The Government’s Welfare Bill passed a vote in the Commons on 1st July with over 40 Labour MPs voting against. What the amended Bill really now amounts to will no doubt be much examined.
The media’s focus on MPs while expected does not tell the true story. The rebellion was a result of pressure from without of Parliament by disability and welfare campaigners and trade unions, as well as some local Labour Party groups.
It is an important point about where the focus for shifting the agenda of Starmer will come from, not from inside Parliament but outside of it.
In nineteenth century Britain there was no independent working class political representation in Parliament, although individual MPs who represented workers interests such as the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor were occasionally elected even on the very limited franchise then used.
Rather there were two bourgeois parties, the Tories and the Whigs (from 1859 the Liberals). However significant political change did occur. The suffrage was extended to include rather more working men in 1867 and 1884. Trade Unionism was given a legal status and the right to strike guaranteed in the late 1860s and early 1870s.
These changes which went through Parliament were achieved by what is known as pressure from without.
The term has an interesting history. It was the title of a 1974 volume edited by the feminist and socialist historian Patricia Hollis. She went on to become Junior Minister in the Blair Governments. The book clearly represented an historical intervention into what was an earlier period of working class upsurge against a right-wing Tory Government with policies similar to the present one.
Reviewing the book Dorothy Thompson was critical, arguing that its chapters failed to address the range of activities that made up pressure from without.
The Anti-Corn Law League, run by Manchester industrialists, was perhaps the prototype for modern campaigns. Well organised with membership cards, regular publicity and lobbying of Parliament it succeeded in getting the Corn Laws scrapped. That reduced the price of bread. This allowed its core support of business owners to reduce wages, something working class members of the League, of which there were numbers, no doubt reflected on.
A rather different form of pressure from without, aimed at the very types who ran the Anti Corn Law League was what some historians have called ‘collective bargaining by riot’. Here organised crowds, or mobs as the media still call them, gathered to pressure those who sold essentials like bread and beer to do so at affordable prices. Actual riots were rare. The pressure of the crowd was usually sufficient.
A combination of the efficient organisation and lobbying of the ACCL and the mobilisation of the protest crowd suggests pressure from without can still work today
