On 1 March 2014, the Labour party will hold a special conference on proposed internal reforms. This is an ideal time to reflect on previous organisational changes, and the one that perhaps made the greatest difference to British history was that undertaken by Arthur Henderson during the first world war.
Henderson was born into a working-class family in Glasgow. A committed Methodist, he threw himself into trade union activity with the Friendly Society of Iron Founders, as it was known until 1920 (when it merged into the National Union of Foundry Workers). He was party leader three times: in 1908-10, when the chairmanship of the party rotated; in 1914-17 after Ramsay MacDonald’s pacifism led him to resign due to the first world war; and in 1931-2, after MacDonald abandoned Labour to form the national government. He was home secretary in the first Labour government of 1924, and foreign secretary in the second, from 1929-31. For his work as president of the Worldwide Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which opened in 1932, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934.
Henderson joined the wartime coalition then headed by Herbert Asquith, in May 1915, as president of the Board of Education. However, in 1917, with David Lloyd George now prime minister, and Henderson a member of his small war cabinet, an issue arose over Henderson’s attendance at the international socialist conference in Stockholm. Lloyd George did not want him to attend; Henderson was caught between his view that he should attend as a Labour politician, and the war cabinet view that he should not. The war cabinet discussed the issue in Henderson’s absence, keeping him waiting outside ‘on the doormat’.
This prompted Henderson’s resignation from the government, but it also provided a great opportunity. With more time he threw himself into organisational reform of the Labour party. His proposal was, as quoted in his biography, written by Chris Wrigley: ‘to maintain the existing political federation consisting of trade unions, socialist bodies and cooperative societies … but to graft on to it … a form of constituency organisation linked up with the local parties or trades councils.’ Henderson concentrated his energies on his role as Labour party secretary to make this vision a reality. The idea was to have a party machine in as many constituencies as possible, in order to support a larger number of Labour candidates.
Henderson’s work meant that, in the 1918 general election, the Labour party was able to run 388 candidates. It had never run more than 78 candidates before then. The Fourth Reform Act of 1918, which gave the vote to all men over the age of 21, and many women over the age of 30, meant that the 1918 electorate of around 21 million was nearly treble that which voted in the previous general election of December 1910. But for Labour to capitalise on this larger electorate, it needed organisation across the country. Henderson provided it.
This is not to say that Henderson was not subject to criticism. Lenin was no fan of British parliamentary socialism. In his Left Wing Communism-An Infantile Disorder of May 1920, he wrote: ‘I want to support Henderson in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man … the impending establishment of a government of the Hendersons will prove that I am right …’ In fact, the ‘government of the Hendersons’ – made possible by Henderson’s party reforms – established Labour as one of the two main parties in British politics.
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Nick Thomas-Symonds is the author of Attlee: A Life in Politics. He writes the Labour history column for Progress and tweets @NThomasSymonds
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