Revival and Confrontation, 1880–98

Following the Webbs, most historians have continued to see the emergence of what they called ‘new unionism’ at the end of the 1880s as evidence of new directions in industrial relations. Clegg, Fox and Thompson began the multi-volume History of British Trade Unions in 1889 and called ‘new unionism’, ‘one of the most colourful and baffling phenomena in British trade union history’. Many other historians, like the Webbs, tend to link it to the re-emergence of socialist movements in the 1880s and suggest that much of the new movement was shaped by socialist sympathisers. As Sidney Pollard has pointed out, all kinds of people had a vested interest in presenting the short sharp expansion of unionism as something distinctive. Older unionists, who had spent decades polishing a public image of moderation and reason, wished to distance themselves from what seemed to be the newer, more aggressive tones of the emerging unions. Many of the early writers on the period were at pains to show that socialists played a key role in organising the unskilled and that the upsurge of unionism was the evidence of a new class consciousness, which inevitably led on to independent labour and the demand for socialist policies. Later historians, in their search for the elusive class consciousness, latched on to this.1