Sidney Webb, the son of an accountant, was born in London
on 13th July, 1859. His father held radical political views and was
a strong supporter of John Stuart Mill in
the 1865 General Election. At the age of
sixteen Sidney became an office clerk but he continued to attend evening
classes at the University of London until
he acquired the qualifications needed to enter the Civil Service.
Webb also contributed to the Christian
Socialist and taught at the London
Working Men's College.
Webb developed socialist ideas while at university and in 1885 he
joined the Fabian Society. The society believed
that capitalism had created an unjust and inefficient society. The
members, who included Edward Carpenter,
Annie Besant, Walter
Crane, and George Bernard Shaw agreed
that the ultimate aim of the group should be to reconstruct "society
in accordance with the highest moral possibilities".
The Fabian Society was a "fact-finding
and fact-dispensing body" and it produced a series of pamphlets
on a wide variety of different social issues. Many of these were written
by Sidney Webb including Facts for Socialists
(1887), Facts for Londoners (1888)
and The Eight Hour Day (1891).
Webb also wrote A Plan on Campaign for Labour
with George Bernard Shaw.
Webb took an interest in revolutionary groups such as the Social
Democratic Federation but rejected their ideas on class warfare.
He argued for reform rather than revolution and claimed that it was
Robert Owen and not Karl
Marx who was the real founder of British socialism.
Sidney Webb sought an end to the laissez-faire approach to economics
and urged the government to play a more active role in regulating
the economy. His ideas helped to influence the development of what
later became known as the Welfare State.
In 1891 Beatrice Potter, contacted Webb
about her research into the co-operative movement. They became close
friends and in 1892 they were married. Beatrice had an income of £1,000
that she had inherited from her rich father. This money enabled Sidney
to give up his post as a Civil Servant and he now concentrated on
his political work.
In the year that he married, Sidney stood as the Fabian
Society candidate for Deptford in the London
County Council elections. Webb won the seat and he retained it
for the next eighteen years. Webb was appointed as Chairman of the
Technical Instruction Committee and as a result was known as the Minister
of Public Education for London.
Sidney and Beatrice Webb worked on several
books together including The History of Trade
Unionism (1894) and Industrial
Democracy (1897). The research that they carried out while
writing these books convinced them there was a need to establish a
new political party that was committed to obtaining socialism through
parliamentary elections.
In 1894 Henry Hutchinson, a wealthy solicitor from Derby,
left the Fabian Society £10,000. Sidney
and Beatrice Webb suggested that the money
should be used to develop a new university in London.
The London School of Economics and Political Science
(LSE) was founded in 1895. As Sidney Webb pointed out, the intention
of the institution was to "teach political economy on more modern
and more socialist lines than those on which it had been taught hitherto,
and to serve at the same time as a school of higher commercial education".
The Webbs first approached Graham Wallas,
a leading member of the Fabian Society,
to become the Director of the LSE. Wallas declined the offer and W.
A. S. Hewins, a young economist at Pembroke College, Oxford,
was appointed instead. With the support of the London
County Council (LCC) and the Technical Education Board, the LSE
flourished as a centre of learning.
On 27th February 1900, the Fabian Society
joined with the Independent Labour Party, the
Social Democratic Federation and trade union
leaders to form the Labour Representation Committee
(LRC). The LRC put up fifteen candidates in the 1900
General Election and between them they won 62,698 votes. Two of
the candidates, Keir Hardie and Richard
Bell won seats in the House of Commons.
Sidney Webb was willing to work with any political party in order
to obtain the policies he believed in. When the Conservative
Party won the 1900 General Election,
the Webbs drafted what later became the 1902
Education Act.
The Webbs were strong critics of the Poor
Law system in Britain. In 1905 the government established a Royal
Commission was established to look into "the working of the laws
relating to the relief of poor persons in the United Kingdom".
Beatrice Webb was asked to serve as a member
of the commission and her husband assisted with collecting the data
on how the system was working. Beatrice disagreed with most of the
members on the Royal Commission and together with Sidney wrote and
published a Minority Report. In their report the Webbs called for:
(1) the end of the Poor Law; (2) the establishment and coordination
of employment bureau throughout Britain to make efficient use of the
nation's labour resources; (3) improving essential services such as
education and health. The Liberal government headed by Herbert
Asquith accepted the Majority Report and rejected the advice given
by the Webbs.
In 1915 Sidney Webb was appointed to the Labour
Party National Executive. By 1922 he was Chairman of the National
Executive and the following year, in the 1923
General Election, was chosen to represent the Labour
Party in the Seaham constituency. Webb won the seat and when Ramsay
MacDonald became Britain first Labour Prime Minister in 1924,
he appointed Webb as his President of the Board
of Trade.
Webb left the House of Commons in 1929
when he was granted the title Baron Passfield. Now in the House
of Lords, Webb served as Secretary of State for the Colonies in
MacDonald's second Labour Government.
In 1932 the Webbs visited the Soviet Union.
Although unhappy with the lack of political freedom in the country
they were impressed with the rapid improvement in the health and educational
services and the changes that had taken place to ensure economic and
political equality for women. When they returned to Britain they wrote
a book on the economic experiments taking place in the Soviet Union
called Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?
(1935). In the book the Webbs predicted that "the social and
economic system of planned production for community consumption"
of the Soviet Union would eventually spread to the rest of the world.
They added that they hoped this would happen through reform rather
than revolution.
Despite the Stalinist purges and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Webbs continued
to support the Soviet economic experiment and in 1942 published The
Truth About Soviet Russia (1942). Beatrice
Webb died on 30th April, 1943. Sidney Webb died four years later
on 13th October, 1947.
(1)
Beatrice Potter recorded in her diary her
first meeting with Sidney Webb (14th February, 1890)
Sidney Webb, the socialist, dined here to meet Charles and Mary
Booth. A remarkable little man with a huge head on a very tiny body,
a breadth of forehead quite sufficient to account for the encyclopaedic
character of his knowledge, a Jewish nose, prominent eyes and mouth,
black hair, somewhat unkept, spectacles and a most bourgeois black
coat shiny with wear.
With his thumbs fixed pugnaciously in a far from immaculate waistcoat,
with his bulky head thrown back and his little body forward he struts
even when he stands, delivering himself with extraordinary rapidity
of thought and utterance and with an expression of inexhaustible self-complacency.
But I like the man. There is a directness of speech, an open-mindedness,
an imaginative warm-heartedness which should carry him far. He has
the self-complacency of one who is always thinking faster than his
neighbours, who is untroubled by doubts, and to whom the acquisition
of facts is as easy as the grasping of matter; but he has no vanity
and is totally unself-conscious.
(2)
In his book, Memories
and Reflections, Ben Tillett describes
the Labour Group on the London County Council.
Our small Labour Group included
Crooks, Burns, Steadman and Freak. Sidney Webb was an encyclopedia
of information and knowledge. With his fellow Fabians he made London
government his plaything. My respect for this formidable little gentleman
with the boundless stories of knowledge, industry and aptitude for
political intrigue, dates from the times when we worked together on
the London Council.
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