In 2015 an article was published in the Journal of the World Socialist Movement which stated that "For over 110 years, Labour has hoodwinked the workers, and endlessly led them down the blind alley of reformism, always mindful that its real allegiance was to the master class who own and control society." The Labour Party wasn't founded to fight for the working class. The Labour Party was founded to manipulate and get control of the working class.
So who was behind the founding of the Labour Party?
Lionel de Rothschild took his seat in the House of Commons as Liberal Member of Parliament for the City of London in 1858. Lionel's son, Nathaniel de Rothschild, who became known as the elder statesman of the City of London, was Liberal MP for Aylesbury from 1865 and was later created a peer by Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone and raised to the House of Lords. Lord Rosebery who was also a Fabian was William Gladstone's Foreign Secretary and succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister.
Lord Rosebery was married to Hannah de Rothschild who was given away at the wedding ceremony in 1878 by the then British Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (p.47). Benjamin Disraeli (Conservative), and William Gladstone (27 years a Conservative MP, then Liberal) were both regular visitors of the Rothschild family (p.11).
The Fabian Society, founded in 1883, had the utmost contempt for the working class. At the core of the Fabian Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb who also co-founded the London School of Economics where Lord Rosebery was the second president and Lord Rothschild the third president (p.182). On the subjects of human breeding and control of society (pp.83, 84, 257), we read in the book 'Our Partnership' by Beatrice Webb, "How can we hope to improve the organisation of society without attending to the quality of men and women to be organised...What can we hope from these myriads of deficient minds and deformed bodies that swarm our great cities – what can we hope but brutality, meanness and crime." Webb then goes on to tell us, "We cannot hope to attack individualism, or, as we prefer to call it, anarchy, in its stronghold of the home and the family, entrenched behind current religious morality and custom, before we have replaced it by deliberate collective rule in the factory, the mine, in the whole machinery of wealth production..."
In the book Educate, Agitate, Organize by Patricia Pugh, which was commissioned by the Fabian Society to celebrate their centenary, we are told that in reference to the working class in Britain, Fabian Society members including Ramsay MacDonald and Henry Snell announced that "Our [Fabian] Society, like the Chartered Company in Africa, will capture the hearts of the natives, and control them, for profit and their own good at the same time." MacDonald would eventually become Labour's first Prime Minister and Snell would become Labour leader in the House of Lords.
Fabian Society member and Liberal supporter Kier Hardie (p.6) along with Liberal MP Robert Bontine Cunningham Graham founded the ScottishLabour Party in 1888. R.B. Cunningham Graham later also founded the Scottish National Party (SNP) of which he was the first president. In 1892 Kier Hardie was first elected as an MP, not in Scotland, but in the West Ham South constituency of London. In 1893 the Independent Labour Party was formed by trade unions, members of the Fabian Society, and led by Kier Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald. The Trade Union Congress,Fabian Society, Independent Labour Party, and Social Democratic Foundation founded the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 which was later renamed the 'Labour Party' in 1906.
Lady Warwick, aka Countess Warwick or Daisy Warwick, became an active member of the Social Democratic Federation in 1904 (p.151) The Social Democratic Federation was another founding organisation of the Labour Representation Committee. Dora Montefiore was also a member of the Social Democratic Federation (pp.3& 88). The Montefiore's are relatives of the Rothschild's. Lady Warwick was "an iconic leader in society", not least because of her 9-year affair with Edward, Prince of Wales, [who became King Edward VII]. Lady Warwick devised lavish and extravagant entertainment for the Prince’s entourage, known as the Marlborough House Set, which included members of the Rothschild family.
Henry Mayers Hyndman, the founder of the Social Democratic Federation and British representative of the International Socialist Bureau tells us, in his book, that in 1904, Lady Warwick attended the International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam and became a member of the International Social Democratic Party (p.91). Kier Hardie was British representative of the International Socialist Bureau from 1906 and Lenin the Russian representativefrom 1908. The 1909 meeting of the International Socialist Bureau was attended by both Kier Hardie and Lenin. Kier Hardie died in 1915, his wife was Lillias Balfour Wilson.
Regarding the supposed conversion of Lady Warwick from Tory land-owner to socialist, H. M. Hyndman writes (pp.89, 90), "To have some sympathy for Labourism was all very well, if a trifle eccentric. There was no real danger in Labourism, nor, at that time, even in Trade Unionism. But downright revolutionary Socialism! — that was quite another matter. What could a refined and highly educated Countess of ability, accustomed to enjoy the good things of this world in the widest sense and with the most delicate discrimination — what could she be doing in such a galley as that which held furious subversionists of the most unseemly and inelegant description, and, in particular, the irreconcilable and virulent writer of these lines? What indeed? Nobody could make it out."
Beatrice Webb was lead author of the minority report (1909) which first sketched the outlines of a Welfare State. And her husband, Sydney Webb, wrote the original Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution which set out the aims and values of the party (p.12). On the website of the World Socialist Movement we are told that "Clause IV was NOT written out of a genuine sympathy or empathy with the workers and with a view to changing the existing social system. It was penned to assuage, to pacify that section of society that was beginning to nurture the idea that it was time it took matters into its own hands. Clause 4 was penned in an attempt to persuade that section of society that posed a threat to the ruling class that their lot could be bettered if they put their faith in an elite, an intellectual vanguard, who would work on their behalf in parliament and at a time when workers elsewhere were attempting to change society themselves."
The Great War [1914 -1918] Beatrice Webb tells us (p.490), was the outcome of a long-standing bitter struggle between capitalist states; some having extended dominions and colonies, others wanting new territories, new markets and new native populations to exploit for the purpose ofmaking profit for their financiers, manufacturers and traders. There followed the disastrous peace of Versailles, breaking up defeated. Empires, annexing their colonies, and imposing impossible reparations which could only be paid by the exportation of capital from the victorious countries to the victims."
Lady Warwick stood as Labour Party candidate in 1923 for Warwick and Leamington - the seat was won by Conservative MP Anthony Eden who would later go on to become Conservative Prime Minister. Lady Warwick was the mother-in-law of Anthony Eden’s sister, and Lady Warwick's daughter was the step-mother of Anthony Eden's wife Beatrice (p.47).
Ramsay MacDonald became the first Labour Prime Minister in 1924 and appointed Sydney Webb as his President of the Board of Trade. The first Labour government only lasted nine months. Labour returned to power—this time as the largest party—in 1929 but was soon overwhelmed by the crisis of the Great Depression. In August 1931, after discussions with the other party leaders, MacDonald formed a national government consisting of leading Labour, Conservative and Liberal politicians, as well as a number of individuals who belonged to no political party. MacDonald was expelled from the Labour Party as a traitor and only two members of the Labour Party agreed to serve in the National Government. MacDonald's majority came from the Conservatives. MacDonald remained Prime Minister of the National Government from 1931 to 1935 when he resigned due to ill health. MacDonald remained in the Cabinet as Lord President of the Council until retiring from the government in 1937. He died the same year.
George Bernard Shaw was an early member of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics along with Sydney and Beatrice Webb. In 1928, George Bernard Shaw stated in his book (p.470) that “under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner." George Bernard Shaw was an unrepentant advocate of Stalin'spolicies which resulted in the deaths of millions of people in what became known as the Great Terror. Sydney and Beatrice Webb were also supporters of Stalin's policies as can be seen in their book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation.
229 Fabian Society members were elected to Parliament in the 1945 Labour landslide. Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee showed between 1945 - 1951 that nationalisation is a deception. Why were privately owned strategic industries such as Coal, Electricity, Iron & Steel, and the railways not nationalised before or during World War II, but only after the war? The government would have been in control of the major industries it needed to help fight the war. The answer is because just like World War I, the Second World War was deliberately orchestrated by capitalists who wanted to make huge profits by keeping the industries in their own private hands. The Iron & Steel industry for instance provided the metal to make munitions, airplanes, ships, submarines, tanks, barbed wire, air-raid shelters, agricultural machinery, cutlery, and a whole range of metal objects not just for the military, but also for civilians.
When an industry is supposedly ‘nationalised’, the industry actually remains in private ownership. The government and the public never own the industry – vast amounts of public money is used to upgrade, expand, and cover any financial losses incurred by the private owners. And when the industry has been upgraded, the industry is eventually presented back to the private owners under the guise of ‘privatisation’ to continue managing the industry themselves.
Liberal MP William Beveridge, author of the 1942 Beveridge Report that introduced the Welfare State in the UK, had worked as a researcher for the Webbs on the Minority Report (pp.3 & 55) and had been a Director of the London School of Economics.
Influenced by many of the proposals in the Beveridge Report, Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, seen here with Lord James de Rothschild 12 April 1948, was Clement Attlee's Minister for Health and spearheaded the founding of the National Health Service (NHS) which came into being on the 5th July 1948. Some 2,688 voluntary and municipal hospitals in England and Wales were nationalised to form the NHS. Faced with the threat of a strike by the British Medical Association who had opposed to founding of the NHS, Bevan conceded that GPs would retain the freedom to run their practices as small businesses. The consultants were given more money, and allowed to keep their private practices. Bevan promised legislation that ensured that doctors would not become salaried civil servants working within the NHS. The basic promise of free treatment was quickly broken. Legislation passed under Labour brought in a prescription charge. When the Conservatives were came to power in 1951, charges for spectacles and dental care quickly followed. The King's Fund which was founded by Rothschild and Edward VII has been involved with the NHS since its inception and is the realmanagement arm of the NHS.
In 1953, Winston Churchill’s Conservative government privatised most of the industry Iron and Steel Industry. In 1967 Harold Wilson's Labour government renationalised the Iron and Steel Industry via the Iron and Steel Act 1967 which has been locked up in the government archives for a period of 84 years and is not available for public viewing until the year 2054.
After Tony Blair’s Labour landslide victory in 1997, over 200 Fabians now sat in the House of Commons, including many of the Cabinet. In the newspaper article "The Rothschilds and their 200 years of political influence" we learn that Peter Mandelson, who was Tony Blair's second in command, was a closely connected to several members of Rothschild family. After Tony Blair stood down as Labour Prime Minister, Tony became theChair of the Rothschild controlled 'J.P. Morgan International Council'.
Following the 2015 election and the surprise election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, the role of the Fabian Society as a pluralist, non-factional forum within the Labour movement be lost non of its importance. Fabian Society membership since 2015, we are told, has been higher than at any time in the society’s long history.
Ken Craggs
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