Kate Patrick
‘The best explanation for the rise of the Labour Party is the desire of the
working class for a party of its own.’ Do you agree?
This essay will argue that the best explanation for the rise of the Labour Party was not
the active ‘desire’ of a homogenous working class for a ‘party of its own’, but rather
the structural features of the Labour Party (both ideological and organisational) that
facilitated the cross-class appeal necessary to make the Labour Party a national party.
Firstly, I will address how the franchise reforms of 1918 may appear to have
unlocked a working-class electorate, predisposed to vote along the lines of class
interest for the Labour Party. I will then contest this, using the insights of Pugh
(2002) to show that the new franchise did not systematically differ from the old
electorate in any way that would pre-dispose new voters to vote for Labour. Finally, I
will make the case that it was the mass organisational structure of the party that
allowed it to exploit the potential gains of the new mass franchise, as well as the
ideological structure that afforded the Party sufficient flexibility to appeal both
within and across classes.
For the purposes of this essay I will focus in on the period surrounding the end of the
First World War and the subsequent franchise reforms, specifically the 1918
Representation of the People Act (ROPA). I choose to do this because the central
debate pivots around the significance of the ‘franchise factor’ in the post-war
electoral growth of the Labour Party (Matthew et al., 1976). This growth manifested
in the increasing the number of candidates put up for election from 56 in December
1910 to 388 by the 1918 Coupon Election, with Labour firmly establishing itself as a
national party by winning 5.5 million votes to the Conservative’s 7.8 million (Pugh,
2002a: 161; Matthew et al., 1976: 739). However, it is important to note that, while
this growth was certainly substantial, the rise of the Labour Party did not follow one,
long continuous trajectory, but rather exhibited an ‘erratic’ pattern (Pugh, 2002b:
514).
Firstly, I will address the argument that the rise of the Labour Party is best explained
by the unleashing of working class voters with a desire for political representation.
The 1918 ROPA extended the percentage of men included on the electoral register
from just 58% to 95%, resulting in a large absolute increase in the number of working
class voters (Pugh, 2002a: 135). Moreover, the lodger requirement1 was abolished in
1918, rendering the right to vote no longer a ‘privilege purchased through
property’ (for men), and seemingly resulted not only the enfranchisement of a large
absolute number of working class men, but the disproportionate enfranchisement of
working class men (Matthew et al., 1976: 726). If the working class did in fact ‘desire
a party of its own’, and this desire thusly influenced voting habits, the expansion of
the electorate would have unlocked a vast pool of previously untapped voters
predisposed to vote for the Labour Party. The extent to which it was the new pool of
1 Only men renting rooms with an annual value of over £10 per year were entitled to vote.
, Kate Patrick
voters who boosted Labour’s electoral performance (rather than old voters defecting)
is further highlighted by the fact that the Conservatives on average benefitted more
than Labour from previous voters who had defected from the Liberal Party in 19182
(ibid: 740). Thus, Labour’s electoral gains in 1918, comparative to 1910, seem to
have been the result of the disproportionate enfranchisement of the working classes
whose ‘desire’ for political representation drove them to vote for the Labour Party.
However, Pugh has evidenced that the ‘reservoir of newly created voters’ unleashed
by ROPA was not in fact disproportionately working class, and thus if workers were
voting in line with class interests, the Labour Party should have not, all else equal,
benefitted electorally relative to the Conservatives or the Liberals (2002a: 164). Pugh
points out that the categories that were disenfranchised prior to ROPA were not
‘essentially connected with social class’ (2002a: 136). For instance, out of 4 million
disenfranchised men, 450,000 of them were middle-class bachelors, many of whom
were disqualified on the grounds that they were still living with their parents, or were
highly mobile (ibid). More importantly, the group of men disenfranchised prior to
1918 was not constant, but fluctuating over time, with 75% of those in this category
being only temporarily disqualified subject to their living arrangements at the time,
and thus many of the men who got the vote permanently in 1918 had previously been
enfranchised at some point. As such, it follows that the pool of new voters unleashed
in 1918 may not have been as disproportionately working class as Matthew et al.
(1976) suggest, and may in fact have been similar in composition to the pre-1918
franchise.
However, there is a stronger reason to believe that ROPA did not unleash a pool of
working class voters with a predisposition to vote for the Labour Party: the fact that
the working class did not possess one homogenous ‘desire’ at all. For instance,
soldiers and servants (groups disenfranchised prior to 1918), tended to have
Conservative sympathies ‘either out of deference or personal interest’ (Pugh, 2002a,
136). In addition, areas such as Birmingham, the West Midlands, the East End, and
Clydeside, all exhibited strong working class Conservatism crystallised in the ‘well-
trenched and populist’ Conservative electoral machine (Pugh, 2002a: 141). Perhaps
significantly, even MacDonald, writing just years before his election as Labour
chairman in 1911, acknowledged that ‘class interests’, in practice, reduced to nothing
more than ‘personal interests’ (1908: 135), which supports Owen’s assertion that the
rise of the Labour Party cannot be attributed to the simple ‘articulation of a pre-
existing working-class consciousness’ (2007). Thus, if ROPA did not unleash a pool
of voter pre-disposed to vote for the Labour Party, then it remains to be explained
why the Labour Party made such substantial electoral gains in the 1918 election, a
puzzle to which I will now turn.
I will argue that the mass organisational structure of the Labour Party by 1918,
especially relative to the thin structure of the Liberal Party, enabled Labour to better
2Of those who had previously voted Liberal, 25% voted Tory in 1918, while only 19% defected to Labour
(Matthew et al., 1976: 738).
