THE Labour Party’s history is not something much discussed at Labour conferences. There are occasional nods to Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson and of course Tony Blair. 

The Labour Party constitution, written by Sidney Webb in 1918 and amended since, is usually only discussed when the leadership is trying to work out how to gather more power for itself and less for the unions and ordinary members. 

A recent exception was the period from 2010 to 2019 under the leadership of Ed Miliband and then Jeremy Corbyn, when more power was given to members and membership numbers boomed. The current leadership of Sir Keir Starmer owes a good deal to the fact that the Labour right was concerned that the left might gain control of the order of service in Labour’s broad church, as Ralph Miliband put it.

However on the first day of the Liverpool conference Pat McFadden was at the rostrum extolling the virtues of clause one of the 1918 constitution. 

This called for a political Labour Party to be established in every parliamentary constituency. McFadden’s point was that it was precisely the members of those Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) 100-plus years on that had brought Labour victory on July 4.

McFadden certainly knew but did not mention that there is more to the history than that. The 1918 decision was to set up political Labour Party organisations, CLPs, in each area.

When the Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1900 it was not a membership organisation. It comprised some trade unions, a handful of socialist societies such as the Fabians, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and, for a period, the Social Democratic Federation.

The 29 Labour, or more accurately Lib-Lab MPs, returned in 1906 relied on a parliamentary deal. Later election successes rested a lot on the activity of local branches of the ILP.

The 1918 election saw a mass, and much-belated, extension to the suffrage to include not all, but at least six million, women voters.

Webb seized on that to successfully argue that the Labour Party need to professionalise its structure. However with that came a clear focus that one of the key, if not the key, aims was to maintain a Parliamentary Labour Party through winning elections.

Webb was perfectly aware that this was not the only model out there.

Before the first world war, Labour, with its ideas of changing matters through parliamentary action, had faced strong opposition from other trends in the labour movement — syndicalists, for example — who believed that through industrial action, workers should bypass Parliament and take direct control of industry.

Webb’s words in clause four of the 1918 constitution words may sound radical. He wrote: “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

Historically, however, they were designed to address a debate in the labour movement where other ideas were much more radical still. Hence not just clause four but also clause one.

McFadden no doubt had in mind that as well as Labour’s victory in July there were also the largest number of MPs from the left outside of Labour — independent socialists and Greens — elected since the 1832 Reform Act. That is a direct challenge to clause one, suggesting that socialist politics exists not just in the parliamentary sphere but outside it as well.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.