www.tpuc.org - The Peoples United Collective -

Sandie Seward

The Labour Party was founded in 1900. For the first few years it was known as the Labour Representation Committee; but at the General Election of 1906 it secured the return of 29 M.P.'s and it's posistion securely established, adopted it's present name. Since then it has been through many changes of fortune; but from 1918 onwards up to it's resounding victory in 1945 it has been continuously the only serious rival to the Conservative Party. There have been two previous Labour Governments, in 1924 and from 1929 to 1931, though neither had behind it a clear majority in the House of Commons or was able to set seriously about carrying through the Socialist policy for which the Party stands.

The Forerunners.

Socialism, which is the Labour Party's political faith, originated in the early years of the Nineteenth Century, mainly as a protest against the intolerable conditions of living which accompanied the Industrial Revolution. That revolution in men's power of producing wealth, instead of bringing about a rapid advance in wealth and health for the common people, led, under the spur of the profit motive and of intense competition between the rising capitalists, to ruthlessly cruel overwork in the new factories, especially for women and children, to the rapid growth of ugly and insanitary factory towns, and to a poor law system of savage inhumanity which bore hardly on the unemployed, the sick, and the aged, as well as on agricultrural workers, who were suffering from the effects of the enclosures and from the decline of village industries.
These conditions provoked th mass revolts of the workers in the first half of the 19th Century. Trade Unions of miners and factory workers grew in strength, and the Socialist and Co-operative ideas of Robert Owen, a great cotton mill employer who preached the establishment of a "New Moral World" controlled by the common people gained a ready hearing. A great wave of Trade Unionism reached it's it's height in 1834, but was beaten back by government repression, best remembered by the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were transported to a penal colony for attempting to organise the agriculteral workers.

(Part Two to follow soon)

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Regards..........Sandie.
Just because your're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.