Reviews various interpretations of the rise of the British Labour Party.

The Trades Disputes Act of 1906 reversed the Taff Vale Decision of 1901 and restored trade unions' immunity from action for damages. The Liberals dropped own bill in favour of Labour's indicating an expression of support for the new Labour Party representation after the 1906 election.

Conventionally, most early-20th-century Labour politicians were nonideological liberals with an indigenous trade-union, Nonconformist, or "ethical socialist" background. In fact, prominent Labour figures such as Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, and George Lansbury developed intellectual constructs owing much to revisionist Marxism and other continental socialist influences. Labour Party intellectuals participated fully in the contemporary exchange of socialist ideas throughout the Western world. They were in the forefront on many issues, such as the changing nature of capitalism, the impact of technology, the role of voluntarism, and participatory citizenship. The Labour Party was in many ways more eclectic and adaptable than its European counterparts, which were more inhibited by entrenched Marxist positions.

While leaders of the Labour Party opposed tariff reform based on concerns over its effect on food prices they did not share the optimistic Liberal view of free trade.

The land question occupied a central place before 1914 in the policies of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Socialists in these parties idealized the virtues of rural life, were concerned about rural depopulation, and viewed "smallholdings" as a partial solution to unemployment. The PLP, however, resisted the ILP's "state-based" demand for outright land nationalization, preferring a system of devolved public ownership exercised democratically through district and parish councils.

Liberal revisionists have attempted to explain the demise of the Liberal Party and the rise of the Labour Party in terms of the cultural and social change wrought by World War I. They thus challenged the older class-based explanation, which held that the working class attached itself to the political ambitions of the Labour Party before 1914 via the trade union movement. The author suggests a balanced approach, one that acknowledges that the war was responsible for significant political and social change but recognizes that the Liberal Party was finding great difficulty in containing Labour's prewar challenge. The Liberals failed to appreciate the discontent that had existed among trade unionists from the mid-1880's. This neglect, combined with working-class anger and frustration, helped to produce an independent Labour movement.

Examines nonconformity and the rise of Labour suggesting the link with theology is tenuous.

Ramsay MacDonald, an evolutionary socialist, viewed the family as crucial to the development of socialist society. He saw capitalism as undermining both the family and the social discipline the latter inculcated. MacDonald criticized the Social Democratic Federation's policy of state-provided child maintenance as supplanting family responsibility with state control - a policy also playing into the hands of socialism's capitalist enemies. Consequently, MacDonald and most of the Parliamentary Labour Party leadership supported various legislation aimed at strengthening the working-class family as an accountable social unit.

Examines the history of the 1910 law suit brought by Walter V. Osborne, railway porter and branch secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, to prevent union levies for political campaigns.

Questions why "Britain alone of the major European states produced no mass Marxist" in the years before World War I. Suggests that Britain was not a favourable environment because of the workforce structures (smaller units), associational life (hobbies, clubs) and that the working class did not feel excluded from society,

The decision in favour of universal suffrage at the Labour Party conference in 1907 ran into practical political problems involving Keir Hardie's leadership.

Considers some aspects of the judgments in and consequences of the Osborne case, concerning the political levy in trade unions, between 1907 and 1913.

The election of 1906 examined in relation to the problem of electoral alliance with Liberals and risking alienation of ILP.