a few weeks later there was another pitched battle at the ILP conference in Derby. The ILP agreed to stick with its support for limited suffrage, but when Hardie wanted to send a telegram of congratulation to Christabel Pankhurst on her release from prison, women such as Margaret MacDonald were incensed because it seemed that he was supporting women who were undermining the Party against those who worked hard for it. Soon after this Hardie was ill and went home to Scotland to recuperate. In July he departed for a tour of the colonies, writing late in the year to say that he would not be standing for re-election as leader. He wanted to be free to speak out on the issues he cared about, and did not believe that he could do that as chairman of the PLP.
Despite a view that David Shackleton should take over, it was Arthur Henderson who stepped into the breach. In some ways he was as unlike Hardie as it was possible to be, but this turned out to be a mixed blessing. Hardie had (usually) been able to take the ILP with him even if the unions were suspicious; in Henderson’s case it was the other way around. ILP members, already unhappy over the Party’s parliamentary performance, thought Henderson was too close to the Liberals, too prone to compromise, and too much in the unions’ pocket. Since his salary was paid by the Friendly Society of Ironfounders this was hardly surprising, but at a time when MPs were not salaried most were paid by their unions as well as receiving a small stipend from the Labour Party. Payment of MPs from the public purse would be a step towards opening politics up to more working-class men but no government had shown any sign of bringing it in, and in the meantime the unions and the Party had to find the money with which to fund their representatives themselves. Complaints about Henderson’s closeness to the Liberals were voiced within months of his election: John Bruce Glasier wrote to Ramsay MacDonald that Henderson ‘should appear to lead the party as a fighting force, and he cannot do that if he is always side by side with Liberals on virtually Liberal platforms’.[4]
Henderson had begun his life as a Liberal and had in fact been the agent for the Liberal MP for Barnard Castle, before being elected to Parliament as an Independent Labour candidate in the by-election following his employer’s death. But it was also the case that the PLP was new, inexperienced and sometimes chaotic, and it had real difficulty finding its parliamentary feet in its early days. It also faced a considerable threat in that the Liberal government was using its huge majority to move the Liberal Party leftwards onto Labour’s territory. This began with Campbell-Bannerman’s support of the Trade Disputes Act and the passing of the Workmen’s Compensation Act in 1906, but soon moved on to other, more contentious areas. After the change of prime minister in 1908 the challenge increased, and throughout this period both Hardie and Henderson encountered problems when it came to establishing the Labour Party as a separate and distinctive political force.
A few months after Hardie’s resignation the Liberals also changed their leader. In early April Henry Campbell-Bannerman resigned on health grounds and was succeeded as prime minister by H. H. Asquith.[5] Asquith was inclined to the reforming wing of the Liberal Party in some respects, but since he was also a cautious and pragmatic Yorkshireman he constructed a Cabinet which aimed to balance the various wings of his party. David Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer and the 33-year-old Winston Churchill President of the Board of Trade. Promotion to the Cabinet meant that Churchill had to seek re-election to Parliament, and a by-election was duly held in the Manchester seat he had represented since 1906. His opposition to women’s suffrage was widely known, and the suffrage movement turned out with enthusiasm to campaign against him. The Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Council, led by Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper, also worked hard to get him defeated, this time over the question of whether or not women should be allowed to work as barmaids. This seemed an unlikely issue to motivate an all-male electorate, but for different reasons it had become a cause célèbre among both feminists and temperance campaigners. Lancashire was a temperance heartland, and Churchill was even more opposed to temperance than he was to women’s suffrage. Help for the campaign to defeat him came from a variety of quarters, including Eva’s older sister, Constance (Countess Markievicz). Much more ebullient and outgoing than Eva, she was already involved in Irish nationalist politics as well as the suffrage movement, and she knew how to make an impression. She drove a carriage around the constituency from the roof of which, at appropriate halts, she, Eva and others made speeches. The carriage was drawn by four white horses, and Constance was a skilled driver. At one point a man in the crowd shouted out to her, ‘Can you cook a dinner?’, to which Constance replied, ‘Yes, can you drive a coach and four?’[6] Churchill lost the election to the Conservatives but rapidly found another seat in Dundee which allowed him to take up his cabinet post.
Historically, the Liberal Party had always believed in individual responsibility. This meant that there had been a long-standing resistance to state interference in either industry or the provision of charity or relief for the poor or unemployed. They shared the general view that people who worked hard and looked after their own families should not then be taxed in order to look after those who did not. Self-help was seen as the goal, and poverty as a choice. The more the state intervened to alleviate society’s problems, the less chance there would be of individuals taking responsibility for themselves and their children. But since the 1880s there had been tension between this and a more collectivist view, and socialists, social reformers and people such as the Fabians had begun to produce some new thinking. This was accelerated by the shock discovery during the South African War that many young working-class men were unfit for military service. There was a panic about the general health of the nation and a growing realisation that if people were underfed and overworked as children they would be unlikely to make vigorous adults. But although inquiries and commissions were set up to investigate, there was very little actual progress towards acting on their findings.
For the left, individualism became code for class-based self-interest. John Bruce Glasier’s remark in his diary about the ‘miserable individualism’[7] of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst is usually quoted as an example of his opposition to women’s suffrage, but it may be that he already detected their drift to the right. Collectivists were socialist; individualists were not. Collectivists saw the state as a possible provider of both economic and social solutions; traditional Liberals and, to an even greater extent, Conservatives, regarded state provision as an interference. For different reasons many working-class people were also opposed to state intervention. They were suspicious of middle-class people’s philanthropy, and legal reductions in hours or other restrictions often also meant loss of income. Many industries were not unionised and could not therefore benefit from collective bargaining and trade agreements. Paupers and workers living on starvation wages were at the mercy of almost everyone, including well-meaning but often judgemental charities which constantly tried to change the behaviour of the poor by the application of more stick than carrot.
By the first decade of the twentieth century the Liberal commitment to individualism was beginning to break down, and in 1906 the incoming government had some modest proposals for a more collectivist approach. These included supporting legislation for the provision of school meals for underfed children, a measure which had been the subject of debate for decades.
There were already many small-scale charitable schemes feeding hungry children, although it was in Bradford that the first steps had been taken towards state provision. Margaret McMillan was a gifted ILP speaker and propagandist, but her main cause was that of children’s welfare. In 1894 she had been elected to the Bradford School Board and, together with Fred Jowett, had begun pioneering work to improve the health and well-being of the working-class children attending the local schools. They had brought in medical inspections, home visits, and the novel idea of encouraging teachers to communicate with parents so as to involve them in their children’s education. They had also, illegally, introduced a free school meals system. The alarm engendered by the discovery of the scale of childhood malnourishment among the working classes had led to a concession in some quarters that the state might have some responsibility. In 1906 the incoming Liberal government passed the Education (Provision of Meals) Act.
Like the Old Age Pensions Act a couple of years later, what became known as the School Meals Act was a fudged attempt to resolve a deep-rooted problem without costing anyone a great deal of money. It began life as a private members’ bill introduced by Tyson Wilson, a newly elected Labour MP who proposed a discretionary scheme which would allow local authorities to provide meals to needy children and to raise a halfpenny rate to cover it. The government supported it, but the Conservative Party, the House of Lords and the Charity Organisation Society, which considered itself (and was in some quarters considered) expert in matters of poverty, all opposed it. Even the national Board of Guardians opposed it, largely on the grounds that it would encourage men to abdicate their responsibilities for their children. Some peers went so far as to want to disenfranchise fathers if their children received free school meals. Many Labour members, on the other hand, wanted the scheme to be compulsory. In the end Wilson’s bill got through more or less unscathed, largely because of government support. The principle of free school meals provided by the public purse had been agreed, but getting the Act implemented would prove to be much more of a challenge.
For the WLL, this was an ideal campaign. Many members were themselves engaged in local government and some were serving as Poor Law guardians and understood the problems. Once the Act was operative the League began to campaign on two fronts: first, to make the provision of free meals compulsory; and second, to get local authorities to implement a voluntary scheme. Perhaps unsurprisingly, councils were not enthusiastic. Raising a rate, however small, to cover expenditure which many people considered an interference with the normal rights and responsibilities of parents was not an attractive prospect, and there was substantial resistance. WLL branches began to try to persuade councils, particularly those with Labour members, to take action. They met with some success: Birmingham implemented the Act, as did the London County Council, and Leicester after a campaign led by Margaret MacDonald. But overall implementation was patchy and the criteria being used to determine eligibility inconsistent and sometimes discriminatory. The WLL therefore decided to launch a national campaign to amend the Act, which it did in the form of a petition, backed up by literature and lobbying. This campaign ran right up to the start of World War I, and while it was not successful in changing the law it did secure the implementation of the 1906 Act in a number of authorities and keep the issue to the forefront of Labour members’ minds.
In fact, one of the major obstacles which stood in the way of progress was not the School Meals Act but the Poor Law which covered the relief of destitution generally. This dated back to 1601 but had been amended in 1834 to bring in the workhouse system, which was based on the theory that the more unpleasant destitution was made the less likely people were to allow themselves to fall into it and, as a result, the lower the burden would be for the rate- and taxpayers. Workhouses were therefore made very unpleasant indeed, and although by the end of the nineteenth century there had been some improvements, these were relative and not very effective. Families entering the workhouse were often split up so that children might have the double dislocation of losing both their home and their parents. Elderly couples were also separated, in some cases rarely seeing their spouses again before they died. Rations were limited and the work provided hard. Periodically there were horror stories in the press about the near-starvation conditions in some workhouses, but improvements were marginal and slow. In 1838 Charles Dickens’ picture of workhouse life in Oliver Twist had shocked people, but 60 years later children were still being fed inadequate food and made to work long hours. In the 1890s a number of ILP members, including women, were elected to boards of guardians and were outraged by the conditions they found. The spectre of destitution haunted poorly paid workers, who were prepared to endure even the worst excesses of the notorious sweating system of employment rather than enter the workhouse gates or allow their children to do so.
By the turn of the century there was general agreement that something needed to be done, but very little as to what that something should be. The Labour Party wanted to see the Poor Law repealed altogether and replaced with something much more humane and effective. In the sixth League Leaflet the WLL explained that:
Women are working with the Labour Party in order to secure for the disinherited some of those advantages in society to which their labours for the community fully entitle them … there need not always be men and women who toil all the best days of their life, and have nothing for themselves in their old age – widows who have to neglect their children in order to earn a crust of bread for them – children who are starved with cold and hunger.[8]
In 1905 the Conservative government set up a Royal Commission – by no means the first – to look at the operation of the Poor Law. The commissioners included Beatrice Webb and the charity expert Helen Bosanquet, who, between them, represented the difference between collectivist and individualist approaches. Many Labour and Fabian women had begun with charitable work, as had Beatrice herself, but the intractable nature of the underlying problems had driven them to seek a more comprehensive explanation and solution. Helen Bosanquet, on the other hand, was active in the Charity Organisation Society which saw private giving as capable of meeting the need and did not wish to challenge either social or industrial systems. Her view was that:
the one fundamental cure for poverty is to make the poorer wage-earners more efficient in the widest sense of the term – more efficient as producers, as consumers, and in all the relations of life. They could not then, I hold, fail of greatly increased economic prosperity. But that prosperity would not be at the cost of any other members of the community, all of whom would benefit in their degree by the greater efficiency of the class in question.[9]
However, Helen did think that the charity ‘sector’ itself was disorganised and sometimes dysfunctional. To remedy this she advocated training for charity workers which would include an understanding of politics and wider social and economic issues as well as the management of casework, the relief of poverty, and basic organisational and financial management skills. Helen was both a suffragist and a feminist, while by 1906 Beatrice had only just publicly recanted her earlier opposition to women’s suffrage and never described herself as a feminist. Helen was a Liberal, while Beatrice had been a socialist since about 1890. Helen had been one of the first women to gain a first-class honours degree at Cambridge, while Beatrice, though widely read even as a child, had received very little formal education. Despite a mutual antipathy, it was the powerful views and obvious expertise of both women which would inform the debate about the relief of poverty and ultimately feed together into the development of the welfare state and the professionalisation of the charity sector.
The concentration over the years on the suffrage campaign has tended to mask how important campaigns around poverty were for many women at this time. Indeed, for most Labour and trade unionist women the great question was not so much the vote as the eradication of sweated labour. Millions of women (and a smaller number of men) lived on starvation wages, underpaid and exploited, living and working in conditions that were dangerous for both them and their families. Some sweated workers were employed in factories, but many worked at home, making a huge range of articles. The cheap clothes and consumer goods which were readily available in Victorian and Edwardian Britain were possible only because they were produced by women who were lucky if they earned enough to reach the breadline. Their one- or two-roomed homes – usually in overcrowded slum houses and tenements – were also their workshops. Conditions were often unhealthy and sometimes dangerous: some trades, for instance, resulted in fibres in the atmosphere which could choke the lungs of the children who had to breathe them even in their sleep. Homes were hard to keep clean and even harder to keep safe. Workers were often paid by the piece and had to buy their own tools and materials, not infrequently at an inflated price from the middleman who paid them. There was no factory inspection for homeworkers, so child labour was still common, with children coming home from school to work long hours or even missing school altogether. There were no trade unions for these women, and no possibility of collective bargaining with the hundreds of thousands of individual employers and middlemen.
The campaign to outlaw sweated labour was as old as the campaign for the women’s vote, and had achieved about as much success. From time to time there had been a public outcry, but there was little political will to take on the vested interests involved. One of Margaret MacDonald’s first pieces of work for the Women’s Industrial Council (WIC) had been an investigation into homeworking which went on to form the basis of the Home Work Regulation Bill of 1902. Even more than a century later, the account of it still makes grim reading. As a report of the inquiry (probably written by Clementina Black) noted:
Even the historical strikes of unskilled labourers, of dockers and seamen, difficult as they are to conduct, leave unstirred the lower depth of daily work; rank behind rank stand masses of helpless women, generally too poor and ignorant to organise, to struggle, or even to remonstrate, mere slaves to the imperious necessity of starvation wages.[10]
A decade after the report was published there had still been virtually no progress. Many people, including Beatrice and Sidney Webb, had long been of the view that a minimum wage of some kind was the only answer, but there was not entire agreement about this and there was some uncertainty about how it would be enforced. Advocates of a legal minimum believed that many employers were unlikely to do the right thing of their own accord, and that there would therefore need to be an element of compulsion. A basic level below which wages could not fall would enable more men to maintain their own families and would have the added benefit of improving children’s health, too, since they would not be brought up in workshops and would have the full attention of their mothers. Opponents thought that an enforced lower level of pay could both interfere with collective bargaining and actually tempt more married women into employment. Unscrupulous employers might try to reduce male wages to the legal minimum and it would be difficult to inspect and monitor what was happening. It would be particularly difficult to inspect the huge number of small and domestic workshops, which was where the majority of sweating took place. There was also, despite periodic outbursts of guilty revulsion on the part of the public, no general will to take action. The cost of higher wages would be dearer consumer goods; clothing prices, in particular, would rise if the women who made garments were paid more. Some people thought that, since the cheapest products of sweating were consumed primarily by the poorest in society, the result of an enforced minimum wage would actually be increased poverty. Part of the problem was finding a way of convincing people that the price would be worth paying.
The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), under the continued presidency of the formidable Emilia Dilke, had campaigned for years for an end to sweating, and her husband, Sir Charles Dilke MP, had introduced an anti-sweating bill into Parliament every year since 1900. Each time it had fallen for lack of support. Something was needed to push the genteel guilt people felt about sweating over into action, and Mary Macarthur believed she had the answer. In 1904 the German trade unions had held a very successful exhibition in Berlin to bring the evils of sweated labour home to the buying public. Mary thought that this could be replicated in London, but it needed some high-profile backing. According to her biographer, Mary Agnes Hamilton, she:
rushed off to see the editor of the Daily News … She broke in upon Mr A. G. Gardiner, who had never seen her before, and, white-faced, with burning eyes, poured forth her story and appealed for his help … When, however, he began to suggest some difficulties … she disarmed and alarmed him by bursting into tears.[11]
This story may or may not be apocryphal, though Mary did sometimes tend towards the dramatic. Whatever the spur, Gardiner was taken with the idea of an exhibition sponsored by his paper, and once he was on board matters moved quickly. The Sweated Industries Exhibition took place at the Queen’s Hall in May 1906 and was a huge success. It was visited by over 30,000 people who, for a small fee, entered a hall laid out in a manner described by the Daily News as resembling a bazaar. ‘But,’ added the paper, ‘when one looks at the price tickets it will surely seem a bazaar belonging to Dante’s Inferno.’[12] At each stall real workers carried out their trades, demonstrating all the skills for which they were so grossly underpaid. Placards gave details of each individual, the trade, the rate of pay and the household expenses it had to cover. Visitors could talk to the workers and ask them questions. The exhibition was opened by royalty and attended by almost every politician of note. Lectures were given by experts such as Margaret MacDonald and Mary Macarthur; over 1,500 people turned up to be harangued by George Bernard Shaw. A handbook was produced giving harrowing details of the lives of the workers accompanied by atmospheric photographs. The National Anti-Sweating League (NASL) was established with a committee composed of a mix of people including Mary Macarthur, Clementina Black, Margaret Irwin (the erstwhile secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress), Keir Hardie and the Webbs, as well as the Liberal Herbert Gladstone, and Emilia Dilke’s husband, Charles.
However, now that there was the prospect of real progress a serious division of opinion between Labour and trade union women came to the surface. There were two basic approaches. One was for a minimum wage to be established for each trade by means of a wages board. This idea had already been implemented in the Australian state of Victoria, where its supporters believed it had met with some success. Its opponents thought that such a scheme would be impossible to implement effectively and instead favoured a system of licensing for homeworkers which would enable the inspection of domestic as well as industrial premises. Margaret MacDonald favoured a licensing system, while Mary Macarthur supported wages boards. In 1906 she spoke in support of a resolution at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) supporting the minimum wage and calling upon Labour MPs to ‘press forward this proposal in the House of Commons in the next session of Parliament’. In her speech, Mary conceded that ‘the question of a legislative minimum wage really bristled with difficulties’ and that they should have a scientific and properly researched basis. The resolution was passed unanimously.[13]
In the ranks of the WIC, however, there was no unanimity. Clementina Black, now in her 50s and hugely experienced, was an advocate of the minimum wage. Margaret MacDonald, who had been a WIC stalwart almost since its inception, and who very well understood what was required in terms of proper research, became more opposed the more she investigated. In late 1906 she had travelled to Australia to examine the operation of the Victoria Wages Boards for herself and she returned convinced that they were not the answer. She agreed that they would discourage women from working but, given that she tended to defend women’s right to work (if not always the desirability of their exercising that right), she did not necessarily regard this as a good thing. She also thought that what was possible in the small setting of the state of Victoria was not automatically transferable to the East End of London or the back streets of York. As the anti-sweating campaign gathered pace so too did the disagreement, and in 1907 the Labour Leader gave Margaret MacDonald and Mary Macarthur the space to debate the issue at some length over several editions.
Margaret’s case rested on four basic factors, all of which Mary Macarthur roundly rebutted. Margaret believed that the minimum wage was ‘diverting our energies from the direct fight for Socialism in order to advocate a palliative which, in my opinion, would not only be ineffective, but in some cases positively harmful’.[14] Mary replied that this was effectively saying that ‘the same argument must apply equally to all factory legislation … and, if we follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, Socialism must be further off now than it was fifty years ago’.[15] Secondly, Margaret contended that it was not possible simply to replicate the Victorian Wages Boards in the larger and much more complex economy of Britain. She cited figures which gave the number of industrial workers in Victoria as 112,610 men and 32,669 women, while in Britain ‘returns for 1899 of persons employed in factories and workshops give 1,528,881 females and 3,077,108 males’.[16] This, she argued, would make the Victorian model, where both employer and employee members of wages boards were elected by their relative sides, impossible to set up, and would thus give the Secretary of State, who would be appointing the board members, a significant power which his counterpart in Australia did not have.
Mary’s response was to sweep these difficulties rather imperiously aside. Despite being very familiar indeed with the problems of organising the lowest-paid workers, she maintained that ‘The Trade Unions, which, if not already in existence could, I believe, be formed, would almost certainly – as in Victoria – prove the determining factor in the election of the workers’ representatives.’[17] She went on to say that wages boards would in fact encourage the development of trade unions, and that this was one of their principal attractions. The legal minimum would be underpinned by the extension of collective bargaining and the strengthening of workers’ rights.
Margaret’s remaining objections were about the outcomes rather than the process. She did not believe that wages boards would result in higher pay, and she thought that, since the legislation would apply industry by industry and district by district, the inconsistencies would enable unscrupulous employers simply to move their businesses to an area where it was not operative. Mary was particularly scathing about this, pointing out that this kind of thing was always said whenever any industrial legislation was proposed, and that it could always be resolved by extending wages boards as and when necessary. But on the question of whether or not the proposed system actually worked, she and Margaret were in flat disagreement. Mary wrote:
In her concluding article, Mrs Macdonald states that Victorian experience is that the Wages Boards do not raise the average standard of the trade. This is absolutely incorrect. … the average increase in the wages since the application of the Act … was 4s 4d weekly. In no single case had there been a reduction.[18]
Given that this was not only tantamount to an accusation of dishonesty, but also a challenge to her credibility as a researcher and statistician, it is hardly surprising that Margaret took exception to it. Having seen the operation of the Victorian system at first hand she considered herself to have a level of expertise that Mary did not possess; Mary was an experienced trade union organiser who believed that she knew more about the practicalities than any researcher could, however well qualified.
The NASL was four-square behind the minimum wage and was attracting high-profile support. In June 1907 the government appointed a Select Committee on Homework which, though narrow in remit in that it did not include industrial workshops, was still an advance. Margaret gave evidence to it on behalf of the WIC, opposing wages boards and supporting a licensing system. As president of the WIC Clementina Black gave evidence supporting precisely the opposite conclusion. Clearly this split was not sustainable, and Clementina resigned soon afterwards. Mary Macarthur also gave evidence, particularly to point out that sweating was not simply an issue for homeworkers, but also for women such as the Cradley Heath chain-makers, who were so badly paid that they could not afford to join a union and therefore could not benefit from collective bargaining mechanisms. In July 1908 the Select Committee reported in favour of legally compulsory wages boards for both homeworkers and in factories and workshops. Winston Churchill, as President of the Board of Trade, was made responsible for seeing the measure through Parliament, and the Trade Boards Bill became law in 1909. It was the usual Liberal fudge; despite Labour attempts to broaden its scope it covered only four industries – bespoke tailoring, cardboard box-making, lacemaking and chain-making. The theory was that boards would develop in other industries as experience of them grew. This did indeed happen, but progress was very slow and vast swathes of industry remained untouched by minimum wages for decades to come.[19]
In the course of the debate on wages boards, considerable damage had been done to relationships between Labour women. The debate over suffrage had been temporarily resolved in 1907 with an agreement at the WLL’s conference (moved by Mary Macarthur) which said that, given that there was disagreement between adult and limited suffragists, the WLL should agree to differ, leaving women:
free to agitate the question on whatever lines appear to them best, but reaffirms the necessity for the recognition of the equality of men and women as citizens and the direct Labour representation of women in Parliament and on all local bodies.[20]
When it came to wages boards, however, no such room for manoeuvre existed. Mary Macarthur’s position was heavily defeated, leaving the WLL committed to Margaret MacDonald’s licensing plan. Since the first of her Labour Leader articles had appeared the day before she could justifiably feel pleased with the outcome. As time went on, however, and it became clear that licensing was not going to be the way forward, she became more and more entrenched in her views. In 1908 Mary Macarthur resigned temporarily from the WLL executive. An anti-sweating exhibition which the WLL had been proposing to mount did not take place, probably because the scale and now personal nature of the disagreement made it impossible.
Clementina Black’s absence from the WIC did not last for long, and when she returned it was to more controversy. Margaret was already considering resigning, though Ramsay wrote to her that ‘I always feel that to talk of resignation as a reason why one’s opponents should not do something or another is objectionable.’[21] At this stage Margaret remained, but by July 1910 relationships had deteriorated so badly that the organisation had become a battleground. Eventually differences over the treatment of the report on married women’s work,[22] combined with proposed changes to the WIC’s structures, gave Margaret the opportunity she had perhaps been looking for and she resigned. Almost all of the considerable number of WLL women who were also members left with her, including Margaret Bondfield, Mary Fenton Macpherson, Mary Middleton and the WLL’s treasurer, Minnie Nodin. Later the breach seems to have been healed to some extent, and in terms of the WLL was overtaken by other events, but it remained a source of sadness to Margaret for the rest of her life.
The Royal Commission on the Poor Law would eventually produce both a majority and a minority report, but it would take four years to do so and Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill were not prepared to wait. They began to bring in the kind of legislation the trade unions and the Labour Party had been calling for for years. For Labour MPs this posed challenges; they could hardly be seen to oppose the new bills, but few of them went anywhere near as far as most of them would have liked. On the other hand, taken together, the proposals effectively began to bypass the antiquated Poor Law provisions and to introduce the idea, however hesitantly, of collectivist state responsibility for the welfare of citizens.
The first measure was the Old Age Pensions Act, which had been promised before Campbell-Bannerman’s demise but was now enacted. Although revolutionary in its way, it fell well short of a comprehensive solution to the problem. Pensions were only to be available from the age of 70 and were to be means tested. They were also hedged about with criteria and caveats. However, they were available to women as well as men, were funded centrally and, crucially, were not contributory. Ramsay MacDonald believed that ‘Governments are not afraid of Socialist speeches; they are very much afraid of successful criticism in details’,[23] and it was in this spirit that the PLP approached the debate. But applied to one piece of legislation after another it tended to leave Labour looking more like the left wing of the Liberal Party than a political player in its own right. ILP members, in particular, became angry and disillusioned. They thought that, given the Liberal government’s huge majority, it would do the PLP no harm at all to take a properly socialist line and oppose legislation on that basis. In 1908 Ben Tillett, who had been one of the leaders of the 1889 dock strike and was now moving towards Marxism and the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), published a pamphlet called Is the Parliamentary Labour Party a Failure? To his mind the answer was a resounding affirmative, a view at least partly influenced by visits to Australia where Labour was perceived as having had more success. Tillett disliked Hardie, Henderson and Ramsay MacDonald and considered many members of the PLP to be of average quality at best. He accused the leaders of having ‘stumped the country, subservient to the Nonconformist-Temperance-Liberal Party ignoring the great tragedy of starvation as represented by the millions unable to find work or food’.[24] Given that Hardie regarded the unemployed as his special concern, ultimately even above female suffrage, this was rather unfair, but Tillett was not alone. Victor Grayson also attacked the leadership over unemployment, and in November 1908 even refused to appear on a platform with Hardie at Holborn Town Hall. Philip Snowden and Katharine Bruce Glasier were shouted down at a meeting in Liverpool by an audience described by her husband as ‘anarchists, SDP-ers, secularists, Clarionettes and Graysonites’.[25] He reflected in his diary: ‘Egotism, mere self-assertion, disloyalty rampant. Its main motive is individualist – the hope of getting. Are we feeding wolves? I wonder … I wonder ….’[26]
Matters came to a head in Edinburgh in April 1909 when the wolves gathered for the ILP conference. It was a very bad-tempered affair on all sides, although at points the leadership’s groundwork beforehand seemed to be paying off. Delegates agreed by a huge margin that the ILP should remain affiliated to the Labour Party. They then agreed that ILP branches should not be allowed to run candidates without ILP and Labour Party support. Ramsay MacDonald was coming to the end of his three-year term as chairman and delegates gave a good reception to his valedictory speech. He, Hardie, Snowden and Bruce Glasier were all re-elected to the National Administrative Council (NAC), despite Bruce Glasier having resigned as editor of the Labour Leader in something of a huff. But then things started to go wrong. Conference effectively expressed approval of Victor Grayson’s action in refusing to appear with Hardie in Holborn. The leadership was outraged. Overnight there were consultations and the following morning Hardie, MacDonald, Snowden and Bruce Glasier all resigned from the NAC to which they had just been re-elected. Appalled delegates begged them to stay and passed a resolution expressing ‘emphatic confidence, personal and political’[27] in the four. They even reversed their decision on Grayson but it made no difference. The ILP’s drift away from the Labour Party was beginning to accelerate.
A couple of weeks later the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, introduced what would become known as the ‘People’s Budget’. It was, in fact, not quite as radical as he would have liked people to believe, but it was more than radical enough for the Conservative Party, the House of Lords and even some sections of the Liberal Party. It was effectively the first significant attempt by a British government to use the taxation system to redistribute wealth, and it caused a storm of protest. It included a land tax, a supertax on higher incomes, and higher death duties which were to fund welfare reforms including a state insurance system for workers. Employers of domestic servants were horrified to find that they would be required to buy national insurance stamps for their skivvies, and landowners were, for the first time, to be compelled to contribute to the national purse. Introducing it, Lloyd George said, ‘This is a war Budget. It is for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness.’[28]
The House of Lords refused to pass the budget on the grounds that almost none of it had been in the Liberal manifesto in 1906. Asquith and Lloyd George maintained that it did not need to have been, and that democratically elected governments had the right to govern as they saw fit, with or without the House of Lords. The inevitable result of the clash was a general election in which the 60 per cent of men who could vote were invited to decide who governed Britain. The election was to take place in January 1910, but at the end of 1909 the House of Lords dealt Labour a blow at least as serious as the Taff Vale judgment, and with even more far-reaching consequences.
The originator of the action was Walter Osborne, a railwayman, trade unionist and Liberal. His union, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (ASRS), had moved the resolution at the TUC which had led to the founding of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), but Osborne, a former Marxist, was now aggressively opposed to socialism. He particularly objected to the fact that the union imposed an extra membership levy which it gave to the Labour Party. In 1909 he sued his union to get this political levy stopped, and on 21 December the House of Lords duly obliged. It ruled that trade unions could not levy money for political purposes, and that they could not hand such monies over to the Labour Party. This effectively wiped out the Labour Party’s funding stream and prevented the affiliated unions from underwriting Labour’s election campaigns or organisation. It was impossible not to suspect that the Lords were acting from political malice given their opposition to what many of them regarded as a ‘socialistic’ budget. Even the Liberal home secretary, Winston Churchill, normally no friend to the trade union cause, later observed that:
It is not good for trade unions that they should be brought in contact with the courts, and it is not good for the courts … where class issues are involved, and where party issues are involved, it is impossible to pretend that the courts command the same degree of general confidence. On the contrary, they do not, and a very large number of our population have been led to the opinion that they are, unconsciously, no doubt, biased.[29]
In the short term, however, nothing could be done to reverse the decision. Labour now faced a general election with the remnants of the Gladstone–MacDonald pact on seats still in place, but without the resources to back it up. Both parties were going to fight the January 1910 election on much the same ground, with only the Conservatives defending the House of Lords’ position. If the Liberals could replicate their 1906 success and at the same time force Labour back from its 1906 gains, they would have a free hand to deal with the House of Lords and implement the People’s Budget.