A Different Outcome on Farringdon Street

[OwenM]

In 1900 a conference was organised by the TUC at Congregational Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street in London involving several other left-wing organisations which proceeded to create the Labour Representation Committee - the forerunner to the Labour Party.
The main issue up for debate at the conference was on the setup of the organisation. The compromise position - where both the trade unions and the likes of the ILP and SDF could affiliate (initially the only form of membership) was probably always the most likely. But what if it had instead become simply a coalition of political parties - or, far more likely, only allowed union affiliation?
It seems likely that in either case the other groups would walk out and in essence set up the other. The union option might be more strongly allied to the Liberals than Labour was in OTL, at least until Taff Vale - if the Liberals handle that better than OTL as a result, could that avert the strange demise of Liberal England, or would there just be a stronger Lib-Lab group to break away? Meanwhile the socialist group would probably remain a fairly minor party - potentially recreating the Labour Party in a post Taff Vale split, though possibly on different terms.
Then there's the question of how this might affect co-operative societies' political aspirations......
Thoughts?

 

[Alex Richards]

I suspect that a Labour party that's more explicitly Union-based would find it harder to displace the Co-operatives at the municipal level. Whether for Long Eaton (as the example I know well) this means that the Co-op get a revival in the 1910-14 period, or perhaps we some sort of Lib-Lab pact surviving for longer means they're in a position to pick up the pieces after WWI rather than it being essentially a reset on the political map.

 

[Mumby]

In 1900 a conference was organised by the TUC at Congregational Memorial Hall on Farringdon Street in London involving several other left-wing organisations which proceeded to create the Labour Representation Committee - the forerunner to the Labour Party.
The main issue up for debate at the conference was on the setup of the organisation. The compromise position - where both the trade unions and the likes of the ILP and SDF could affiliate (initially the only form of membership) was probably always the most likely. But what if it had instead become simply a coalition of political parties - or, far more likely, only allowed union affiliation?
It seems likely that in either case the other groups would walk out and in essence set up the other. The union option might be more strongly allied to the Liberals than Labour was in OTL, at least until Taff Vale - if the Liberals handle that better than OTL as a result, could that avert the strange demise of Liberal England, or would there just be a stronger Lib-Lab group to break away? Meanwhile the socialist group would probably remain a fairly minor party - potentially recreating the Labour Party in a post Taff Vale split, though possibly on different terms.
Then there's the question of how this might affect co-operative societies' political aspirations......
Thoughts?

I can see the co-operative societies as being more aligned perhaps with the union-based Worker's Party (a placeholder name to differentiate it from the OTL Labour Party), they weren't conceived as socialist from the beginning and might be put off by a more explicitly ideological and possibly Marxian Socialist Party.

 

[Uhura's Mazda]

And ILP-SDF coalition would be interesting - on the one hand, the SDF might stick around longer past 1907 if they had more influence over the group, but on the other hand, Hyndman is still a dick and the ILP is still more electorally successful than the SDF, so it's not going to see any major success and will splinter in all probability.

I do, however, think that it's fairly inevitable that the ILP and the unions will eventually put differences aside and work together. FPTP makes it very difficult to sustain two different electoral parties of similar ideological positions, especially when their entire pitch is that the working class should stand together in solidarity to stop their brothers dying of emphysema.

 

[RyanF]

So we might have a Union Representation Committee possibly having a pact with the Liberals, the Independent Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Federation all competing for elections in the 1900s?

FPTP would make cooperation inevitable, as inevitable as a fall-out between the unions and the Liberals. What interests me is what might happen to the ILP and the SDF in the interim; cooperation between the two might be difficult, and then there's the possibility of splinters from the Scottish and London branches of the latter in protest, as happened OTL with the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

When the need for cooperation is finally hammered home after a disappointing GE we might still not see any Labour Party as we know it, instead we might see distinct organisations remain but not competing against each other in elections - this Labour Front maybe consisting of the hypothetical union party previously allied with the Liberals, the ILP, the SDF, the Co-operatives, perhaps the Fabians, and maybe even having candidates in Ireland. Perhaps this later organisation and experience of competing against each other discourages the development of a unified party and instead we see the Front continue with a commitment to electoral reform.