FABIANS

Who were the Webbs?

OCTOBER 15, 2024

Ahead of an on-line talk for the Socialist History Society, Michael Ward looks at their legacy.

Today, Beatrice and Sidney Webb are mostly remembered for two things: their contribution to the founding of Britain’s welfare state, and their fascination, in their later lives, with the Soviet Union.

They certainly helped to define the programme of the 1945 Labour government, and helped to shape a Labour Party that was preoccupied as much with social policy as with economic management. But although Britain pioneered social security, the British benefits system is now weaker than the arrangements in other advanced economies.

And the Webbs, disillusioned with the absence of an effective policy to combat unemployment in the two minority Labour governments of the 1920s, placed their hope for the future with the Soviet Union. They – and others – turned a blind eye to the economic and political shortcomings of the USSR; when they toured Russia and Ukraine in 1932, they saw what they were supposed to see, met who they were supposed to meet. And they submitted the draft chapters of their book to the Russian Ambassador in London.

Beatrice and Sidney’s enthusiasm for Soviet Communism was the final stage in their political evolution. For the first twenty years after their marriage in 1892, their creed was permeation: influencing other political parties to put their ideas into practice. They ran a political salon at their home on the Thames Embankment. MPs, ministers, trades unionists, and writers came in droves, lured more by the sparkling conversation than by the frugal food.

They had a great success with education policy: In the 1890s. Sidney, a member of the Liberal/Labour Progressive group that controlled the early London County Council, presided over a massive expansion of secondary education. After 1900, he worked, successfully, with the Conservative Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, and the leading Liberal, Richard Haldane, to replicate the system across England.

They hoped to repeat that success with welfare policy: Beatrice, appointed a member of a Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, wrote a Minority Report calling for the abolition of the Poor Law. But, although she and Sidney mounted what they called a “raging, tearing campaign” in support of the Minority Report, they could not persuade the Liberals Government to act.

So, in 1911, Sidney and Beatrice took a year’s sabbatical to go round the world. When they returned, they committed their energies to Labour. As Beatrice wrote, “The Labour Party exists, and we have to work with it. ‘A poor thing but our own.’”

Sidney re-wrote Labour’s constitution (including the famous Clause IV) and its programme, and recruited staff to run its Head Office. In 1922, at the age of 64, he became an MP for the first time, and then a minister in the Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929-1931.

The 1924 Government, ruled by a narrow adherence to Treasury orthodoxy, had no effective policy towards unemployment. No new thinking took place between 1924 and 1929 within the Labour Party. Faced with the after-effects of the Wall Street crash of 1929, and strident calls for spending cuts, the Government collapsed in August 1931. The Labour Prime Minister, MacDonald, emerged at the head of a National Government with Conservatives and Liberals.

It was then that Beatrice and Sidney turned towards the Soviet Union. But they never joined or supported the Communist Party of Great Britain; they had a low opinion of its leading members, and thought that people in Britain would not vote for a party controlled from abroad. They remained active in the Labour Party. They were appalled by the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, and when, in 1941, Hitler invaded Russia, Beatrice, in her last years, became a vociferous supporter of the alliance between Britain and the USSR.

Sidney, supported by Beatrice, played a leading role in both the Labour Party and in Parliament. But, beyond the structures of formal politics, they played a critical role in building up a network of institutions which together form the infrastructure for broader movements of ideas.

They did not found the Fabian Society – but Sidney was an early member, along with his friend George Bernard Shaw. Beatrice became a member after her marriage, and from 1912 onwards was a member of the Fabian Executive Committee.

In 1894 a benefactor, Henry Hutchinson, left the Fabians £10,000 in his will, for “the propaganda and other purposes of the said Society and its Socialism.”

Beatrice and Sidney decided to use this windfall “to found, slowly and quietly, a ‘London School of Economics and Political Science’.”

The LSE opened its doors the following year. By 1904, LSE had 1,300 students and 20 professors; the trustees concluded that LSE was now a “leading educational institution.”

Sidney chaired the LSE Board until 1911; he stayed a Board member until the 1930s. He chaired the interview panel which appointed Clement Attlee as a lecturer in 1912; in 1919 he appointed William Beveridge as Director – and in 1937, in one of his last interventions, persuaded Beveridge to leave.

When the Webbs returned from their round-the-world trip in 1912, and made their decisive commitment to Labour, their first action was to start a magazine; Beatrice felt “a clear call to leadership in the labour and socialist movement to which we feel we must respond. For that purpose we are starting a new weekly.”

They enlisted George Bernard Shaw as an ally, and through the winter of 1912-13, managed both the commercial and the editorial sides of the operation. They appointed Clifford Sharp, who had edited the monthly newsletter of the Poor Law Campaign, as editor. By the time the first edition of the New Statesman appeared in April 1913, they had signed up 2,300 postal subscribers. Sidney chaired the New Statesman board for the first ten years.

A think tank; a university; and a weekly publication: the infrastructure of a political movement.

Over a hundred years later, these three institutions are still flourishing – independent of governments. In the 1940s, it was hoped that the Attlee government’s welfare measures would end poverty. LSE, the Fabians, and the New Statesman carried out or published the research in the 1960s and 1970s that ‘rediscovered’ poverty.

Yes, the Webbs made a terrible mistake in their uncritical praise of the Soviet Union – but the Soviet Union has been gone for thirty-five years, while the Webbs’ institutional legacy persists.

In different ways, LSE, the Fabian Society, and the New Statesman can speak truth to power. The need for them remains urgent.

Michael Ward is the author of Unceasing War on Poverty: Beatrice & Sidney Webb and their World, Conrad Press, 2024. He has written more about the Webbs here. His talk for the Socialist History Society is at 7pm on Wednesday 16th October 2024. Register here.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sidney_and_Beatrice_Webb_%284624489497%29.jpg. Source: Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Uploaded by Oxyman Author: Simon Harriyott from Uckfield, England, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.