The Labour Party is a centre-left political party in the United Kingdom, and is regarded as the principal party of the Left in England, Scotland and Wales since 1920. Labour first surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s.
It formed minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and from 1929 until 1931 and took part in the wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945 when it formed its first majority government under Clement Attlee.
Gordon Brown
Labour was also in government from 1964 to 1970 under Harold Wilson and from 1974 to 1979, first under Wilson and then James Callaghan.
The Labour Party won the 1997 general election under the leadership of Tony Blair with a majority of 179 in the House of Commons, reduced to 167 in 2001, to 66 in 2005 and in 2010 the party lost its majority becoming the second largest party in the House of Commons.
Labour is currently the leading partner in the Coalition Welsh Government and the main opposition party in the Scottish Parliament. It has 13 members in the European Parliament. The Labour Party is a member of the Party of European Socialists and the Socialist International. The party’s current leader is Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
The party grew out of the trade union movement and socialist political parties of the 19th century seeking representation for workers. It describes itself as a “democratic socialist party”.
However, since the “New Labour” project began, a larger proportion of its support has come from middle-class voters and many perceive this support as key to Labour’s electoral success since 1997.
Historically the party was broadly in favour of socialism, as set out in Clause Four of the original party constitution, and advocated socialist policies such as public ownership of key industries, government intervention in the economy, redistribution of wealth, increased rights for workers, the welfare state, publicly-funded healthcare and education.
Beginning in the late-1980s under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, and subsequently under John Smith and Tony Blair, the party moved away from socialist positions and adopted free market policies, leading many observers to describe the Labour Party as Social Democratic or Third Way, rather than democratic socialist.
Party electoral manifestos have not contained the term socialism since 1992, when the original Clause Four was abolished. The new version states:
“The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect.”
The Labour Party is a membership organisation consisting of Constituency Labour Parties, affiliated trade unions, socialist societies and the Co-operative Party, with which it has an electoral agreement. Members who are elected to parliamentary positions take part in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and European Parliamentary Labour Party (EPLP).
The party’s decision-making bodies on a national level formally include the National Executive Committee (NEC), Labour Party Conference and National Policy Forum (NPF)—although in practice the Parliamentary leadership has the final say on policy.
The 2008 Labour Party Conference was the first at which affiliated trade unions and Constituency Labour Parties did not have the right to submit motions on contemporary issues that would previously have been debated.
Labour Party conferences now include more “keynote” addresses, guest speakers and question-and-answer sessions, while specific discussion of policy now takes place in the National Policy Forum.
For many years Labour held to a policy of not allowing residents of Northern Ireland to apply for membership, instead supporting the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).
The 2003 Labour Party Conference accepted legal advice that the party could not continue to prohibit residents of the province joining, and whilst the National Executive has established a regional constituency party it has not yet agreed to contest elections there.
The party had 198,026 members on 31 December 2005 according to accounts filed with the Electoral Commission, which was down on the previous year. In that year it had an income of about £35 million (£3.7 million from membership fees) and expenditure of about £50 million, high due to that year’s general election.
As a party founded by the unions to represent the interests of working-class people, Labour’s link with the unions has always been a defining characteristic of the party. In recent years this link has come under increasing strain, with the RMT being expelled from the party in 2004 for allowing its branches in Scotland to affiliate to the left-wing Scottish Socialist Party.
Other unions have also faced calls from members to reduce financial support for the Party and seek more effective political representation for their views on privatisation, cuts and the anti-trade union laws. Unison and GMB have both threatened to withdraw funding from constituency MPs and Dave Prentis of UNISON has warned that the union will write “no more blank cheques” and is dissatisfied with “feeding the hand that bites us”.
Internationally, the Labour Party is a member of the Socialist International and the Party of European Socialists, while the party’s MEPs sit in the Socialists & Democrats group.
The Labour Party’s origins lie in the late 19th century, around which time it became apparent that there was a need for a new political party to represent the interests and needs of the urban proletariat, a demographic which had increased in number and had recently been given franchise. Some members of the trades union movement became interested in moving into the political field, and after further extensions of the voting franchise in 1867 and 1885, the Liberal Party endorsed some trade-union sponsored candidates.
In addition, several small socialist groups had formed around this time, with the intention of linking the movement to political policies. Among these were the Independent Labour Party, the intellectual and largely middle-class Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation and the Scottish Labour Party.
In the 1895 general election, the Independent Labour Party put up 28 candidates but won only 44,325 votes. Keir Hardie, the leader of the party, believed that to obtain success in parliamentary elections, it would be necessary to join with other left-wing groups.
