It is now necessary to frame the ideological debates and conflicts taking place within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialism in East London in the context of the ambiguous and sometimes quixotic relationships formed between the left and the Irish Catholic and Jewish populations. The socialist movement(s) of the period demarcated ideological space through a number of ethnically based oppositions. In particular, a contrast was stressed between a peaceful native socialist tradition on the one hand and a supposed propensity on the other for Irish or Jewish radical organisations to resort to violence to achieve political gains. The chapter locates the complex interplay present in socialist and trade union discourses on both the Jewish and Catholic communities within a wider radical narrative of national and international victims and villains; diasporic groups could find themselves simultaneously acting out both roles.

Insular or International Socialism? Ideological Interactions between the Domestic Left and Foreign Émigrés

The fractious organisations that made up the radical left in the last decade of the nineteenth century were in a state of near-constant dispute with each other over ideological and tactical matters. These organisations ranged from anarchist groups through to the SDF, the Fabian Society, and the societies and trade union organisations that would coalesce into the Labour Party. These skirmishes took place at public meetings and in the columns of party organs, with groups forming, splitting, and re-forming, and with fluid memberships and loyalties. The socialist parties condemned the anarchists as ‘individualists’ and dangerous daydreamers, the SDF journal Justice belittled the Fabians both as ‘almost entirely middle class’, removed from their proletarian audience, and as ‘men of the half-educated lower middle class [who] strive to make up by conceit and impertinence for their lack of capacity, knowledge and manners’. H.M. Hyndman of the SDF was attacked for his ‘upper-class’ wardrobe, manner, and patrician attitude, and Bruce Glasier of the ILP wrote of the Social Democrats that ‘the ways of the SDF are not our ways … the SDF are more doctrinaire, more Calvinistic, more aggressively sectarian than the ILP’. Robert Blatchford criticised Keir Hardie and the Labour Leader writers as ‘Puritans, narrow, bigoted, puffed up with sour cant’, who ‘could never mix’ with his own group based around the Clarion journal.