The Great Labour Unrest

This meticulously researched and carefully crafted book makes a significant contribution to the literature on the prospects for Edwardian Liberalism and for Labour as an independent force. Lewis Mates offers his study as building on and revising Duncan Tanner’s seminal work, Political Change and the Labour Party 1900–18. He also builds on Roy Gregory’s pioneering work, The Miners in British Politics 1906–14. He focuses on the Durham coalfield and in particular on the internal politics of the Durham Miners’ Association (DMA). Mates seeks to connect the experiences of miners in the pits and their families in their communities to the debates within the DMA and to electoral conflict within the coalfield. The choice of Durham is significant; there would come a time when the DMA would epitomise the visceral loyalty of many miners and their communities to the Labour Party; this identification would be represented above all by the theatre of the annual Durham Gala with Labour politicians on the balcony at the County Hotel reviewing the ranks of miners and their lodge banners. In contrast, before 1914 the Durham union was seen by many advocates of independent Labour as backward, and the DMA’s traditional Liberalism was personified by its longstanding leader, the Liberal Member for Mid Durham, John Wilson. The union’s opposition to a legislative eight-hour day and its endorsement of a sliding scale for wage determination kept the DMA apart from the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB). Only late in 1907 did the union’s lodges decisively vote to join the Federation

Economics · Labour economics · Legislature · Liberalism · Opposition (politics · Political economy · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Trade union · Unrest · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US