The different elements which came together to form the Labour Representation Committee in February 1900 were, when it came to party organisation, at once its strength and its weakness. Labour was not in the position of a totally new political party having to build up a political machine from scratch, rather the LRC was able to utilise and build upon existing organisations: these were the Independent Labour Party, the Fabian Society, those trade unions which supported the LRC, and trades councils throughout the country (the Social Democratic Federation disaffiliated from the LRC after little more than a year's membership). At both a local and a national level, however, these organisations were often hostile to each other, jealous of their independence and suspicious of attempts by the LRC Executive to control them.

In his most recent return to a thesis first stated in 1957, Professor Norman Cohn remains convinced of the “parallels and indeed the continuity” between medieval millenarianism and modern totalitarianism. While Professor Cohn's treatment of this theme has in 1970 been stated “more briefly” than in 1957, it is difficult to share his view that it has simultaneously been rendered “more clearly”. Indeed the latest edition of The Pursuit of the Millennium might easily persuade the reader that Professor Cohn had surrendered that hypothesis which formed a major interest of his work.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the relationship of poverty and drunkenness became a topic of bitter social controversy. The debate often had hopelessly polarized positions, being reduced in crudest form to a disagreement over whether poverty caused intemperance or the reverse. The very emotionalism and repetition of the argument, while disappointing to the logician, was a clear sign of the deep passions that the question invoked. While contributors to this debate stretched across the spectrum of religious and political alignment, the controversy was essentially the creature of the left. As will be argued, the question of self-inflicted poverty through drunkenness excited the Liberal and emergent socialist-labour parties far more than it did the Conservative-Unionist sector.

G. D. H. Cole has drawn attention to the militancy of the unions outside of the craftsmen's trades in the 1860's. The “class cleavage” which he ascribed to the engineering, shipbuilding and the building trades enabled the skilled men to use their “New Model Unions” as exclusive barriers against dilution by the semi-skilled and labouring classes. In consequence, the Amalgamated Unions had pacific tendencies which were only partially offset by their adoption of a centralised organisation, through which policy making and finance were mainly controlled. Although Cole described the Ironworkers' Union as one of the provincially based Amalgamated Unions, the three main unions which were formed by the ironworkers in the years 1862–3 never really succeeded in amalgamating along the lines described. When they did come together in 1868, after a period of disastrous defeats, the form of amalgamation they adopted resulted in a very weak union. The executive committee insisted upon making all decisions on the use of the strike tactic, but allowed the branches almost complete control over union finances.

The idea of a “labour aristocracy” pervades writing about the British working class of the second half, and especially the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This emphasis is, in my view, correct: the behaviour and consciousness of working people cannot be explained without some such concept of divisions within the working class. But this proposition has too often been allowed to conclude, rather than to commence the enquiry. The fragmentation of the manual working class into different strata and sub-cultures may take several forms, and is bound to have local and industrial variations. In approaching the problem it is necessary to draw a clear distinction between differences in the class situation of various groups of workers, and the formation of separate working class strata – a cultural and political process. Three main levels of analysis are relevant to this problem: the stratification within the working class, in terms of class situations (relative earnings, security, prospects and opportunities, position of subordination or autonomy in the workplace, and so on); the extent to which various strata of manual workers were distinguished by the cultivation of particular styles of life, and by commitment to particular sets of norms and values; and the consequences of these for institutions embodying the interest of manual workers as a class (unions, parties, etc.) and for the patterning of conflict and consensus in the society.