Religion, Politics and the Catholic Working Class

Extract

Most studies of the British electorate agree that Catholics tend to support Labour. Indeed, Robert McKenzie and Allan Silver argue that Roman Catholics are the group least likely to vote Conservative. However, with a few notable exceptions Catholics have not made a great contribution to Labour politics. This failure can be explained by a variety of factors, primarily the insistence by Church leaders in the past that, as a minority, Catholics ought to organize defensively to protect their own interests, particularly the schools. Hence the formation of the Catholic Federations as a response to the educational policies of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Governments. Some Catholics in this period were also mesmerized by the chimera of a Catholic party similar to the German Centre Party, and it is highly significant that the Salford Diocesan Federation received overtures from the right-wing British Labour Party in 1911, which had been formed ‘to promote by constitutional methods the welfare of the working class, and to secure real Labour representation’. Ecclesiastics were suspicious of state socialism and ideological politics in general and hostile to the secularists and anarchists on the fringe of the Left. Bishop Vaughan declared in 1883 that the doctrines of socialism were the outcome of Satan’s teaching, and that ‘terrorism, incendiarism, violence, and murder are lawful weapons whenever it is judged that this will advance the cause of socialism’. Finally, most of the Catholic working class were Irish, or of Irish extraction, abjectly poor, and unlikely to possess the necessary property or residential franchise qualification, so consequently Catholics were under-registered until after the implementation of the 1918 Representation of the People Act.