The Labour Party won only two seats in the parliament at the first elections that they participated in, which is not surprising considering that they allegedly spent only 33 pounds on those elections!
On this day the British Labour Party celebrates the anniversary of its founding. Namely, on 27 February 1900, the so-called “Labour Representation Committee” was founded at a meeting in London – a direct predecessor of the Labour Party. Ramsay MacDonald was appointed as secretary, and he was actually a Scot rather than an Englishman. He later also became the first Labour Prime Minister in the history of Great Britain.
The Labour Party were actually formed as a conglomeration of various labor and leftist organizations. From the very beginning they had a certain detachment from socialism in the true sense of the word. However, the right-wingers marked them as “socialists”, so Winston Churchill for example, a member of the Conservative Party, accordingly called their government a “socialist government”.
On the first elections that they participated in (1900), the Labour Party won only two seats in the parliament, which is not surprising considering that they allegedly spent only 33 pounds on those elections. However, already in 1910, the Labour Party received as many as 40 seats in Parliament. In 1924 Labour Party member Ramsay MacDonald became Britain’s Prime Minister, which was a major victory for the Labour Party.
In the past 80 years, the Labour Party rotates in government with the Conservative Party. These two parties are by far the strongest in the British Parliament. At the moment, the Labour Party forms the so-called Shadow Cabinet, headed by Ed Miliband as the official Leader of the Opposition.
