The Labour Party's origins lie in the late 19th century numeric increase of the urban proletariat and the extension of the franchise to working-class males, when it became apparent that there was a need for a political party to represent the interests and needs of those groups see, for instance, the 1899 Lyons vs. Wilkins judgement, which limited certain types of picketing. Some members of the trade union movement became interested in moving into the political field, and after the extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1885, the Liberal Party endorsed some trade-union sponsored candidates. In addition, several small socialist groups had formed around this time with the intention of linking the movement to actual political policies. Among these were the Independent Labour Party, the intellectual and largely middle-class Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation and the Scottish Labour Party.

In 1899 a Doncaster member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, Thomas R. Steels, proposed in his union branch that the Trade Union Congress call a special conference to bring together all the left-wing organisations and form them into a single body which would sponsor Parliamentary candidates. The motion was passed at all stages by the TUC, and this special conference was held at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, London on February 27-28, 1900. The meeting was attended by a broad spectrum of working-class and left-wing organisations; trade unions representing about one third of the membership of the TUC delegates.

The Conference created an association called the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), meant to coordinate attempts to support MPs, MPs sponsored by trade unions and representing the working-class population. It had no single leader. In the absence of one, the Independent Labour Party nominee Ramsay MacDonald was elected as Secretary. He had the difficult task of keeping the various strands of opinions in the LRC united. The October 1900 'Khaki election' came too soon for the new party to effectively campaign. Only 15 candidatures were sponsored, but two were successful: Keir Hardie in Merthyr Tydfil and Richard Bell in Derby.

Support for the LBC was boosted by the 1901 Taff Vale Case, a dispute between strikers and a railway company that ended with the union ordered to pay £23,000 damages for a strike. The judgement effectively made strikes illegal since employers could recoup the cost of lost business from the unions. The apparent acquiescence of the Conservative government of Arthur Balfour to industrial and business interests (traditionally the allies of the Liberal Party in opposition to the Conservative's landed interests) intensified support for the LRC against a government that appeared to have little concern for the industrial proletariat and its problems. The LRC won two by-elections in 1902–1903.


In the 1906 election, the LRC won 29 seats — helped by the secret 1903 pact between Ramsay Macdonald and Liberal Chief Whip Herbert Gladstone, which aimed at avoiding Labour/Liberal contests in the interest of removing the Conservatives from office.

In their first meeting after the election, the group's Members of Parliament decided adopt the name "The Labour Party" (February 15, 1906). James Keir Hardie, who had taken a leading role in getting the party established, was elected as Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (in effect, the Leader), although only by one vote over David Shackleton after several ballots. In the party's early years, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) provided much of its activist base as the party did not have an individual membership until 1918 and operated as a conglomerate of affiliated bodies until that date. The Fabian Society provided much of the intellectual stimulus for the party. One of the first acts of the new Liberal government was to reverse the Taff Vale judgement.

The recession of 1908-09 and subsequent rise in unemployment led to increased industrial unrest and desire for radical change among the working class led to increasing support for syndicalism and for change through parliament. In the two 1910 elections, Labour gained 40 and then 42 seats. Support grew further for Labour during the 1910–1914 period along with an unprecedented level of industrial action with Seamen, rail workers, cotton workers, coal miners, dockers and many other groups all organising strikes and with many sympathy strikes also occurring. This was no doubt helped by the sometimes heavy-handed measures of the Liberal government (e.g., Winston Churchill's sending troops to the Rhondda valley in 1910 against coal miners, with some fatalities resulting).

During the First World War the Labour Party split between supporters and opponents of the conflict and opposition within the party to the war grew as time went on. Ramsay MacDonald, a notable anti-war campaigner, resigned as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party and Arthur Henderson became the main figure of authority within the Party and was soon accepted into H. H. Asquith's War Cabinet.

Despite mainstream Labour Party's support for the Coalition, the Independent Labour Party was instrumental in opposing mobilisation through organisations such as the Non-Conscription Fellowship and a Labour Party affiliate, the British Socialist Party organised a number of unofficial strikes.

Arthur Henderson resigned from the Cabinet in 1917 amidst calls for Party unity. The growth in Labour's local activist base and organisation was reflected in the elections following the War, with the co-operative movement now providing its own resources to the Co-operative Party after the armistice. The Co-operative Party later reached an electoral agreement with the Labour Party.

The Liberal Party split — between supporters of leader David Lloyd George and former leader H. H. Asquith allowed the Labour Party to co-opt some of the Liberals' support, and by the 1922 general election Labour had supplanted the Liberal Party as the second party in the United Kingdom and as the official opposition to the Conservatives.

Labour's main electoral bases resided in the industrial areas of Northern England, the Midlands, Scotland and Wales. Because of the concentrated geographical nature of Labour's support, industrial downturns tended to hit Labour voters directly. Anecdotal evidence suggests that party membership was often working-class but also included many middle-class radicals, former liberals and socialists. Accordingly, the more middle-class branches in London and the South of England tended to be more left-wing and radical than those in the primary industrial areas.

The election of May 1929 left the Labour Party for the first time as the largest grouping in the House of Commons with 37.1% of the popular vote (actually slightly less than the Conservatives and 287 seats, although still reliant on Liberal support to form a minority government.

Soon after the election there was a worldwide collapse in share values that was the forerunner of the Great Depression. After consultation with King George V, Ramsey MacDonald and other Labour MP's including most cabinet ministers entered into a coalition with most of the Conservatives and Liberals in what was known as the National Government. Ramsey MacDonald remained Prime Minister but was expelled from the Labour Party along with many others who joined in the new government. Ramsey MacDonald sought re-election in 1931 and created a new National Labour party, made up of those Labour ministers and other Labour MP's who accepted the coalition.

When Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister after the defeat at Dunkirk in 1940, incoming Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided that it was important to bring the other main parties into the government and have a Wartime Coalition similar to that in the First World War, Clement Attlee became Deputy Prime Minister for the remainder of the duration of the War in Europe although the Coalition broke up after Nazi Germany was defeated while the Allies were still fighting the Japanese.

With the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, Labour resolved not to repeat the Liberals' error of 1918, and withdrew from the government to contest the subsequent general election (July 5) in opposition to Churchill's Conservatives. Surprising many observers (especially overseas), Labour won a landslide majority, reflecting voters' perception of it as the party most able to guide the country through the early years of peace.

Clement Attlee's government was one of the most radical British governments of the 20th century. It presided over a policy of selective nationalisation (the Bank of England, coal, electricity, gas, the railways and iron & steel). It developed the "cradle to grave" welfare state under health minister Aneurin Bevan. And to this day the party still considers the creation in 1948 of Britain's tax-funded National Health Service its proudest achievement.

With the Cold War under way, Attlee's government secretly decided to proceed with the development of Britain's nuclear deterrent, in opposition to the pacifist and anti-nuclear stances of a large element inside the Labour Party. Defence became one of the divisive issues for Labour itself, especially defence spending (which reached 10% of GDP in 1950 during the Korean War). Aneurin Bevan eventually left the government over this issue and the introduction of prescription charges which Harold Wilson ((President of the Board of Trade) also resigned over. The government also faced a fuel crisis and a balance of payments crisis in 1947. Labour narrowly lost the October 1951 election to the Conservatives (in a coalition with the National Liberals, despite their receiving a larger share of the popular vote and in fact their highest vote ever numerically, in terms of the percentage of the popular vote and in terms of those eligible to vote, it was one of the highest percentages eligible to vote to vote for one party in a General Election in British history.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the party was split between moderate modernisers led by Hugh Gaitskell (associated with the main trade unions), and the more radical socialist elements within the party. This split, and the popularity of the Conservative governments of the period (which themselves had felt obliged to preserve most of the changes made by the Attlee government and build on many of these), kept the party out of power for thirteen years although they still got a substantial vote in 1955 comparable to their 1950 vote but the 1959 General Election saw Labour returning almost to their lower levels of support of the 1930's.


A downturn in the economy, along with a series of scandals in the early 1960s (the most notorious being the Profumo affair), engulfed the Conservative government by 1963. The Labour party returned to government with a wafer-thin 4 seat majority under Harold Wilson in the 1964 election, and increased their majority to 98 in 1966 election remaining in power until the 1970 election which contrary to expectations during the campaign they lost.

The 1960s Labour government had a different emphasis from its 1940s predecessor. Harold Wilson famously referred to the "white heat of technology", referring to the modernisation of British industry. This was to be achieved through the swift adoption of new technology, aided by government-funded infrastructure improvements and the creation of large high-tech public sector corporations guided by a Ministry of Technology. Economic planning through the new Department for Economic Affairs was to improve the trade balance, whilst Labour carefully targeted taxation aimed at "luxury" goods and services.

Labour had difficulty managing the economy under the "Keynesian consensus" and the international markets instinctively mistrusted the party. Events derailed much of the initial optimism, especially a currency crisis which mounted until 1967 when the government was forced into devaluation of the pound and pressure on sterling was intensified by disagreements over US foreign policy. Harold Wilson publicly supported America's engagement in Vietnam but refused to provide British assistance. This infuriated President Johnson who in response felt little obligation to support the pound. For much of the remaining Parliament the government followed stricter controls in public spending and the necessary austerity measures caused consternation amongst the Party membership and the trade unions, unions which by this time were gaining ever greater political power.

Labour in the 1960s made major steps in introducing the permissive society notably the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion, and the abolition of the death penalty (except for a small number of offences - notably High Treason) and various legislation addressing race relations and racial discrimination. Another significant achievement was the creation of the Open University. In Wilson's defence, his supporters also emphasise the easing of means testing for non-contributory welfare benefits, the linking of pensions to earnings, and the provision of industrial-injury benefits.

The aftermath of the 1979 election defeat saw a period of bitter internal rivalry in the Labour Party which had become increasingly divided between the ever more dominant left wingers under Michael Foot and Tony Benn (whose supporters dominated the party organisation at the grassroots level), and right wingers under Denis Healey.

The Thatcher government was determined not to be deflected from its agenda as the Heath government had been, a deflationary budget in 1980 led to substantial cuts in welfare spending and an initial short-term sharp rise in unemployment. The Conservatives reduced or eliminated state assistance for struggling private industries, leading to large redundancies (layoffs) in many regions of the country notably in Labour's heartlands. However, Conservative legislation extending the right for residents to buy council houses from the state proved very attractive to many Labour voters. Labour had previously suggested this idea in their 1970 election manifesto, but had never acted on it.

The election of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) veteran Michael Foot to the leadership disturbed many Atlanticists in the Party. Other changes increased their concern; the constituencies were given the ability to easily deselect sitting MPs, and a new voting system in leadership elections was introduced that gave party activists and affiliated trade unions a vote in different parts of an electoral college. It led to the decision by the Gang of Four (former Labour cabinet ministers) on January 26, 1981, to issue the 'Limehouse Declaration', and to form the Social Democratic Party. The departure of even more members from the centre and right further swung the party to the left, but not quite enough to allow Tony Benn to be elected as Deputy Leader when he challenged for the job at the September 1981 party conference.


Led by an increasingly unpopular Michael Foot, the party went into the 1983 general election with a manifesto dominated by the politics of the party's far-left wing. The manifesto contained pledges for abolition of the House of Lords, unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Community, withdrawal from NATO and the most radical and extensive nationalisation agenda that Labour had ever stood on including nationalisation of industry and banks. The Bennites were in the ascendency and there was very little that moderates could do to resist or moderate the manifesto, many also hoped that a landslide defeat would discredit Michael Foot and the hard left of the party. Labour MP and former minister Gerald Kaufman famously described the 1983 election manifesto as "the longest suicide note in history". The Conservatives considered the 1983 Labour manifesto as being so unpopular that they actually printed a number of copies of it to distribute it for free and indeed Labour was possibly only saved from far more substantial collapse by tactical voting by Alliance supporters and Conservative supporters worried by the effects of the possible scale of the Conservative majority in removing checks (notably Conservative cabinet minister Francis Pym's statements during the campaign that big majorities caused bad government) on the government

Much of the press attacked both the Labour party's manifesto and its style of campaigning, which tended to rely upon public meetings and canvassing rather than media (although given that Michael Foot was so unpopular a low profile probably lessened Labour's collapse). By contrast, the Conservatives ran a professional campaign which played on the voters' fears of a repeat of the Winter of Discontent. To add to this, the Thatcher government's popularity rose sharply on a wave of patriotic feeling following victory in the Falklands War.

After a landslide defeat at the 1983 election, Michael Foot immediately resigned and was replaced by Neil Kinnock, initially considered a firebrand left-winger, he proved to be more pragmatic than Foot and progressively moved the party to the centre; banning left-wing groups such as the Militant Tendency and reversing party policy on EEC membership and withdrawal from NATO, bringing in Peter Mandelson as Director of Communications Peter Mandelson to modernise the party's image at this time and embarking on a policy review that reported back in 1985 although the miners strike in 1983 through to 1984 delayed Labour's bid to revive their fortunes.

At the 1987 general election, the party was again defeated in a landslide, but had at least re-established itself as the clear challengers to the Conservatives and gained 20 seats reducing the Conservative majority to 102 from 143 in 1983 despite a sharp rise in turnout. Challenged for the leadership by Tony Benn in 1988, Neil Kinnock easily retained the leadership claiming a mandate for his reforms of the party. Re-organisation resulted in the dissolution of the Labour Party Young Socialists, which was thought to be harbouring entryist Militant groups. It also resulted in a more centralised communication structure, enabling a greater degree of flexibility for the leadership to determine policy, react to events, and direct resources.

During this time the Labour Party emphasised the abandonment of its links to high taxation and old-style nationalisation, which aimed to show that the party was moving away from the left of the political spectrum and towards the centre. It also became actively pro-European, supporting further moves to European integration.

"New Labour" is an alternative branding for the Labour Party dating from a conference slogan first used by the Labour Party in 1994 which was later seen in a draft manifesto published by the party in 1996, called New Labour, New Life For Britain and presented by Labour as being the brand of the new reformed party that had in 1995 ditched Clause IV and reduced the Trade Union vote in the electoral college used to elect the leader and deputy leader to have equal weighting with individual other parts of the electoral college.

Peter Mandelson was a senior figure in this process, and exercised a great deal of authority in the party following the death of John Smith and the subsequent election of Tony Blair as party leader.

The name is primarily used by the party itself in its literature but is also sometimes used by political commentators and the wider media; it was also the basis of a Conservative Party poster campaign of 1997, headlined "New Labour, New Danger". The rise of the name coincided with a rightwards shift of the British political spectrum; for Labour, this was a continuation of the trend that had begun under the leadership of Neil Kinnock. "Old Labour" is sometimes used by commentators to describe the older, more left-wing members of the party, or those with strong Trade Union connections.

Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell are most commonly cited as the creators and architects of "New Labour". They were among the most prominent advocates of the shift in European social democracy during the 1990s, known as the "Third Way". The use of "New" echoes slogans in American politics, particularly those of the Democratic Party, such as Roosevelt's New Deal (which indeed Labour has used as the name for its Welfare to Work programmes since 1997), Kennedy's New Frontier and Clinton's New Covenant and in Canada with the founding of the left-leaning New Democratic Party in 1961.

The "modernisation" of Labour party policy and the unpopularity of John Major's Conservative government greatly increased Labour's appeal to "middle England". The party was concerned not to put off potential voters who had previously supported the Conservatives, and pledged to keep to the spending plans of the previous government, and not to increase the basic rate of income tax. After being unexpectedly defeated for a fourth consecutive time in the 1992 election, the party won the 1997 election with a landslide majority of 179. Following a second and third election victory in the 2001 election and the 2005 election, the name has diminished in significance. "New Labour" as a name has no official status but remains in common use to distinguish modernisers from those holding to more traditional positions who normally are referred to as "Old Labour".

New Labour (as a series of values) is often characterised as a belief in 'no rights without responsibilities' -- that a citizen should recognise that one possesses responsibilities linked with any legal rights they hold. The concept of a 'stakeholder society' is quite prominent in New Labour thinking. As noted above, New Labour thought also embraces the notion of the "Third Way", although critics point to the lack of any concise statement of its meaning. The term "Third Way" has since fallen from use.

The name "New Labour" has also been widely satirised. Critics associate the new name with an unprecedented use of 'spin doctoring' in the party's relationship with media. The Conservative Party attempted to tarnish the new Labour tag during the 1997 election campaign using the slogan 'New Labour, New Danger'. After Gordon Brown's budgets became more and more Keynesian, Private Eye magazine began to call the party 'New' Labour. Oddly, it continues to do so even when discussing privatisation or pro free-market Labour initiatives (a frequent theme, especially in "Doing the Rounds", the medical column, and "In the Back", the investigative section). Private Eye also uses the term when mentioning the more authoritarian aspects of Labour policy; in this context the ironic inverted commas would normally be more appropriate around Labour rather than New.

In left-wing circles, the name "New Labour" or Neo Labour is used pejoratively to refer to the perceived domination of the Labour Party by its right-wing. Indeed, some socialists argue that Labour has become so fond of neo-liberal policies that it is Thatcherite rather than democratic socialist. Whilst in theory the Labour Party has remained a social democratic organisation, there remain unresolved questions regarding the centralised and highly personalised style of Tony Blair's leadership. Some critics see this as a sign of creeping presidentialism. There also appears to be a tendency to create policy "on the hoof", to coincide with opinions expressed in the media and newspapers. Former Shadow Cabinet member Bryan Gould characterised the resulting policy confusion as a "soufflé of good intentions."