Celebrating the centenary of the Parliamentary Labour Party, this volume commemorates the 29 founding Labour MPs elected in 1906. The obituaries are written, in the main, by the twenty-first-century successor MPs for those same towns and cities, offering a unique insight into how today’s politicians view their party’s past.
The 29 pioneers include Labour’s first Prime Minister, first Chancellor of the Exchequer and the first Minister of Labour as well as a Nobel Peace Prize winner. This book brings to the attention of a fresh audience the remarkable qualities of these working men. Some of this material has never before been published and never in a single source. Many of these pioneers left school at 11 years old, or earlier, and overcame poverty, illegitimacy and unemployment to found a great parliamentary party, hold high offices of state and change the nature of British politics forever.
With a foreword by Tony Blair, Men Who Made Labour focuses on the pioneers origins, expectations, world vision and achievements in the context of early twentieth-century conditions, when the prospect of any Labour government was still a distant dream.
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