Sidney Webb

Independent activity Social Democrats United Kingdom United Kingdom 1859–1947 ○ Died

British socialist economist who led the Fabian Society and wrote Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution

He drafted Clause IV, which committed the Labour Party to public ownership of industry.

A British socialist and economist born into a lower-middle-class London family, who studied law at night while working as a clerk. Joining the Fabian Society in 1884, three months after its founding, he led it with Bernard Shaw and pursued “permeation”, infiltrating people and ideas into the existing parties. He married Beatrice Potter in 1892 and worked with her for the rest of his life; together they founded the London School of Economics in 1895 and the weekly New Statesman in 1913. He wrote Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution, entered Parliament in 1922 and, made Baron Passfield in 1929, served as Colonial Secretary in MacDonald’s second Labour government. After the couple’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1932 he wrote most of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935). He died in 1947; his ashes lie in Westminster Abbey.

Also known as: Sidney James Webb · Lord Passfield · Baron Passfield

Activities and affiliations

From the Fabian Society to the Labour cabinet

He was born near Leicester Square in London to a father “variously described as an accountant, a perfumer, and a hairdresser” and a mother who was a hairdresser and dealer in toiletries. After a middle-class day school in London and further schooling in Switzerland and Germany, he studied law in his spare time at the Birkbeck Institution for a University of London degree while holding an office job, also studied at King’s College London, and was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn in 1885. He joined the Fabian Society in 1884, three months after its founding and about the same time as Bernard Shaw, and with Beatrice Webb, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas and others turned it into the pre-eminent political and intellectual society of Edwardian England. For the society he wrote on poverty in London, the eight-hour day, land nationalisation, the nature of socialism, education, eugenics and the reform of the House of Lords. In 1892 he married Beatrice Potter, whose money let him give up his clerical job and concentrate on his other work, and in 1894 the couple wrote The History of Trade Unionism. In 1895 he led the founding of the London School of Economics with a bequest left to the Fabian Society, and from 1912 he was its professor of public administration for fifteen years. In 1913 the Webbs founded the New Statesman. He drafted Clause IV, which committed the Labour Party to public ownership of industry. He was elected MP for Seaham in 1922, and as Baron Passfield from 1929 he served as Secretary of State for the Colonies and for Dominion Affairs in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government. As Colonial Secretary he issued the Passfield White Paper revising the Palestine policy of Churchill’s White Paper of 1922. Failing health made him give up the Dominions in 1930, but he stayed at the Colonial Office until the Labour government fell in August 1931. The couple travelled in the Soviet Union from 21 May to late July 1932, and he wrote most of their thousand-page Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935), drawing on publications and statistics supplied by the Soviet embassy in London; he went back in 1933 with their niece Barbara Drake and others. He died in 1947 and was buried with his wife in the garden of their house at Passfield Corner; at Shaw’s petition both were moved to the nave of Westminster Abbey, beside Attlee and Bevin.