CHAPTER TWO

Second Time as Disaster

‘The myth has grown that in our society the state is neutral. It is not, and never has been. Therefore its apparatus must be democratised and made more responsive to the needs of a democratic society.’

Eric Heffer

The defeat of the unions in 1926 saw workers turn to the Labour Party to defend them from the rapacious Tories. By the time of the 1929 general election they all had the vote – every adult over 21 could now vote and 8 million voted Labour. The result was Labour’s best yet, with more MPs returned than ever before. The ILP retained a significant presence in Parliament: of the 287 Labour MPs, 140 were aligned with the ILP, although only 37 had been directly funded with ILP money in their election campaigns. Labour had the most MPs, though not a majority, pulling the party back into the familiar strategic debate about how to get legislation passed with Liberal support. The second MacDonald administration was seen by many in the ILP as a chance to undo past mistakes and show working people what Labour could achieve. Moreover, Maxton had won a motion at the 1929 conference that gave the PLP, not the Prime Minister, the right to nominate the Cabinet. The hope this time from the left was that a stronger representation of genuine socialists might ensue. Worryingly, MacDonald displayed contempt for party democracy by ignoring the conference decision and selecting his own Cabinet.

Six months after the election the Wall Street Crash ripped the heart out of the world economy. The left’s fears about the inadequate political strategy of the Labour leaders were tragically realised in the catastrophe that was the 1929–31 government. Faced with an economic crisis at the very heart of capitalism, and with millions of workers looking to them for protection, the Labour government spectacularly failed to meet the challenge. They failed to identify the causes of the wider problems: that, alongside the Great Depression, the British Empire was staring into the abyss and British industry was being crushed by both commercial and financial foreign competition. Britain’s economic strength and the resulting power of its working class had always been predicated on its role as a global power – which also formed the material basis for the jingoism and nationalism in the workers’ movement. The MacDonald government had no serious answers to the unravelling of British imperial power and the ensuing economic decline, despite being elected by the mass of enfranchised working men and women to deliver real change. If ever there was a time to deliver on the pledge to implement whatever they could of their programme, and ‘go down fighting’ rather than capitulate to the self-preservation of the capitalist elites, it was now. But the tragedy of the first Labour government was repeated, only this time with far more damaging results.

The lack of a specific socialist policy meant that Snowden at the Treasury fell back on the tried, tested and failed methods of the Liberals and Tories. Snowden proved a disastrous choice for Chancellor because he refused to deviate from the old liberal policies: he was a zealous supporter of both free trade and maintaining the gold standard. Ignoring the trade unions and his own party members, he leaned heavily on the civil service and the Treasury for advice. Defiant in the face of what would later become Keynesian orthodoxy, Snowden opposed deficit spending to boost the economy and create jobs. Instead he oversaw an austerity regime which only made the economic crisis far worse for working people. Inevitably, MacDonald and Snowden faced opposition from within the party from the earliest days of the government. ILP members, including Maxton and Wheatley, proposed an amendment to the King’s Speech which would commit the government to nationalising key industries and an income sufficient for workers to sustain their families.¹ The amendment was defeated in the PLP and some MPs became increasingly exasperated at the vocal antics of what they saw as a recalcitrant left minority.²

The central problem facing the Labour government was that of keeping its pledge to reduce spiralling unemployment. Despite election promises, unemployment actually doubled under the two-year administration, reaching 2.7 million. MacDonald’s handling of the crisis was denounced weekly in the ILP press. The lines of contention were clear: ‘The issue is whether in this economic situation the Labour Movement is to make futile attempts to rebuild capitalism or whether it is to accept the challenge of the failure of capitalism by boldly determining to lay the foundation for a new social order.’³ The ILP demanded that the issue of unemployment be tackled to ensure that workers’ lives were not destroyed by a crisis they had not created. Unemployment laws limited payments to only those people that were ‘genuinely looking for work’, which was being used to arbitrarily throw people off welfare. The ILP tried to get these onerous parts of the law removed but were defeated in the Commons by the Tories and Labour right. As the crisis ground on, Labour retreated from even mild social reforms and welfarism, instead launching an attack on the living standards of working people as a way of trying to save British capitalism. In 1918 the party had pledged to ‘lend no hand’ to the revival of capitalism and to see it buried. Now the leadership was scrabbling around desperately looking for cuts to prop up the economy – for which it took some merciless criticism from the ILP.

The Labour right in the PLP were very hostile to the activities of the ILP, seeing their MPs as wreckers who were undermining the party in a fragile situation. Wheatley was unrepentant however, pointing out that all the ILP MPs were doing was implementing the party policy adopted at conference: ‘No rebel has yet cast a vote in Parliament except for something which was the declared policy of the Party. We are not in rebellion against the Labour Party, but we are in rebellion against anybody who will try to lead it away from its great historic mission. That mission was the abolition of poverty. Until that task is accomplished every Labour man and woman ought to be a rebel.’⁴ At their 1930 conference the ILP declared that they were a ‘separate socialist organisation’ and were not beholden to the right-wing policies of the government.⁵

As the class war intensified, people had to choose sides. Confronted by financial speculators launching an attack on the pound, thereby plunging the British economy further into stagnation, the option was either to make bold inroads into wealth and property to rebuild the economy on a socialistic basis, or make the poor pay for the crisis. The ILP leadership wrote to its parliamentary group requesting that each MP publicly sign up to the principles of Socialism in our Time or leave the ILP. Faced with this choice many ILPs parliamentarians abandoned the party en masse, shrinking its membership in the Commons from 140 to just 18. Confronted with the economic crisis gripping the country, the pressure of Parliament and the rightward shift by Labour, most of the left MPs opted for the gradualist approach of MacDonald.

In August 1931 MacDonald decided that his allegiance lay with the bankers and employers – he concluded that it was the workers’ intransigence that was really preventing the sacrifices necessary to get the economy healthy again. In his diary he wrote: ‘If we yield now to the TUC we shall never be able to call our bodies or souls or intelligences our own.’⁶ He was, however, happy to yield his body, soul and intelligence to the demands of the government’s creditors. In the perennial battle of any Labour leader, that between class and country, MacDonald finally sided with a view of the national good ‘defined by British bankers in a crisis made by international speculators’.⁷

The financiers did not prescribe specific cuts but they did demand a balanced budget to ‘restore confidence’. Looking for cuts that all parties could support, eyes turned to the May Committee of Inquiry, which recommended £97 million worth of cuts and the gutting of welfare and unemployment benefits, a policy that would hit the poorest hardest. Backed by the Conservatives, MacDonald proposed to implement the welfare reforms to balance the budget. This was too much even for many on the Labour right. The fall-out and subsequent retreat in Parliament led to a split in the Cabinet, with eight Ministers refusing to agree to the 20 per cent cut in unemployment benefit. Faced with a concerted attack on the pound and an ultimatum from the Bank of England that if cuts weren’t made then the credit supply would dry up, MacDonald submitted the resignation of his government to the king, only to re-emerge afterwards as Prime Minister in a coalition government with the Tories.

MacDonald declared an election in 1932 that split Labour in two. MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas declared themselves members of National Labour and supporters of an emergency coalition government with the Tories to ‘ensure national stability’. They stood for election on the basis that if a ‘National Government’ was not returned then people’s savings would be decimated and hyper-inflation would grip the country. Snowden made the most treacherous attack on his old party, describing Labour policy as ‘Bolshevism run mad’.⁸

Due to the combined efforts of the Tories, the now ex-Labour leaders and the fear tactics of the media, Labour was routed at the 1932 election losing 225 MPs. Only 52 Labour MPs were elected (three ILP MPs were elected separately), leaving a vacuum in the PLP leadership after nearly every Cabinet member lost their seat. After a few months the government agreed to leave the gold standard without any serious fuss from the City of London, even though the previous Labour government had been warned not to do so by the same bankers.⁹ MacDonald led the most integrationist wing of his party into an uneasy alliance with the class enemy, ending up distrusted by the Tories and hated by his fellow socialists. This was the culmination of the Fabian strategy writ large on the pages of history, just at a time when the working class was looking to Labour to secure its welfare and living standards and needed a bold and audacious party fighting for their interests. MacDonald’s remaining time in Parliament was a shambolic end to a disastrous career as Prime Minister. In his last rambling, tearful speech to Parliament, Maxton famously interrupted him: ‘Sit down man! You’re a bloody tragedy.’

The Labour rank and file considered the MacDonald strategy a betrayal of their party and of the workers’ movement. Even Clement Attlee, normally quite a temperate Labour MP, described it some years later as the ‘greatest betrayal in the political history of this country’.¹⁰ It was easy for the remaining Labour members to blame MacDonald, Thomas and Snowden individually, but others offered a more radical critique. Jennie Lee for instance, a left-wing ILP member from Scotland, attacked the notion that the great betrayal was an ‘isolated and infamous act’, arguing that it was the logical end point of the entire political philosophy of the old party leadership, reared as it was on a diet of liberalism and Fabianism.¹¹ The mistake was the result of the strategy that had been adopted in 1900, not of the actions of a few misguided individuals.

As the most senior surviving MP, Lansbury was the only eligible candidate for the leadership position, taking over after Henderson lost his seat. This offered a rare moment in the party’s history for a left-wing leader. Lansbury commanded respect and was much loved by Labour members and workers across the country, but his pacifist principles sat dangerously outside the prevailing militarist mood of the time. With the collapse of the PLP, the balance of power in Labour shifted decisively towards the union leaders. Men like Bevin, Citrine and Henderson met to organise a ‘council of war’ with the intention of making Labour electable again and acting as a bulwark against any turn to the left. They could not tolerate Lansbury as leader for long, and set about making plans in motion to oust him.

Adieu, ILP

Once again, the failure of a Labour government led to a radicalisation of the Labour left. Some more moderate Labour thinkers even began to talk openly about the problems with the ‘gradualist’ approach; Tawney is often quoted as saying that when it came to reforming capitalism into socialism ‘onions can be peeled leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a live tiger claw by claw’. It is the tiger after all, that usually does the killing. Attlee boldly declared at the 1932 party conference: ‘no further progress can be made in seeking to get crumbs from the rich man’s table ... they cannot get socialism without tears, that whenever we try to do anything we will be opposed by every vested interest, financial, political and social’.¹² The left turn that the ILP had been taking for a decade accelerated and deepened, heading towards a more radical reformism and away from the ethical socialism they had initially counterposed to Fabianism.¹³

Both Labour and the ILP had to find a way of dealing with the fallout from the MacDonald disaster. The two organisations, one a constituent of the other, had come to different conclusions. The ILP was increasingly critical of the gradualism of the party leadership; the failure of the Labour government on top of the defeat of the miners was too much for ILP members. The Labour right, for its part, was intent on forcing the ILP to either surrender or leave the party. The ILP had been on a tight leash since 1929 when the PLP changed its standing orders to prevent the ILP left from voting against the government. This silencing of dissent fell very hard on the more radical MPs and some refused to sign the new standing orders. As punishment, the NEC refused to endorse the 19 ILP candidates who stood in the 1931 election. With only 52 MPs left, Labour demanded complete unity in votes in the commons. The ILP rejected this, arguing that the problem with the Labour government had been political, not organisational. If they were not free to speak their mind then how could they explain to the working class and Labour voters what the problems were? The ILP demanded that the socialist measures in the Labour manifesto be implemented, but with the PLP autonomous of the democratic structures of the party it was simply not possible to push a clear socialist line. Amid the growing rancour, the calls for outright disaffiliation became cacophonous. Brockway went to visit Lansbury to broker peace, but the latter refused to countenance going back to the federal model of pre-1918, which the ILP believed was the only way to save Labour from a split.¹⁴

The ILP National Council was totally divided on the question of disaffiliation, so gave no recommendation to the 1932 conference in Blackpool. The ILP debate split three ways: disaffiliation, continued affiliation or continued negotiations. Brockway, Maxton and others met with representatives from the Labour Party to try to reach an agreement. They proposed that MPs should be able to vote against the PLP line but would then have to face being reported to their CLPs where local members would decide what to do with them – either endorse their actions or censure them in some way. The Labour Party representatives were uninterested, demanding acceptance of the PLP standing orders as the only basis for continued negotiation.

The ILP convened a second conference in Bradford in a tense atmosphere. The local ILP paper – the Bradford Pioneer – printed an open letter to the conference delegates headlined: ‘The ILP was born in Bradford. Have you come to bury it?’ The appeal had only limited resonance; the ILP delegates voted by 241 to 142 to leave Labour, an act described by one historian as ‘suicide during a fit of insanity’.¹⁵ Brockway supported disaffiliation, though later agreed that the decision had been a mistake. The hard-line tendency argued that the split meant a ‘clean break’ in which ILP members cut off all ties with Labour, no longer even associating with it through their trade union affiliations. The decision to not pay the union political levy proved particularly disastrous: many ILP union activists were now treated as pariahs; in many union branches they weren’t allowed to take part in political discussions as branch chairs loyal to Labour had them removed from the meeting. Leaving Labour in the way they did meant being exorcised from the political wing of the movement, cut off from the many thousands of workers and socialists still affiliated.

The split tore apart comradeships that had been built up over many years. For ILP members like Jennie Lee, a miner’s daughter brought up on radical socialist traditions, it was clear that Labour’s entire strategy up till that point had failed. She sided with Maxton, later writing that ‘the British working class movement was in no mood to accommodate me. It had split into warring factions ... I had to choose.’¹⁶ Nye Bevan was furious with her: ‘Why don’t you get into a nunnery and be done with it? … I tell you, it is the Labour Party or nothing ... I know all its faults, all its dangers. But it is the Party that we have taught millions of working people to look to and regard as their own.’¹⁷ Despite Bevan’s thunderous criticisms, Lee would not be budged, she believed leaving was the only logical course of action left open to principled socialists. For many radicals the ill-fated attempt to unite liberals and socialists had reached its logical conclusion – the broad church of integrationist, liberal Fabians and transformative radicals of various stripes was finished, broken by the cold reality of the MacDonald government.

The split was indeed a disaster for the ILP. Despite the Great Recession and mass unemployment, being outside of Labour proved to be a barren place. A rigorous campaign of activism didn’t stop the ILP’s membership collapsing – many had been paper members only or had viewed it more as a social club. It is tempting to look at the trajectory of the ILP and conclude that they behaved in a sectarian or destructive manner and that remaining in Labour would have been preferable, as Bevan argued at the time. But being locked into a party led by people who detested them, the grass definitely looked greener outside. If there had been more internal democracy in the Labour Party then the ILP might have fared much better, but the consensus between the NEC, the PLP and the TUC meant that pursuing constitutional reform was simply not possible. The ILP believed that the rise of fascism and the crisis of capitalism was a harbinger of the final breakdown of the system and that it could therefore win mass working-class support from Labour by being independent. This perspective proved to be misjudged.

Independence did however allow some freedom of action. A majority of ILP members supported sending a brigade to Spain in the late 1930s to support the revolution. Brockway himself – who had praised Gandhi and maintained a theoretical commitment to non-violence – changed his position in the face of an actual revolution in which his friends, international collaborators and comrades were involved. The ILP sent 25 members to Spain to fight on the side of the Republicans, and would have sent more were it not for government intervention. They fought alongside the POUM,¹⁸ and some of their battles were famously described by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia.¹⁹ It was a measure of how far the ILP had come since 1916, when they opposed the Dublin uprising on pacifist grounds.

In late 1938, feelers were put out by Stafford Cripps, acting on behalf of Attlee, to seek a meeting with the ILP to discuss reaffiliation. The meeting between the two party leaderships in one of the committee rooms of the Commons proved to be a positive affair. The Labour leaders were apparently quite keen for the ILP to rejoin on the same basis as 1931 – that is with an independent press and party structure and their own policies, but with an agreement not to vote against the PLP whips in the Commons. The ILP leadership accepted this; even Maxton who disagreed in principle but accepted it as long as the majority of the party felt that it was the right thing to do. The Labour NEC also voted to endorse the reaffiliation. But then the war broke out. Labour supported the war while the ILP opposed it, and with Labour’s temporary electoral truce with the opposition parties in place, reaffiliation at that point proved impossible.

The Socialist League

When the ILP disaffiliated, some of its supporters chose to stay with Labour as they still saw it as the best hope for radical change. After the July 1932 ILP conference had voted for disaffiliation, the Socialist League emerged a month later to carry on the legacy of the ILP within the Labour Party. The League was part think tank, part grassroots activist network, part left pressure group. In the tradition of the Fabian movement it set out to publish pamphlets, essays and books on various aspects of socialist theory with the aim of intellectually preparing a future Labour government for replacing capitalism. It was bankrolled by Stafford Cripps, a popular parliamentarian who had been elected (twice!) in 1931. Although Cripps came from an aristocratic background, like many others he was radicalised during the 1920s. The experience of the second MacDonald government set him on a course towards a semi-revolutionary politics, though this was contemptuously dismissed by Hugh Dalton MP as ‘an adolescent Marxist miasma’.²⁰

Cripps was joined by Harold Laski, a prominent intellectual who went on to teach Ralph Miliband. Other leading figures included Nye Bevan, Barbara Betts (later Castle), William Mellor and Ellen Wilkinson. A young Michael Foot was also an active member – an ethical socialist inspired by H.G. Wells, he and Betts read Marx together in their twenties.²¹ Laski helped found the Left Book Club and co-founded Tribune with Cripps, Bevan, George Strauss, Wilkinson and the publisher Victor Gollancz. Major Clement Attlee was also a contributor to pamphlets and lectures by the League. This was a time when the intellectual fires of the Labour left were burning with the intensity of a movement trying to find its way forward after a historic defeat.

The Socialist League in some ways represented the most advanced internal theoretical challenge to Labour’s gradualist approach, and certainly reached the most radical conclusions based on their research, analysis and lived experience. It sought to win the party to a transformative strategy, and in doing so transform the party itself. The question would be how far they could go before the integrative tendencies of the party overwhelmed them. The League started off strong: within three months it had 70 branches across the country and a big presence at the 1933 and 1934 conferences. While it had little influence in Parliament, it did combine a dynamic and serious theoretical endeavour with a broad reach of support across the party. It fused with the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda, which included G.D.H. Cole, and succeeded in ousting Ernest Bevin from his position as its chair. The League’s approach was thoroughly empirical and educative; it sent members out to gather data and material for its pamphlets, to ensure the arguments would be irrefutable by Tories or the bosses. The intention was to turn these facts into agitation and propaganda for socialism.

Unlike the ILP, which started life as a separate party and maintained its existence as such throughout its time in Labour, the League opted for a different approach. It initially prioritised the education of Labour members and getting left-wing policies adopted at conference. As an affiliated socialist organisation, the League had delegate rights on local bodies. In addition, because the local Labour branches were quite weak and disorganised, with few active members and a general sense of despondency after the MacDonald fiasco, League activists prioritised trying to develop a healthy intellectual party culture.

The main debates that gripped the Socialist League focused on unemployment and socialist planning, the problems of Labour as a socialist vehicle, and wider concerns about how British capitalism and imperialism prevented the success of a socialist programme. After the collapse of the great strike and then MacDonald’s betrayal, people were attracted to radical theories and insights into the limits of parliamentary socialism and the trade union movement. The way the bosses had crushed the general strike through mass scabbing by the middle classes, and the Tories used the army or police to break strikes, opened up a wider discussion around the role of the state and the tenacity with which the ruling class would pursue the class struggle. Many believed that the gradualism of the Fabians and MacDonald had been exposed by the concerted sabotage of the British economy the 1929–31 government had witnessed. In his article, ‘The Choice Before the Labour Party’, Tawney outlined the prevailing fears on the left:

If the privileged classes’ position is seriously threatened they will use every piece on the board, political and economic, the House of Lords, the Crown, the Press, disaffection in the army, financial crises, international difficulties, and even, as newspaper attacks on the pound in 1931 showed, the émigré trick of injuring one’s own country to protect one’s pocket – in the honest conviction that they are saving civilisation.²²

The League recognised the class struggle: ‘We have got to decide on which side of the economic conflict we belong, and having decided, face up to the implications of that conflict’, as Barbara Betts solemnly declared.²³

Leaders like Cripps and Laski believed that it would not be possible to achieve socialism through strictly constitutional-parliamentary means; mass direct action would be needed to buttress any left Labour government once in office. Cripps ran into considerable trouble when he implied that the monarchy might sabotage an elected left government; the Labour NEC forced him to publicly retract his statement. The League turned their theory into a series of motions for the Labour conference, with proposals to abolish the House of Lords and for the introduction of an ‘Emergency Powers Act’ to ‘takeover or regulate the financial machine, and to put into force any measures that the situation may require for the immediate control or socialisation of industry and for the safeguarding of the food supply and other necessities’.²⁴ The League won a vote at the 1932 conference for the nationalisation of the Joint Stock Banks to prevent capital flight.

While radical compared to the constitutionalism of the party and the conservatism of the trade union leaders, the League’s approach was still a parliamentary route, though one which accepted the importance of extra-parliamentary action. In effect, their socialist programme represented a series of laws that a left Labour government could implement, with their success guaranteed by the speed of the legislative agenda – hence the need for emergency powers within days of being elected – and the active support of the wider working-class movement. The continuing domination of the right in alliance with the union block vote was not significantly addressed. The League’s position also seemed to reduce the problems of the MacDonald government to a question of timing: if only they had implemented a socialist programme in the first few weeks, then any possible attempts at capital-strikes, bankers blackmail or industrial sabotage could have been be avoided.

International issues dominated the agenda in the 1930s. Labour’s continued support for the British Empire caused some consternation in the ranks. Its position as a governing party administering the Empire never wavered once in either 1924 or 1929–31. By contrast, the League’s members arrived at a wholly different, anti-colonial, position. Labour was formally committed by its 1933 conference to support ‘socialisation and self-government’ in India,²⁵ but in 1935 Attlee proposed an amendment that would grant India only Dominion status – far short of truly democratic independence. The prevailing view in Labour was that India was too vast and too primitive a country to administer its own affairs, as such, until their society had developed, ‘the Labour Party considers that the British Government must act as trustee for the native races’.²⁶ Against this Western paternalism and appeal to the ‘white man’s burden’, H.N. Brailsford published a controversial book, India in Chains, that linked the question of British imperial rule to the subjugation and enforced ‘backwardness’ of the Indian people. He argued that it was the alliance between British colonialism and the propertied classes in India that conspired to keep the mass of people down. Britain ruled India in a way that robbed the people of education and thus of the political capacity to run their own affairs – creating a vicious circle in which continued British occupation appeared necessary. The League rejected the racist category of ‘backward people’ and called for self-determination based on a Constituent Assembly that would ensure a full and democratic debate for the Indian people.²⁷

Overall, Socialist Leaguers were dismissive of the League of Nations. Rather than focusing on the details of how the League of Nations worked, their criticism ran deeper – the imperialist context itself precluded its effectiveness as a tool for world peace. They believed that the failure of the League of Nations to intervene in Manchuria to help the Chinese fight the Japanese, and its prevarication over Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, were not the result of a lack of will – rather, the lack of will was itself an expression of the political problems of the League. Some in Labour argued that the League of Nations was effectively a product of imperialism, and although they were not in favour of withdrawing from it, they only supported its actions in as much as they could be considered progressive for the world working class.²⁸ This position was scandalous to the Tories, the Liberals and many Labour integrationists.

Lessons Learned?

Despite the departure of the ILP, Labour with Lansbury at its head still moved left as a consequence of the fallout from the MacDonald government. For many socialists within Labour the signs were good that lessons may have been learned and a new dawn was coming for a revived, more democratic and more clearly socialist party. The process of governmental disappointment followed by a turn to the left to reinvigorate the demoralised membership was by now a familiar pattern. What was not yet clear was the extent to which the Labour hierarchy would tolerate, let alone encourage, debate over principles and tactics to consolidate the activist base before the ‘serious work’ of preparing for government arrived. The 1930s provide a textbook example of the usual ‘turn to the left’ process once in opposition.

At the 1932 conference, the left – led by Charles Trevelyan – won votes on nationalising the Joint Stock Banks, preventing a return of Snowden and MacDonald, and condemning gradualism as a strategy. They also won a motion at the 1933 conference to commit Labour to call a general strike in the event of war. The 1934 policy statement was just as radical on the domestic front. The party’s programme For Socialism and Peace committed it to the nationalisation of land, banking, coal, iron and steel, transport, power and the water supply, as well as the setting up of a National Investment Board to plan industrial development. These policies only lasted until 1937, when the right won back control. The commitment to the general strike in the event of war was overturned by a joint meeting of the PLP, the NEC and the TUC at Transport House.²⁹ The left’s labour of Sisyphus during these battles would be familiar to many subsequent generations – all the good work done at conference was undone in committee meetings and back-room deals over the following months.

In some ways the Socialist League initiated policies that became Labour mainstream thinking. For instance, as a response to mass unemployment they advocated planning and credit to boost demand – a Keynesian measure synonymous with post-war Labour policy.³⁰ But other ideas were more controversial, for instance workers’ self-management, debated at the 1933 conference. The view of the right, led by Herbert Morrison, was that workers, bosses and the government should jointly run industry, ensuring a collaborative approach to any problems. This became known as corporatism, which the left feared would subordinate workers to their bosses.³¹ Morrison advocated forms of local municipality that were supposedly based on the lessons of Lansbury in Poplar, but with one crucial component missing: Poplarism had been based on mass participatory activity, but Morrison favoured efficiency over democracy, a political machine over local participation.³²

The Socialist League challenged the corporatist view, some of its members even associating it with creeping fascism. They wanted a greater share of control for workers in industry, linked to a planned economy. The League’s notion of workers’ control issued in a proposal for a National Economic Council made up of trade unionists, experts and representatives from industry.³³ The League’s vision had trade unionists sitting on the boards of nationalised companies as the representatives of their members, not merely as management personnel.³⁴ The Leaguers were critical of any ‘national plan’ that didn’t also involve moves towards the expropriation of capitalists, considering that anything less would just be a move to manage capitalism to ensure productivity. Inevitably this led to a clash with union leaders like Bevin, who regarded the League’s policies as unrealistic and divisive.

Attempting to draw the lessons from the first two Labour governments, a series of proposals were made in the 1933 document Labour and Government to put in place measures to stop future disasters. It committed Labour to holding a special conference of the labour movement before accepting office in a minority government, as a means to secure some kind of oversight on possible policy initiatives. A Labour Prime Minister would also have to consult the PLP before deciding on a Cabinet – a mechanism for getting more critical voices heard in the formation of a government. Most importantly, it insisted that the policies of any future government had to be agreed at conference and ‘embodied in the General Election manifesto’.³⁵ The decision of conference was quite clear – any future minority government must implement a socialist programme and stand or fall in the Commons on that programme.³⁶

After its initial successes, the Socialist League rapidly ran aground, failing to amend Labour’s programme at the 1934 conference. Mellor wrote in The Socialist Leaguer that it was a combination of the trade union block vote and the NEC’s control of the Conference Arrangements Committee that had defeated the League’s intervention. He concluded that the League should reach out beyond Labour. They had reached the limits of what was possible given the current constitutional and political arrangements, and should therefore turn to the wider workers’ movement to fight for socialism.³⁷

The League’s main political campaigns were against unemployment, fascism and imperialism. Since appeals to the Labour leadership fell on deaf ears, they looked outwards to joint initiatives with the ILP and the CPGB around issues like unemployment. When the left organised a series of hunger marches and mass protests against the devastating effects of poverty and the lack of jobs in working-class communities, Socialist League, ILP and CPGB activists were centrally involved in putting pressure on the National Government to tackle the issue. The CPGB had by this stage abandoned their social-fascism argument and swung towards a Popular Front policy: that working-class parties should unite with ‘progressive capitalists’ to defend democracy against fascism.

When Oswald Mosley, recently returned from Italy and keen to put Mussolini’s fascism into practice in Britain, organised a provocative march through London’s East End to terrorise the Jewish community, more joint actions were organised. While Labour’s leaders and The Daily Herald urged Labour members to ‘Keep Away’ and stay indoors, the Socialist League, ILP and CPGB organised a massive anti-fascist demonstration that confronted the fascists on Cable Street and broke up their march route, humiliating the racist Black Shirts and proving the strength and unity of the workers’ movement – despite opposition from the official leadership.³⁸

Debates on world events dominated the 1935–6 period, in particular the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia) and the fascist counter-revolution in Spain. With the Italian invasion looming, the TUC, NEC and PLP called on the League of Nations to use any means at its disposal to stop Mussolini. Lansbury opposed on strictly pacifist grounds; the Socialist League on anti-imperialist grounds. As Cripps explained: ‘If war comes before the workers in Great Britain have won power, that war will be ... in the interests of British imperialism.’³⁹ The League called for a general strike, a policy inevitably blocked by the TUC.

The argument for non-intervention in Spain was that it would stop arms and equipment falling into the hands of Franco’s fascist forces but Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were already supplying Franco with all the material he needed to beat the Republicans and the left. In the cause of solidarity, the Socialist League supported intervention on the side of the Republic. The debate over how to respond to Spain frustrated many on the left, particularly Laski. Labour adopted a position of fundraising for non-military materials such as medical supplies. The League wanted them to go further, arguing for military support for the Republican government against the fascist rebels. The 1936 party conference was movingly addressed by two Spanish Republicans, which boosted the left’s case but was not enough to overturn the union block vote backing the executive’s policy of non-intervention. Laski bitterly wrote after the event: ‘After a long fight those blasted trade unions decided on non-intervention though they knew this meant a sure rebel [Franco] victory in Spain ... I have never seen such blindness in a body of leaders since I began to be interested in politics ... It is just pitiable.’⁴⁰ At subsequent meetings, workers still demanded action: in the words of one union member ‘we have to go to Transport house and turn it upside down’.⁴¹

The decision of the Labour Party not to assist the Republicans in Spain drove the Socialist League further into the arms of the CPGB. Along with the ILP and CPGB they launched a Unity Manifesto calling for a united front of all working-class organisations against fascism. Labour’s leadership wanted nothing to do with it. When the League debated the Unity Campaign in January 1937, members expressed mixed opinions. The delegates voted 56 in favour, 35 against and 23 abstaining on a motion to back the Unity Manifesto, but most knew this would propel them into a headlong clash with Labour and risk disaffiliation. It also caused big ructions on the left: many in the ILP were very critical of the show trials in Moscow where well-known communists were being executed based on false charges. There was no criticism of this in the Unity Campaign. Those who were doubtful of the CPGB’s intentions were right to be concerned; it was revealed after the conference that the CPGB had been secretly promoting the dissolution of the League ‘in the best interests of the [Unity] campaign’. Clearly the Stalinists were concerned about a radical left emerging within Labour, and wanted it either stamped out or absorbed into the CPGB.

In response to the Unity Campaign, Labour’s NEC moved to bring matters to a head. The excuse was the League’s collaboration with the CPGB, but that was only the official explanation. The real goal was to kick the stool from under the left and isolate figures like Laski and Cripps. As an exasperated Hugh Dalton wrote in his diary concerning Cripps’ regular outbursts: ‘Cripps seems quite unable to see the argument that he is damaging the party electorally ... He has become very vain and seems to think that only he and his cronies know what Socialism is or how it should be preached.’⁴² The list of left demands were seen by the NEC as damaging to the standing of the party: ‘Buckingham Palace – League of Nations – “compelling” [trade] unions to declare a general strike – prolonging Parliament beyond five years ... “Seize land, finance and industry” (without compensation?) – Emergency Powers Bill in one day’.⁴³ All these demands were considered vote losers. Faced with a global capitalist crisis and the rush to war, the Labour hierarchy decided to close such socialist experiments down in order to triangulate towards electability.

It was Dalton who led the charge against the Socialist League, dismissing it as a ‘rich man’s toy ... the “so-called Unity campaign” [was] financed by two rich men who were using their private wealth in constant attacks in the policy and leadership of the Party’.⁴⁴ The fact that both Cripps and Trevelyan (a landowner) were rich made the attacks sound authentic to many rank-and-file members. But, as Transport House closed in, there were protests from others in the movement; the New Statesman and Nation pointedly asked in January 1937: ‘do Transport House realise that a very large proportion of those who work hardest for the Labour cause up and down the country want the United Front and that a great many of them are already doing their best to operate it locally in relation to particular issues?’ But the protests fell on deaf ears.

Rather than allow the right to drive their members out of the party, the League’s leadership decided to disband without a fight. Betts was phlegmatic about it: ‘This is not a funeral, but a deliberate political tactic’; she held out the hope the forces involved could carry on in some way. But others knew that it was over. J.T. Murphy was despairing: ‘[The League] decided not to face expulsion but to die.’⁴⁵ Foot later wrote: ‘Many were to regret that decision in later years when the left in the party, robbed by their own act of any effective organisation, found themselves hopelessly pitted as individuals against the Executive machine.’⁴⁶ The dissolution of the Socialist League was the end of the only official ‘loyal opposition’ in Labour. Another would not emerge for another decade. Looking back after re-joining Labour, Brockway lamented: ‘Thus ended ingloriously the Unity campaign. Its result was the destruction of the Socialist League, the loss of influence of Cripps, Bevan, Strauss and other “lefts”, the strengthening of the reactionary leaders and the disillusionment of the rank and file.’⁴⁷

When Labour published its immediate Economic Programme in 1937 it jettisoned any talk of workers’ control and extolled the virtues of Morrison’s corporatist socialism, the same position that had been defeated in 1933. For all their effort and intellectual work, the Socialist League’s political gains were rolled back in double-quick time by Transport House.⁴⁸ Labourism reasserted itself. As Tawney argued in 1931, ‘Until the Labour Party recognises that it is not socialist it is unlikely to become socialist.’⁴⁹

The Hammering of George Lansbury

In the wake of the National Government disaster, Lansbury’s leadership had helped stabilise the party and hold it together; not an inconsiderable feat considering the events. Labour made some advances, especially in London, where Morrison launched a successful campaign to win the London County Council. But the right had come to see Lansbury as a nuisance and a menace to Labour’s electability, and as such he had to be defeated. His pacifism looked hopelessly out of touch in the face of fascism in Italy and Germany. Increasing pressure was being put on the party to advocate the use of force against Mussolini, or at least the use of sanctions. Lansbury wanted an international conference called by the League of Nations to resolve these issues. He knew he was isolated in the PLP; he had a small loyal following of MPs, but many left Labour MPs disagreed with his strict pacifism. In an epoch where rearmament was central to Britain’s imperialist role in the world, the Labour right looked to deliver the men and guns needed. Pacifism in this context was seen by the right as irresponsible and by the left as hopeless. A key moment in the restoration of a more ‘moderate’ leadership and policy direction was the 1935 Labour conference, at which the right-wing wanted to ensure ‘the ritual martyrdom of George Lansbury’.⁵⁰

Lansbury’s nemesis in this instance was the intractable Ernest Bevin, a bruiser of a trade union boss who delighted in contrasting his ‘common-sense’ approach with what he saw as the hopeless idealism of the socialists. Bevin appealed to the importance of maintaining Britain’s imperial role in the world in order to ensure stability and peace internationally. After all, if the anti-imperialist aims of the Labour left were adopted then there would be a scramble by Germany, France and others to grab the ex-colonies, leading to even more wars.

Lansbury had offered to resign if the PLP or conference wished him to do so, but Bevin scolded him to fall on his sword himself: ‘It is placing the executive and the movement in an absolutely false position to be taking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what you ought to do with it.’⁵¹ The response to this from delegates was lukewarm, some even booed, but it was a powerful message from the country’s most powerful trade union leader for Lansbury to go. It was not the last time Bevin would be the executioner of the left at a conference. His speech swayed the conference to support the League of Nations, and the anti-war position was defeated by 2,168,000 to 102,000 votes. Dalton was pleased, recording in his diary that Bevin had ‘hammered Lansbury to death’.⁵² Feeling the ground collapse beneath him, with little support at conference and even less at the National Council of Labour, Lansbury resigned. By now in his mid seventies, he turned away from Labour and committed the last years of his life to the peace movement, dying in 1940 as the world descended into bloody slaughter.