Welsh Journals

CHARLES STANTON AND THE LIMITS TO 'PATRIOTIC' LABOUR* CENTRAL to the debates on the rise of Labour are conflicting interpretations of the relationship between structure and agency. Those historians who view the changes to British politics wrought by the First World War as being crucial in Labour's triumph over the Liberal Party tend to emphasize political change rather than structural factors. Therefore, the decline of the Liberal Party is explained in terms of the essentially illiberal measures needed to win the war as undermining the political purchase of the Liberal Party, and also the split in the party which the adoption of such measures caused. The Liberal Party was thus intellectually undermined and divided between the supporters of Lloyd George and those of Asquith and was thereby ill-equipped to contest for power after 1916. The resulting vacuum at the centre of British politics was filled by the Labour Party. From this viewpoint it is the decline of the Liberal Party that allows and accounts for the rise of Labour.1 On the other hand, structural considerations are usually key factors for those who locate the origins of the rise of Labour in the emergence of class politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The I would like to thank Dr Chris Williams and Professor Kenneth O. Morgan for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Any errors remain my own responsibility. The classic statement of this interpretation is Wilson's comment that the Liberal Party was akin to a man who had the misfortune to be killed by a runaway omnibus which mounted the pavement and knocked him down: T. Wilson, The Downfall of the Liberal Party, 1914-35 (London, 1966), pp. 18-19; for a more recent interpretation of the Liberal and Labour parties in the regions which generally stresses the strength of the progressive alliance before the war, see D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party 1900-1918 (Cambridge, 1990). For a recent interpretation of these debates, see Keith Layboum, 'The rise of Labour and the decline of Liberalism: The state of the debate', History, Vol. 80, No. 259 (June 1995), pp. 207-26.