Adopted at a joint conference of the societies affili- ated with the British Trades Union Congress and the British Labour Party, at Central Hall, West- minster, London, December 28, 1917 Agreed upon at the Inter-Allied Labor and Socialist Conference, Central Hall, Westminster, London, III CONSTITUTION OF THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY As adopted by the party conference held in London, IV LABOR AND THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER A draft report on reconstruction submitted by the executive committee of the British Labour Party at V RESOLUTIONS ON RECONSTRUCTION Adopted by the Conference of the British Labour VI PLATFORM OF BRITISH LABOUR PARTY IN THE GENERAL VII INTERIM (WHITLEY) REPORT ON JOINT STANDING IN- Sub-committee on Relations between Employer and Employed; Reconstruction Committee Committee on Relations between Employers and Employed; Ministry of Reconstruction IX SUPPLEMENTARY (WHITLEY) REPORT ON WORKS Committee on Relations between Employers and Memorandum by the Minister of Reconstruction XI NATIONAL COUNCIL OF THE POTTERY INDUSTRY. Reached by a group of twenty British Quaker Employers after four days' discussion in 1917-18 INTRODUCTION PUBLIC attention has been absorbed in what has been happening in Russia. Now in Germany. The working class revolutions there have been so much more spectacular as to have quite overshadowed the formidable British labor movement or to have been confused with it. Some writers on the great war have said that the thing which set this war off from any known for a thousand years has been that it was the wrestlings of whole peoples; that here we have been dealing with folk movements unlike any that had occurred since the days when Saxons and Franks, Teutons and Huns and Slavs swept over western Europe. However that may be, there has been another folk movement at work in the midst of war in Europe which is tremendously significant. It asserted itself disruptively in various stages of the Russian revolution. The same forces are at work elsewhere. And in England we have the attempt to harness them in a great constructive working class movement which will make for changes in the economic and political life, in the period following the war, as sweeping as the changes wrought by those middle-class movements which manifested themselves in the ascendancy of nationalism, and in the struggle for liberalism within the nations. In all European history, we have had in England forecasts of fundamental changes that were coming on the continent. The English reformation preceded the continental reformation; the English swing to parliamentary government and democracy preceded the political revolutions on the continent. For the most part Englishmen did not go through anything like the travail and bitterness which the continental peoples traversed in running the same course. They did not come out at the same point; but they showed the trend, and they showed it in advance. Even so, what has been going forward under the stress of war among the wage-earning population of the island commonwealth foreshadows changes which will affect and condition the whole fabric of western civilization. Being a folk movement, it is not possible to compress it into any one channel. It is not like the single tax movement, or the prohibition movement, or the municipal ownership movement as we have known them in this country, because these are propaganda given over to a single issue. The British labor movement is rather the expression at a hundred points of great tidal impulses at work in the common life. This book can best serve American readers by telling of certain of its eager manifestations-international, political, industrial-that will play an organic part in the period of reconstruction. |