The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006

Mark Phythian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134150182
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Questions of war were not central to the founding of the Labour Party, yet questions of war – specifically, under what circumstances the party would support the dispatch of British military forces to fight abroad – have divided and damaged the party throughout its history more deeply than any other single issue.

The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006 opens by identifying and examining the factors that have influenced the party's thinking about war, before considering the post-1945 Cold War context and analyzing a range of cases:

• the Korean War
• the party's response to the 1956 Suez crisis
• the Wilson government's approach to the Vietnam War
• Labour's response to the 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands
• the crisis over the August 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, culminating in the 1991 war
• the wars of the 1990s over Bosnia and Kosovo
• the case for war in Iraq developed by the Blair government during 2002-03.

This is a timely book that both illuminates approaches to past wars and helps us understand the basis of current military commitments. As such it will be of great interest to students across courses in politics, history, and war studies.

1
The Labour Party and the question of war

The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Harold Wilson, 1964¹

Labour is about altruism. The philosophy of democratic socialism is based on a moral view of life, and that must shine through everything we do. We start from moral principles and go out to devise practical policies to implement them. If there is no morality it is not worth having … on this I would not shift an inch.

John Smith, July 1992²

Britain has always been a country willing to lift its eyes to the far horizon and judge its actions by their immediate impact not only on ourselves but on world events and history. The decisions that we take are of momentous import for the world and its order and stability. Let us ensure that those decisions are the right ones, for we shall live with their consequences.

Tony Blair, May 1995³

The Labour Party and the question of war, 1900–1945

In February 1900 the Labour Representation Committee was formed as a vehicle to advance the interests of the trade union movement. It returned two members of parliament at that year’s general election, increasing its representation to 29 in the election of 1906. Immediately thereafter it changed its name to the Labour Party. On 12th February 1906, the newly elected MPs met in committee room 12 of the House of Commons for the party’s inaugural meeting, electing Keir Hardie as Chairman by a single vote on a second ballot. They met again the following day to agree the priorities,

upon which the party propose to draft Bills or Motions: trades disputes; women’s suffrage; canals nationalisation; unemployed amendment act; compensation act; steam enginemen’s boiler bill; mines – employment of boys; women’s local government; mines regulations; miners’ eight hours; taxation of land values; child feeding; old age pensions; housing; shops bill.⁴

Issues of foreign policy or war and peace were absent.

Eight years later, however, the outbreak of the First World War would create the most serious divisions within the party to date. As a member of the Second International the party was expected to oppose the war but, particularly after the German assault on neutral Belgium, a majority of the parliamentary party came to favour a declaration of war on Germany. Chairman Ramsay MacDonald, believing that Britain should remain neutral, resigned, to be replaced by Arthur Henderson on the eve of the declaration of war. He was not the only prominent figure in the party to oppose the war. Keir Hardie took his opposition to audiences in England and Wales, where he was met with outright hostility and accused of harbouring pro-German sympathies.⁵ Nevertheless, the prominence of some of those who opposed the war could not obscure the fact that a vast majority of the party responded to the patriotic fervour it unleashed by wholeheartedly supporting the war effort, with some aware of the risk of a party considered unpatriotic being punished by the voters at the end of what many expected to be a short war.

The war obliged the Labour Party to give sustained consideration to questions of war and peace for the first time. The January 1916 party conference established a committee to consider post-war issues, and a special party conference held at the end of the following year adopted a Statement of War Aims. This called for the creation of a League of Nations and included a wide-ranging statement on the need to make the world safe for democracy, which contained the essence of what would come to be recognised as core Labour values and principles in relation to questions of war and peace:

Whatever may have been the causes for which the war was begun, the fundamental purpose of the British labour movement in supporting the continuance of the struggle is that the world may henceforth be made safe for democracy.

Of all the war aims, none is so important to the peoples of the world as that there shall be henceforth on earth no more war. Whoever triumphs, the people will have lost unless some effective method of preventing war can be found.

As a means to this end, the British labour movement relies very largely upon the complete democratisation of all countries; on the frank abandonment of every form of Imperialism; on the suppression of secret diplomacy, and on the placing of foreign policy, just as much as home policy, under the control of popularly elected Legislatures; on the absolute responsibility of the Foreign Minister of each country to its Legislature; on such concerted action as may be possible for the universal abolition of compulsory military service in all countries, the common limitation of the costly armaments by which all peoples are burdened, and the entire abolition of profit-making armament firms, whose pecuniary interest lies always in war scares and rivalry in preparation for war.⁶

While the Labour Party has never been a pacifist party per se, as this clearly suggests, an instinctive pacifism, ingrained “deep in Labour’s psyche”⁷ grew out of the experience of 1914–18, rooted in the fact that:

Although most workers were swept along at first by the tide of khaki chauvinism, once that war was over the conviction grew that these lonely pacifist spirits who had opposed the war throughout, had been right. The case was, indeed, unanswerable: millions had died for little real purpose, politicians and generals alike had betrayed the trust put in them, and only the armourers had thrived. The betrayal of the common man – the common soldier – by his ‘natural leaders’ shattered a social compact which previous industrial and socialist agitation had, by comparison, hardly dented. The betrayal was simply too great to be emotionally accommodated. Something instinctively sacred to British socialists had been violated. The cry went up – it echoes down the years – never, never, ever again.⁸

The principles outlined in the Statement of War Aims were reflected in postwar criticism of the terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles and the allied intervention in post-revolutionary Russia. At the same time Labour’s commitment to disarmament became a defining feature of the party throughout the following decade, culminating in the League of Nations’ agreement to the convening of a world disarmament conference in 1932, presided over by Arthur Henderson.

Although initially disappointed at the form the League of Nations had taken, Henderson moved the party towards support for this instrument intended to ensure the avoidance of future wars. However, the League was seen essentially as an instrument designed to prevent rather than respond militarily to wars. “That the League might be called upon to intervene in an already erupted conflict”, one historian has noted, “remained a possibility mentioned by no one within the party”.⁹ Hence, there was a considerable degree of naivety or innocence underpinning Labour’s international policy that “realists” like Hugh Dalton warned against,¹⁰ and which was to be severely challenged by events in Spain.

The Spanish Civil War, partly because it was fought against the backdrop of fascism in Germany and Italy threatening the peace of Europe, was viewed by many of the Left as having a significance that transcended the borders of Spain. Over 2,500 Britons volunteered to fight on the Republican side against Franco’s Nationalists, and at least 500 were killed whilst doing so.¹¹ The debate over whether Britain should intervene in the conflict took place in the context of the interventions in support of Franco’s forces by Hitler and Mussolini – the former airlifting Franco’s Army of Africa from Morocco in July 1936 – and, from September 1936, the Soviet Union’s decision to arm Republican forces. Although Clement Attlee had immediately offered the Republic “all practicable support”,¹² the British government’s policy of non-intervention enjoyed majority public support, so much so that in September 1936, Philip Noel-Baker warned Attlee, “there is probably a good deal of public opinion in favour of ‘non-intervention’, and … for the Labour movement to take the lead in this matter means going against a pretty strong tide”.¹³

Support for intervention grew on the Left as the war went on, particularly after the April 1937 bombing of Guernica and the March 1938 bombing of Barcelona. However, it was never strong enough to overcome three major hurdles. First, the National Government’s large parliamentary majority (249 after the 1935 general election) kept it well insulated from interventionist pressure and allowed it to continue with a non-interventionist policy that was umbilically linked to its wider appeasement policy. Second, the Labour Party had been seriously weakened by the events of 1931, and the war in Spain was the occasion for yet further rather than fewer divisions. Finally, calls to assist Republican forces or intervene on the Republican side sat uneasily alongside the party’s continued opposition to British rearmament.

The Spanish Civil War acted as a catalyst in accelerating the decline of the strong influence that pacifism had exerted on the Labour Party since the end of the First World War, a process that could be traced back to Ernest Bevin’s attack on party leader George Lansbury at the 1935 party conference. Events in Spain obliged pacifists to re-consider whether there might be circumstances in which war was justified, and even necessary. Nevertheless, even though at the outbreak of war the Labour Party had declared its support for the Republic, its leadership effectively accepted Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden’s arguments for non-intervention, based on the need to work to avoid a wider European war against Germany and Italy. A policy of non-intervention was confirmed at the September 1936 TUC Congress, although the subsequent party annual conference in Edinburgh adopted a resolution calling for the abandonment of non-intervention if it was shown to have been ineffective.¹⁴ Deputy Leader Arthur Greenwood was forced to concede that as a policy, non-intervention represented a “very bad second best”.¹⁵ This shift was confirmed by the 1937 annual conference, although the practical consequences were limited to fundraising campaigns by the likes of the Spain Campaign Committee and the various charities that grew out of or were linked to the party.¹⁶ As Tom Buchanan has argued, the trade unions, “defined their internationalism in bureaucratic terms, relating directly to specified organisations in other countries, perceiving their responsibility to foreign trade unionists and their families in humanitarian terms”.¹⁷ This was a major reason why rank and file party members were so frustrated and ultimately disappointed by the party’s approach to the war. They did not accept that principle had been adequately translated into practice. Konni Zilliacus would reflect that: “Labour’s behaviour over Spain was the greatest mistake of the Labour Party since the war, and denoted not only a political but a moral and intellectual failure on the part of its leaders”.¹⁸ However, the leadership’s caution was informed by the potential electoral consequences of involving Britain in a war arising from a cause that did not pose an immediate threat to British interests, and which would alienate the Catholic vote, recognised as central to Labour’s continued electoral recovery.

With regard to the threat posed by Germany, by 1937 the Labour Party had begun to overcome divisions arising from the memories and lessons of the First World War. The debates of the 1930s were to be resolved in favour of those who recognised the threat posed by Hitler, bringing Labour’s opposition to the annual Service Estimates to an end. As Hugh Dalton had warned during that year’s annual conference in Bournemouth, as things stood; “a British Labour Government, coming to power tomorrow, would be in danger of humiliations, intimidations and acts of foreign intervention in our national affairs, which it is not tolerable for Englishmen to contemplate”.¹⁹ Hence, by September 1939 Labour was far more united on the question of war than it had been in 1914, its reaction to the declaration of war described as “one of relief”.²⁰ It was a war against Nazism, not the German people, one that had been increasingly accepted as inevitable, and even necessary.

During the war itself, the threat posed by Hitler, given solid expression by the German bombing of British cities, engendered a shift in thinking about foreign policy, with the survival of the sovereign British state assuming primacy over all other international considerations. The party’s wartime statement, Labour, the War and the Peace explained that the party, “unreservedly supports the Allied war of resistance to Nazi aggression because, though loathing war, it regards this war as a lesser evil than the slavery which finally would be the only alternative”.²¹ Foreign policy was no longer governed by abstract principles...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Labour Party and the question of war
• 2 Taking sides in the Cold War
• 3 The Labour Party and war in the 1950s
• 4 Harold Wilson, the Labour Party and the Vietnam War
• 5 Labour’s Falklands War
• 6 The Gulf War, 1990–91
• 7 The rise of humanitarian military intervention in the 1990s
• 8 New Labour goes to war (again)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index