Labour Representation League
노동대표동맹
A British organisation founded in November 1869 to register working-class voters and get workers into Parliament. Never meant to become a full party, it helped elect Lib-Lab MPs and won two seats in 1874. It dissolved in 1882 and is counted a forerunner of the Labour Party.
In depth
Its first secretary was the co-operative activist and trade unionist Lloyd Jones, and the silk weaver and well-known Chartist Thomas Mottershead was a leading founder. The historian Eugenio Biagini called it “very weak and quite ineffective”. In 1873 it urged its supporters to organise in their constituencies not as mere consenting parties to the doings of local wirepullers but as “a great Labour party, a party which knows its strength, and is prepared to fight and win”. In the 1874 general election it fielded twelve candidates and won two seats.
The secretaryship passed to Henry Broadhurst in 1873 and in 1880 to John Hales, a former general secretary of the International Working Men’s Association. In the late 1870s Mottershead used his seat on the League’s executive to campaign against war with Russia. Under Hales the League achieved little, and it dissolved in 1882. In 1886 the Trades Union Congress created the Labour Electoral Association to replace it, and that in turn led to the creation of the Labour Party.