'Perfectly Parliamentary'? The Labour Party and the House of Commons in the Inter-war Years
'Perfectly Parliamentary'? The Labour Party and the House of Commons in the Inter-war Years
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“完全议会制”？
DOI：
10.1093/tcbh/hws049
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发表时间：
2012
影响因子：
0.9
通讯作者：
Toye R
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Toye R
拉尔夫·米利班德（Ralph Miliband）在1961年对议会社会主义的马克思主义批判中，描绘了一个因教条式地致力于议会方法而注定徒劳的工党。相比之下，社会民主党作家如本·皮姆洛特（Ben Pimlott）认为工党的改革主义获得了具体的收益，同时接受了该党的选举主义/民主主义在当时毫无疑问的前提。就党内没有任何团体建议放弃议会方法而言，双方都是正确的。然而，被遗忘的是，1918年后，关于如何利用议会的问题有相当多的争论。工党对议会的承诺不仅受到了其他政党的挑战，这些政党声称工党极端主义，无视下议院的修辞惯例，而且工党本身也指责其对手践踏议会自由。因此，一些左翼议员决定使用议会破坏策略，以寻求将自己塑造成失业者的代言人，他们将其描述为正确利用下议院挑战资本主义，保守党则将其描述为工党天生极端主义和不适合执政的证据。阶级问题是这些理解的核心，性别也很重要。本文探讨了有关议会和议会的方法，进行了内部和外部的下议院，往往通过象征性的表现，如吵闹的“示威”在会议厅内的参数。它的结论是，两次世界大战之间的经验告诉工党的不是议会的可能性，而是它的局限性。
Ralph Miliband’s influential Marxist critique of Parliamentary Socialism (1961) depicted a Labour Party that had condemned itself to futility by its dogmatic commitment to parliamentary methods. By contrast, Social Democratic writers such as Ben Pimlott have argued that Labour’s reformism secured concrete gains, whilst accepting the premise that the party’s electoralism/parliamentarism went unquestioned at the time. Both sides are right insofar as no group within the party suggested abandoning parliamentary methods. What has been forgotten, however, is that there was considerable debate after 1918 about how Parliament should be used. Not only was Labour’s commitment to Parliament challenged by other parties, which alleged extremism and disregard of the rhetorical conventions of the Commons, but Labour itself accused its opponents of riding roughshod over parliamentary liberties. Thus, the decision of some left-wing MPs to use parliamentary disruption tactics in their quest to present themselves as spokesmen of the unemployed was depicted by them as a proper use of the Commons to challenge capitalism and by Conservatives as proof of Labour’s innate extremism and unfitness to govern. Issues of class were central to these understandings, and gender was also important. This article examines the arguments about Parliament and parliamentary methods that were conducted within and without the Commons, often through symbolic manifestations such as rowdy ‘demonstrations’ within the Chamber. It concludes that the inter-war experience taught Labour not the possibilities of Parliament but its limits.