A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  If the historical reports of the death of the Liberal Party after 1918 are greatly exaggerated, it was nonetheless Labour and the Conservatives who were the main beneficiaries of peace. Whereas the in-fighting between Asquith and Lloyd George during the war had weakened the Liberal Party, Labour emerged strengthened by the experience of the war years. Union membership had almost doubled and the anti-war stance of some of the party’s left-wing members became increasingly attractive in the later, bloodiest stages of the conflict. Labour also gained most from the 1918 franchise reforms, which massively expanded the working-class electorate.

  But electoral success brought its own problems. For much of the inter-war period Labour was caught between fighting off right-wing ‘red scare’ smears, which sought to link the Labour movement with communism, and attempting to present itself as a moderate, responsible party of government. These twin pressures tended to negate any move towards truly radical political solutions. Equally, the actual level of socialist intellectual commitment within the Labour movement was debatable, given that many members, including leading figures like Arthur Henderson, remained wedded to a radical-Liberal political philosophy. The political dominance of the left wing of the Labour Party was by and large a temporary aberration, restricted to periods of internal division such as the late 1970s and early 1980s. More importantly, thoroughgoing British socialist/communist parties proved resolutely unpopular and, in the case of the Communist Party of Great Britain, were really only sustained as a significant force by Soviet support. Arguably, this unpopularity stemmed not simply from the success of Conservative negative propaganda but also from the poor fit of organisations like the CPGB with well-established domestic political traditions.

  The Labour Party constitution of 1918 is often felt to reflect the more confident socialist outlook of the party at this point, encapsulated in that great shibboleth of the Labour left, Clause IV. But Clause IV’s promise ‘to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry’ arguably demonstrated the continued power of radical-Liberal traditions within the Labour Party, not the dominance of socialist ideology. As its author, the Fabian Sidney Webb, explained, its socialism was ‘no more specific than a definite repudiation of the individualism that characterised all the political parties of the past generation and that still dominates the House of Commons’.2 Harking back to an earlier trope of radical rhetoric, the language of Labour’s new constitution was political, rather than sectional. It divided society not into economic classes, but into the ‘idle’ rich and the ‘producers’, a largely moral distinction.3 In its reference to the ‘workers by hand or by brain’, it also reached out to white-collar workers and professionals. Even its famous commitment to common ownership was remarkably vague, or, perhaps more generously, flexible, and certainly not an endorsement of state socialism. Common ownership, as far as Webb was concerned, might include cooperatives and even partnership structures such as the John Lewis group, as well as nationalised industries under direct central government control.4

  If this was ‘wishy-washy’ socialism, as Sylvia Pankhurst called it, it was also a well-tuned mission statement for a party that now aimed to tackle the Liberals head on in elections across the country, rather than ride upon its political coat-tails. It presented a party that was distinct enough from Liberalism without alienating either remaining radical Liberals within the party or the electorate. Significantly, Arthur Henderson, who had become party leader as a result of MacDonald’s opposition to the war, barely mentioned socialism in his election speeches. Indeed, though Clause IV is often seen as representing the Labour Party’s formal commitment to socialism, it was only in 1995, when Tony Blair successfully moved that the old Clause IV be replaced with a new text, that the constitution explicitly declared Labour to be a ‘democratic socialist party’, precisely at the moment when ‘New Labour’ had ceased to resemble anything of the kind.

  Though the Labour Party did not increase its number of MPs significantly at the 1918 election, in fact losing some leading figures such as Arthur Henderson, Philip Snowden and Ramsay MacDonald, its share of the vote rose to 22.2 per cent. It was starting to look like a realistic party of government, but this possibility, and the obstacles in its path, would now hang heavily over it for the next two decades. Lloyd George’s coalition government came to an end on 19 October 1922 when it appeared that he had brought a war-weary nation to the brink of conflict once more, this time over the defence of the Greek position in Asia Minor and the protection of the Dardanelles from Turkey. In the subsequent elections, Labour supplanted the Liberals as the second-largest political party, and in January 1924, in coalition with the Liberals, the first Labour administration in British history was formed.

  The government was not successful, however, and within nine months the new Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was forced to call a general election in the wake of the Liberals’ refusal to back the lenient government line in the ‘Campbell Case’, concerning the prosecution of the editor of the communist Workers’ Weekly for sedition, which MacDonald had seen as a political vote of confidence in his administration. The election was a disaster for Labour: the party’s results were badly affected by the publication of the so-called ‘Zinoviev letter’ in the Daily Mail. Purporting to have been sent by the Comintern to the CPGB, the letter advocated further pro-Soviet agitation within the British state, including in the armed forces, and ordered the proliferation of Leninist propaganda within the British Labour movement as a means to promote a rising of the proletariat. The letter was almost certainly a forgery, created by the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in order to smear Labour as a Trojan horse for Bolshevism and ensure a good electoral return for the Conservatives. MacDonald himself said that the publication of the letter left him feeling like a man ‘sewn into a sack and thrown into the sea’. This shameful propaganda was successful in its ends, and the Conservatives emerged the majority party.

  The relationship between the Labour Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain, founded in 1920, was fraught, not least because the CPGB, whatever the authenticity of the ‘Zinoviev letter’, was largely directed by Moscow and, until 1928, was intent on infiltrating the Labour movement. It was on Labour tickets that the communists Walter Newbold and Shapurji Saklavala, the Indian barrister, were elected in 1922. The CPGB could never pose a significant challenge to Labour’s public support. However, it made up for its limited popular appeal with the hefty subsidies that it received from the Comintern, which in 1927 equalled two-thirds of the income of the much larger Labour Party.

  This comparatively wealthy little party was able in 1931 to employ forty-one full-time staff, one for every 165 party members. Leading party workers earned as much as £5 a week, a considerable sum at a time of global economic depression and mass unemployment. Financial security underlined ideological commitment to ensure a relatively uncritical line towards the orders from the Comintern.5 As the former CPGB member Eric Hobsbawm would later remark, ‘We tell [the public] that we do not give the USSR “uncritical support”, but when they ask us when we disagreed with its policy, all we can point to is Nina Ponomareva’s hats.’6*

  Aside from attempting to ally itself with the Labour Party, up to 1928 the CPGB also sought to develop, with some success, militant cadres within trade unions. Under the new Conservative administration of Stanley Baldwin, industrial relations, especially with the miners, which had already reached a low in the last years of the coalition government, deteriorated further. In April 1926, Baldwin refused to renew a subsidy to the mining industry; the following May, he broke off negotiations with the TUC delegation. The unions decided to call a general strike. From 3 to 12 May, Britain stood at a standstill. In the end, it was left to the TUC to call off the strike, though the miners continued to hold out for several bitter, fruitless months. The government had been preparing for such a manoeuvre for over nine months.

  The belligerent Chancellor, Winston Churchill, took control of the TUC’s newspaper, th
e British Worker, and order was maintained by hundreds of recently drafted special constables. The dispute ended with no guarantee secured from the government that the striking workers would be able to return to their jobs. For the miners, who had initiated the dispute, there was only a deterioration in their working conditions, as pit-owners imposed wage cuts and increased their working hours. The difficulty for the unions had already been demonstrated in 1921 with the strike of the ‘triple alliance’ of miners, railwaymen and dockers. As Lloyd George put it, the unions could paralyse the country with a general strike – ‘We are at your mercy’ – but for their action to be a success they would have to be prepared to take control of the government. Despite the efforts of the CPGB, true revolutionaries among the ranks of the TUC were hard to find. The union leaders were constitutionalists and gradualists, like most of the Labour movement, and they could not contemplate overriding the usual channels of government.7

  This was the fundamental problem, noted by the historian Henry Pelling, faced by the CPGB: it was ‘a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation’.8 In the 1810s and 1840s, when the idea of a general strike had first been mooted, industrial action carried the scarcely concealed threat of insurrection. Now it represented no more than a temporary stop, which a well-prepared government could easily weather. Even so, despite this lack of militancy, with Labour having returned to power in May 1929, in the wake of the Wall Street Crash in October that year the government’s initial concessions to the unions were followed by a much tougher line. With the majority of his Cabinet, MacDonald believed that the only solution to the crisis was to cut government spending and raise taxes in order to prop up the pound. The only significant voice of dissent within the administration came from the economist John Maynard Keynes, ostensibly a Liberal but in fact the prophet of the mixed economy and supply-side economics.

  For MacDonald, however, it was vitally important that the still-young Labour Party present the face of a responsible party of government. Like so many Labour prime ministers after him, the quest for respectability led him further and further away from the party’s roots. His government’s policy led him into a direct confrontation with the unions, and it was a clash that MacDonald was determined to win, writing in August 1931: ‘If we yield now to the TUC, we shall never be able to call our bodies or our souls or our intelligences our own.’ The conflict led to a split within the Cabinet, Arthur Henderson and a significant minority of dissidents threatening their resignations should the spending cuts go ahead. On 23 August, MacDonald told King George V that every member of his Cabinet had resigned. Initially, MacDonald had intended to step down as well, but under pressure from Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and the King himself he was persuaded to head up a ‘national government’ to deal with the economic crisis. However, though this move briefly saw the pound rally, by late September the government was forced in any case to abandon the gold standard, as party in-fighting further weakened Britain’s fragile economic confidence. MacDonald was forced to dissolve Parliament on 7 October and fresh elections were called.

  The results proved a disaster for the Labour Party, whose fratricidal behaviour had witnessed a decline in their share of the popular vote – down by 1.5 million – and the lowest return of MPs for the party since 1918. For MacDonald, with a majority of five hundred, it was, however, a perverse kind of victory. By siding with the ‘national government’ rather than his old party, he had effectively become a prisoner to the whims of the Conservatives. The Tory line dominated economic policy and made no concessions to former advocates of free trade. MacDonald would continue as Prime Minister until 1935, but his influence, as well as his health, was rapidly failing. The attacks of old Labour colleagues cut him deeply: he was portrayed as a grasping social climber, satirised for his relationships with aristocratic women (namely, Lady Londonderry), and depicted as a man who had deliberately betrayed his party in order to gain the premiership. Afflicted by dimming sight and failing mental capacities, MacDonald sought solace in séances in which a medium called Grace Cooke claimed to put him in touch with his long-dead wife.

  The rise of the far right threatened to make the internal squabbles between the Westminster parties an irrelevancy. By this stage, the threat of fascism had been brought home by the efforts of one of MacDonald’s own former Cabinet colleagues, Oswald Mosley. Mosley had been expelled from the Labour Party in 1931 for forming his breakaway New Party that same year. The New Party had already shown signs of Mosley’s future leanings in its preference for direct action over parliamentary politics, and its recruitment of ‘enforcers’ such as the boxer Kid Lewis to ‘protect’ its members from the efforts of Jewish and communist groups to expose the ‘cloven hoof of fascism’ that lay behind its agenda. Following a trip to Italy, during which he met Benito Mussolini, Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists in October 1932. The new movement found support from the press baron Lord Rothermere, whose paper, the Daily Mail, loudly proclaimed from its front page: ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ However, mainstream support for the BUF disintegrated after the violent end to the party’s rally at Olympia on 7 June 1934, when stewards brutally ejected hecklers from the crowd.

  Mosley himself was careful not to let his rhetoric stray too far into outright anti-Semitism, but he did nothing to suppress anti-Jewish action and rhetoric from his rank-and-file supporters. Matters culminated at the famous ‘Battle of Cable Street’ on 4 October 1936, when a legal march of BUF supporters, accompanied by a police escort to prevent disruption by anti-fascist groups, clashed with Jews, socialists and trade unionists, who had erected barricades to prevent them from coming through the East End. The anti-fascists succeeded in stalling the march and forced the BUF to disperse. The union between Jewish, socialist, Irish and communist groups that day formed powerful memories. One eyewitness, Professor Bill Fishman, who was fifteen at the time, recalled that he was moved to tears by the sight of ‘bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working-class people could get together to oppose the evil of racism.’9

  The ‘Battle of Cable Street’ is rightly celebrated as a victory against fascism, but nonetheless it sits, like the Jarrow ‘Crusade’ of the same month, rather uneasily within a history of the Labour movement. The actions of the two hundred unemployed men who marched from Wearside to London to petition the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, for relief, were endorsed by neither the Labour Party nor the TUC. These organisations were concerned that the march might be affiliated with the communist-influenced National Unemployed Workers’ Movement – indeed, the Jarrow men had called their action a ‘crusade’ in a bid to distance themselves from the NUWM. It was left to the MP for Jarrow and former communist ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson to raise the marchers’ plight in the Commons. Despite her efforts, and the severity of economic conditions in Jarrow (unemployment ran to 72 per cent), the marchers returned with little more than their train fare back to the North East.

  Similarly, not only did the Labour Party refuse to endorse the actions of anti-fascists at Cable Street, the party’s leadership actively worked to suppress such militant activity. The local Labour MP for Whitechapel did support the Jewish petition for the BUF’s march to be called off, but George Lansbury, the former party leader, would only go so far as to call for the march to be rerouted through ‘less congested’ areas. Those who chose to resist the march by force, he suggested, were only giving the BUF undue publicity. In the wake of the battle, the Labour conference (which had started on the eve of the march) condemned the actions of the fascists, the communists and Independent Labour Party activists. It did, though, also condemn the decision to let the march go ahead and called for new measures to prevent ‘militarised politics’. The government put such measures into effect with the Public Order Act of the same year, which banned the wearing of uniforms in political demonstrations. However, the powers granted in the act were used more against anti-fascist groups than against Mosley’s BUF.
10 This use of the act fulfilled the aims of the major Labour spokesman in favour of it, Herbert Morrison, then leader of the London County Council, who hoped it would be ‘framed in such a way as to deal with Fascists or anybody else who wants to upset the constitutional liberties of this State by force or conspiracy, with the aid of money got from abroad’11 – this last a clear dig at the CPGB as well as the BUF.

  Labour’s unease over the tactics deployed by the anti-fascists at Cable Street was linked to broader disquiet over the CPGB’s leadership of the opposition to fascism in the 1930s. As Walter Citrine, the TUC General Secretary, argued,

  The TUC stands for the principle of democracy against dictatorship, and it is not ready to make qualifications between the dictatorship of the so-called proletariat, which is nothing more than the dictatorship of a handful of Communists in Russia, and the dictatorship of the Fascists. Let us be very careful to make clear to the public at large that our principles are fundamentally different from those advanced by the Communist Party. They believe in force and fighting on the streets, however they may disguise it.12

  Though the CPGB had recently shifted from its policy of attacking the Labour Party to urging a ‘united front’ of Labour, the now disaffiliated ILP and communists against the fascist threat, these overtures were resisted. This resistance was not just the result of a desire to oppose political extremism outside of the party. The betrayal of 1931, with the establishment of a national government, had led some within Labour itself to advocate more drastic measures. In 1933, Sir Stafford Cripps proposed that any newly elected Labour government should immediately pass an Emergency Powers Act and, if this were resisted by the Lords, meet the constitutional crisis head on and make the government ‘temporarily into a dictatorship’.13 Statements like this, and Cripps’s noisy disagreement with the party leadership over the ‘united front’, led to his temporary ejection from the party. The Labour Party was also ambivalent in its response to the fascist threat internationally, initially favouring non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War, a stance that allowed the CPGB to make considerable political capital from its role as a recruiting agent for International Brigades.14