Labour Party (UK)

The Labour Party, often referred to as Labour, is a political party in the United Kingdom that sits on the centre-left of the political spectrum. The party has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. It is one of the two dominant political parties in the United Kingdom; the other being the Conservative Party. Labour has been led by Keir Starmer since 2020, who became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom following the 2024 general election. To date, there have been 12 Labour governments and seven different Labour Prime Ministers – MacDonald, Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan, Blair, Brown and Starmer.

The Labour Party was founded in 1900, having emerged from the trade union movement and socialist parties of the 19th century. It was electorally weak before the First World War, but in the early 1920s overtook the Liberal Party to become the main opposition to the Conservative Party, and briefly formed a minority government under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. In 1929, Labour for the first time became the largest party in the House of Commons with 287 seats, but fell short of a majority, forming another minority government. In 1931, in response to the Great Depression, MacDonald formed a new government with Conservative and Liberal support, which led to his expulsion from the party. Labour was soundly defeated by his coalition in the 1931 election, winning only 52 seats, but began to recover in 1935, with 154 seats.

During the Second World War, Labour served in the wartime coalition, after which it won a majority in the 1945 election. Clement Attlee's government enacted extensive nationalisation and established the modern welfare state and National Health Service before losing power in 1951. Under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, Labour again governed from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1979. The party then entered a period of intense internal division which ended in the defeat of its left wing by the mid-1980s. After electoral defeats to the Conservatives in 1987 and 1992, Tony Blair took the party to the political centre as part of his New Labour project, which governed under Blair and then Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2010. After further electoral defeats in the 2010s, Keir Starmer moved Labour to the political centre since becoming its leader in 2020, winning a landslide election victory in 2024.

The party includes semi-autonomous London, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish branches. Labour is the largest party in the Senedd (Welsh Parliament), and the only party in the current Welsh government.

The origins of what became the Labour Party emerged in the late 19th century. It represented the interests of the labour unions and more generally the growing urban working class. Hundreds of thousands of workers had recently gained voting rights by laws passed in 1867 and 1884. Many different trade unions flourished in the industrial districts. Their leaders used the Methodist revival tradition to find ways to rally the membership. Several small socialist organisations formed and wanted power based on the working class; the most influential was the Fabian Society, which was made up of middle class reformers. Keir Hardie worked for cooperation among the unions and left-wing groups such as his small Independent Labour Party (ILP).

The Labour Party was formed by unions and left-wing groups to create a distinct political voice for the working class in Britain. In 1900 the Trades Union Congress (TUC), an umbrella body for most unions, sponsored a national conference to unite into a single party that would sponsor candidates for the House of Commons. The conference created the Labour Representation Committee (LRC), as a coalition of separate groups with Ramsay MacDonald as secretary. The fearsome issue for labour was the 1901 Taff Vale legal decision which made most strikes illegal; the urgent goal was to get Parliament to reverse it. The LRC cut a secret deal with the Liberal Party: they would not compete against each other in the 1906 general election. Voters gave the Liberals a landslide with 397 seats out of 664; the new LRC won 29 seats. The LRC renamed itself "The Labour Party", with veteran MP Keir Hardie narrowly winning the role of leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).

The Labour Party's first national conference in Belfast in 1907 helped shape many of its key policies. Never fully resolved was the puzzle of where the final decisions ought to lie—in the annual conference? the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP)? The local chapters? The Trade Union Congress (which brought together the heads of most unions)? The conference created a "conscience clause" allowing diversity of opinions rather than a rigid orthodoxy. Irish politics proved to be so different that the Party simply quit Ireland and worked only in England, Scotland and Wales. In 1908–1910 the Party supported the momentous and largely successful Liberal battles in favour of a welfare state and against the Unionist/Conservative Party and against the veto power of the House of Lords. Growth continued, with 42 Labour MPs elected to the House of Commons in the December 1910 general election. During World War I, the party experienced internal divisions over support for the war effort, but also saw one of its top leaders Arthur Henderson, serve in the powerful war cabinet.

After the war, the party focused on building a strong constituency-based support network and adopted a comprehensive statement of policies titled "Labour and the New Social Order". In 1918, Clause IV was added to Labour's constitution, committing the party to work towards common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Socialism was vaguely promised, but there was no effort made to draw up detailed plans on what that would mean or how it could be accomplished.