Britain's Cautious Revolutionaries

While Europe’s early socialists sought to smash the system, their counterparts in Britain were content to work within it.

In 1965, the great Marxist historian and radical EP Thompson wrote an essay on the “peculiarities of the English”. He did so to refute the claims of a rising generation of leftwing intellectuals for whom British history had been little more than a series of catastrophic wrong turns and failed revolutionary opportunities. By contrast, Thompson sought to bring out the importance of a minority strand of radical, dissenting politics running through English history. He also insisted on the need to study the past on its own terms, rather than measured against theoretical models of how it ‘should’ have unfolded. It is a lesson that can be applied to the history of British socialism, which is not short of its own peculiarities.

Considering that British industrialism would provide the model for the Marxist theory of socialist revolution, it is striking how slow Britain was to develop its own domestic socialist tradition. It is equally striking that when socialism did begin to put down strong roots in Britain in the half century between the 1880s and the 1930s, many of its distinctive characteristics placed Britain firmly outside the mainstream tradition of European socialism.

On the continent, socialism had been born in the shadow of the French Revolution and the failed revolutions of 1848, and long remained clandestine and persecuted. It was no accident that many European socialist leaders spent time as political émigrés in Britain, most famously Marx himself. And though the revolutionary fire gradually receded in many European socialist parties as they came within the fold of formal politics, they generally retained a doctrinal commitment to class conflict, the abolition of private property and the overthrow of both capitalism and religion.