Joining Labour

On the last day of March 1919 the Staffordshire Sentinel reported that the annual general meeting of the Newcastle-under-Lyme Liberal Club had passed a resolution of absolute confidence in their member of parliament. Twelve days later, the day after Asquith's speech at the Connaught Rooms, Wedgwood applied to join the ILP branch in Hanley (one of the towns in his constituency). His erstwhile Liberal supporters felt betrayed and publicly called upon him to resign his seat. He refused and a bitter exchange of newspaper letters followed. The Liberals were particularly annoyed that Wedgwood had gone not to a moderate Labour group like the Fabians, but to ‘that bunch of pacifist ILP-ers at Hanley’. They should not have been surprised. The Hanley branch had recently been founded by Outhwaite and his followers, Helen Wedgwood was already a member and there was no local branch of the Fabians, even if Wedgwood had wished to join one. The Newcastle Labour party was only a few months old and was tiny, while the Hanley Labour party, the only sizeable constituency party in the area, was dominated by trade unionists. As the Sentinel noted, Wedgwood would have more freedom of action within a newly formed group of like-minded people. He was also in agreement with ILP policies towards the big issues of the day – crucially, over peace terms and the Allies’ attitude towards Russia, and it was this, as well as the Land Tax issue, that Helen Wedgwood thought had persuaded her father to join the ILP. It must also have helped that the Labour party, some of whose leaders were keen to broaden its electoral appeal by recruiting middle-class Liberal politicians, had just seen almost all its own high-profile and loquacious MPs lose their seats because of their less than enthusiastic attitude to the war. For Wedgwood this was too good an opportunity to miss, and indeed from the autumn of 1919 until November 1922 he was the only middle-class ex-Liberal who was prominent on the Labour benches.

This was the period when Labour established itself as Britain's main opposition party as large numbers of working-class voters and Liberal-party activists transferred their loyalty. Many local Liberal parties broke up or defected en masse.