As Marx and Engels had foreseen, the ending of Britain’s industrial monopoly had enormous ramifications and ushered in a new convulsive period for the working class. But, while on the Continent mass Marxist social democratic parties had taken hold, the existence of a mass workers’ party in Britain remained elusive. The potential certainly existed. However, what was lacking, according to Engels, were the forces capable of welding this potential together: “The mass instinct that the workers must form a party of their own,” he wrote just over a year before his death, “against the two official parties is getting stronger and stronger: again showed itself more than ever in the municipal elections of 1 November. But the old traditional memories of various kinds, and the lack of people able to turn this instinct into conscious action and to rally it together all over the country [was the key issue]…” If it were possible to gather together “a kernel of people who have good theoretical understanding, much will be gained for a genuine mass movement.”

Although there was a small nucleus of capable people around Engels, after his death in 1895, this circle proved too weak to influence events. Tragically, within three years, the wreckage of Eleanor Marx’s personal life led to her suicide. Edward Aveling did not survive long after. This calamity eliminated the key personnel of the original Marxist circle in Britain. The working class, nevertheless, was pushed by events towards the creation of a mass party of labour, but unfortunately not with a leadership based upon class struggle and socialism, but based upon the worst kind of opportunism. The revolutionary socialists around the SDF, who could have provided revolutionary yeast to the workers’ party, tragically remained in splendid isolation from the real movement.

In these years, a series of lockouts and battles characterised the British industrial climate. Within a year of the formation of the Gasworkers’ union in London, the employers, at a cost of £100,000, smashed the union and abolished the eight-hour day. The ship owners also staged a series of lockouts in London, Cardiff and Hull. There was a general lockout of the Miners’ Federation over wage cuts in 1893. Three years later, the Employers’ Federation of Engineering Associations was formed “to protect and defend the interests of the employers against combinations of workmen.”

Yet even these harsh attacks were overshadowed by the employers’ determined use of legal means to cripple the trade unions. Despite the various legal guarantees for unions contained in the 1871 and 1875 Acts, new judgments were made by the capitalist courts throughout the 1890s that sought to challenge the right of peaceful picketing and the union’s protection from liability for damages. The formation of the new general employers’ organisation, the Employers Parliamentary Council, which agitated for legal action against the unions, served to push the reluctant TUC further down the road of political involvement. Out of these apparently accidental developments was expressed an inner necessity for independent working class political representation. It was a natural evolution, despite all the twists and turns of the class struggle.