Cambridge Journals Online

Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo, eds. Labour's First Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. x + 418 pp. $49.95 cloth.

In the British parliamentary election of 1900, the nascent Labour Representation Committee (LRC), born a mere six months before from the union of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) with three small socialist bodies (the Independent Labour Party, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society), contested fifteen seats, polled two percent of the votes cast, and returned two of its candidates to a House of Commons of 670 members. In 1997, in the last general election of the twentieth century, the Labour Party, as the LRC had become in 1906, ran 639 candidates, won 43.2 percent of the vote, and, with 418 Members of Parliament (MPs), commanded an impregnable majority in the Commons. Four years later, the electorate confirmed Labour in its mandate, again with an invulnerable parliamentary majority. At the end of its first century, Labour had come to appear Britain's natural party of government, and its principal foe, the Conservative Party, a wanderer in the wilderness of internecine conflict and impotent opposition.