Socialism and the Challenge of War (RLE The First World War)

Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912-18

Jay M. Winter

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317700081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The First World War marks a crucial period in the history of the socialist wing of the British labour movement. This book is an account of the development of the political ideas and activities of some of the most influential British socialist thinkers of that time: Beatrice and Sidney Webb, R. H. Tawney and G. D. H. Cole. The first part of the book examines the state of the Labour movement and of socialist ideas on the eve of the conflict, then turns to the central question of the impact of the War on the dissemination of British socialist ideas.

I

Socialist Thought and the Labour Movement 1912–14

1

The Background

After years of work for social reform and the repeal of the Poor Law of 1834, Sidney and Beatrice Webb left Britain in June 1911 for a voyage round the world. They retired temporarily from their work at a critical moment in the history of the British Labour movement. When they returned home the following year, it seemed that the complexion of the political world had changed. In June 1912, Sidney Webb addressed the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution. ‘The country to which I return,’ Webb remarked, ‘strikes me, in many ways, as intellectually a new England.’¹ What were the events which had taken place in the twelve months that the Webbs were on tour to convince Sidney of this fundamental change?

British parliamentary affairs were at a particularly turbulent stage when the Webbs turned their attention to non-European civilization. The electorate had gone to the polls twice in 1910 and had returned the Liberals to power, but without the same freedom of action which they had enjoyed after their overwhelming victory of 1906.² Two hundred and seventy-two Liberal M.P.s faced exactly the same number of Conservatives in the House of Commons in 1911. The government was able to break this stalemate only through the support of the Irish Nationalists, led by John Redmond, and the Labour Party, led by J. Ramsay MacDonald. The leverage of these two minority groups over Liberal policy was strictly limited, though, since neither had anything to gain from the return to office of the party of Arthur Balfour and Bonar Law. An uneasy, informal alliance of anti-Conservative forces in Parliament was formed in 1911, and lasted until the outbreak of war.

The Liberals’ pre-war legislative record was an impressive one. It was achieved over the strenuous objections of the Conservatives, whose opposition to change was voiced at times in the most acrimonious terms. The first item on the Liberal agenda, on which the 1910 elections had been fought, was the plan to restrict the veto power of the House of Lords. This obstacle had endangered the ambitious budgets of David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and had been used to block any move towards Home Rule for Ireland. On 15 May 1911, the Parliament Act passed its third reading in the Commons. The Lords did not challenge the measure, but chose rather to ‘perish in the dark’, in Lord Selborne’s felicitous phrase.³

Eleven days previously, Lloyd George had introduced his monumental National Insurance Bill. His scheme provided the entire working population with insurance against sickness and provided workers in certain vulnerable trades, such as building, shipbuilding, and engineering, with insurance against unemployment. After the controversy over the Lords’ veto, the Conservatives chose not to oppose the Insurance Bill in Parliament. Instead they organized popular meetings throughout the country to protest against the measure, and hoped that the hostility which they expected to greet the plan when it came into operation, would undermine the government.

The only principled opposition to the Insurance Bill was stated by six dissident Labour members, who were socialists and objected to the contribution of fourpence per week which most eligible workers would pay for the privilege of insurance.⁴ But despite their refusal to back the bill, Ramsay MacDonald held the bulk of the Labour Party together in its support. It passed its third reading in the Commons on 8 December 1911.

One additional piece of legislation was of great interest to the Labour members. On 10 August 1911, the same day on which the Lords approved the Parliament Act, the Commons voted an annual stipend of £400 per year for each member of the House. This provision was especially important to the Labour Party, whose financial basis had been severely shaken by the important Osborne judgment. On 21 December 1909, the Law Lords upheld the objection of a member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants to the statutory levy of that union for the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP).⁵

The effect on the Labour Party was immediate and drastic. Without redress, the party was likely to go bankrupt.⁶ On this point Labour presented a united front. MacDonald claimed that by this decision the courts had allowed Capital to regain the ‘privileged position’ which it had lost with the coming of the Labour Party.⁷ Despite the usual extravagance of his language, MacDonald was speaking for the vast majority of his party and its supporters, who saw the repeal of the Osborne judgment as a primary Labour demand. His party’s support for the National Insurance Bill was the price which Ramsay MacDonald willingly paid for the Liberals’ action on the payment of members.⁸ With the passage of this latter measure, at least part of what the chairman of the PLP in 1910–11, George Barnes, called the ‘entrance fee’⁹ into the House of Commons was finally met by the state.

What Labour members should do once they got into Parliament, though, was a matter of considerable dispute in these years. The party’s objectives at this time were unclear, to put it mildly. Its independence from the prodding of the Liberal Whip was a point which MacDonald frequently took pains to establish, but his leadership in Parliament did little to convince anyone of his case.¹⁰ When pressed to explain his defensive and often hesitant action, as in the case of the Insurance Bill, he fell back on reciting a catalogue of the party’s problems. ‘Am I “letting the cat out of the bag,”’ he asked the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1912, ‘when I confess that during the last four or five years we have been keeping our political machinery going in the face of the most terrible consequences and tremendous difficulties.’¹¹ Aside from the Osborne judgment, which was ‘bleeding the Labour movement on its political side’, MacDonald had to contend as well with what he called the ‘extravagant expectations’ which many working men had ‘indulged in … regarding the work that the Labour Party would do immediately. Not a few imagined that its advent removed the flaming sword from the gates of Paradise. These delusions had to go as all dreams go.’¹² Whenever explanations were demanded, MacDonald brought up the chastening facts of the balance of power in the House which, he said, gave him little room for manoeuvre and no alternative but to support the Liberals. He asked his critics ‘to remember that, while there is a morass on one side of the road, there is a wild beast waiting to devour us on the other, and in keeping out of the morass, I am not going to put myself into the jaws of the wild beast’.¹³ The position was not an easy one. ‘If we go that side we are scorned,’ he explained, ‘and if we go to the other we are laughed at! I am sorry to say that there is not so very much honour in politics now, but there we are.’¹⁴

What was left for Labour to do? MacDonald insisted:¹⁵

You have got to keep straight in the middle of the road of progress, and really straight, not nominally straight. You have to keep your end in view, and your end is in front. You have to keep the doctrines, but your doctrines were not handed down to you in the sixties by a few people who wrote some interesting phrases.

With such advice, is it a surprise that many contemporaries were hard pressed to decide what the Labour Party stood for?

Did the party stand for socialism? The answer must be a negative one before 1914, and the Webbs would have been the first to agree. Even though many of its major spokesmen, Keir Hardie, Fred Jowett, and MacDonald himself were members of the ILP and avowedly socialists, the pre-war party was committed to nothing other than the election of as many M.P.s as possible. It could hardly have done otherwise, though, since its loose structure as a federation of unions and socialist societies gave the decisive voice in the party to trade unionists, many of whom were definitely not socialists. Most people were of the opinion, at least before 1912, that the ideological position of the party was best left undefined, in the interests of the peaceful coexistence of all its members.

The Labour Party did apply successfully for membership in the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) in 1908, which was a commitment of sorts. But the party was ushered into the European socialist movement by the back door, as it were. No less a dialectician than Karl Kautsky, the German socialist leader and authority on Marx, moved the resolution on 12 October 1908 which declared that¹⁶

the English Labour Party is to be admitted to the International Socialist Congresses because although it does not avowedly recognise the class struggle, it actually carries it on; and because the organisation of the Labour Party being independent of the bourgeois parties is based upon the class struggle.

These distinctions may have missed many of the party’s members, including Arthur Henderson who, on becoming secretary of the party in 1912, automatically became secretary of the British section of the ISB.¹⁷ When it was suggested to him that this post ought to be manned by a socialist, he joined the Fabian Society.¹⁸

In 1912 the (Marxist) British Socialist Party (BSP), led by H. M. Hyndman, decided to challenge the Labour Party’s credentials as a member of the ISB, on the grounds that it was ‘not only not an avowedly Socialist Party, but it declines to adopt a Socialist programme and frequently acts and votes in an anti-Socialist sense’, an apparent reference to the Insurance Bill voting.¹⁹ Henderson’s appointment to the secretaryship of the ISB ‘even though he is a non-Socialist’ seemed to have been the last straw for them.²⁰ Henderson himself penned a long reply to these charges, which were rejected by the Brussels office of the ISB.²¹ Still, the Labour Party record on socialism was ambiguous enough to prompt Camille Huysmans, the secretary of the ISB, to ask the party secretary to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Socialist Thought and the Labour Movement 1912–14
• Part II The Impact of the First World War
• Bibliography
• Index