Description
This book is a study of the Labour Party in its formative years, 1910-1924. In it I have attempted to do three things: to explain the decline of the Liberal Party and its supersession by the Labour Party, to examine the character of the Labour Party by looking at it as a mass party, and to look at the part played by ideology and class consciousness in its growth. I have also suggested that the ambitions of the earlier Labour leaders to create an organisation that would dominate the social as well as the political lives of the working class largely failed. So far as possible, I have used local records and looked at the growth of the Labour Party in the country. Though I have considered parliamentary development I believe that an excessive concentration upon parliamentary politics is misleading and distorts what was actually happening. I have argued that in any case particular policies, and even socialism as a doctrine, were not of first importance in the Labour Party's growth.
