The Labour Party and Foreign Policy

A History

John Callaghan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134540150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a penetrating new study of the Labour Party's thinking on international relations, which probes the past, present and future of the party's approach to the international stage.

The foreign policy of the Labour Party is not only neglected in most histories of the party, it is also often considered in isolation from the party's origins, evolution and major domestic preoccupations. Yet nothing has been more divisive and more controversial in Labour's history than the party's foreign and defence policies and their relationship to its domestic programme.

Much more has turned on this than the generation of tempestuous conference debates. Labour's credentials as a credible prospect for Governmental office were thought to depend on a responsible approach to foreign and defence policy. Its exclusion from office was often said to stem from a failure to meet this test, as in the 1950s. The composition of Labour Cabinets was powerfully influenced by foreign and defence considerations, as was the centralization of power and decision-making within Labour Governments. The domestic achievements and failures of these periods in office were inextricably connected to international questions.

The Labour Party and Foreign Policy is recommended for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in British politics and European history.

1 Party and Liberal nation

When I first entered the House of Commons there was a myth, a prevalent myth. It was to the effect that although the Labour Members of Parliament could reasonably be expected to know something about engineering, or about mining, there were two subjects on which they were completely ignorant: foreign affairs, and how to make war. It was always understood that those were the special prerogatives of the Tories, and their attitude has not changed very much.

(Nye Bevan, speaking at the 1958 Labour Party conference)

The Labour Party

The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was formed in February 1900 for the purpose, as its name indicates, of promoting independent working-class representation in Parliament. It was not the outcome of a struggle for a socialist party. Socialists like Keir Hardie had certainly worked for its creation in the belief that their own prospects depended on an intimate alliance with the trade unions. But the unions themselves were led by men whose disenchantment with the Liberal Party, as a vehicle for their interests, did not entail a disenchantment with liberalism. For almost three decades after the Second Reform Act of 1867 the ‘labour interest’ clung to the Gladstonian Liberal Party, making the most of the restricted franchise and its own poor finances. This attachment was loosened as it became clear that the individual and collective interests of trade unionists could not be fulfilled by the Liberal organisations. The broad coalition of British progressive politics was not broad enough to adopt working-class men as its parliamentary candidates even after the doubling of the electorate in 1884. Yet the expectations of the established unions, the growth of new unions among the unskilled, and the rise of class consciousness increasingly rendered this state of affairs intolerable, especially when the legal status of the unions was called into question in the 1890s.¹

The leaders of the LRC, mostly former Liberals, set out then to defend organised labour alongside the Liberal Party in Parliament. This generation and its outlook dominated the Labour Party (as it became known from the general election of 1906) for the first third of the twentieth century. It took the First World War to create the circumstances in which Labour adopted a socialist objective (in 1918) and a world economic crisis – involving the ignominious collapse of a minority Labour Government – before socialism became the party’s dominant discourse in the 1930s. Another national crisis – the Second World War – was required to generate the circumstances in which Labour could win its first parliamentary majority – and all this in a country in which the working class, Labour’s ‘natural’ constituency, represented about 75 per cent of the population. These jolts to the system, though milestones in the development of Labour politics, were nevertheless contained, in that they were unable to shift the deepest convictions of Labour politics, some of which had long roots in British society as it developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Foremost among them was the belief that legitimate politics was conducted within the existing constitutional framework and institutional structures of the British system. This testified to the dominating authority of both Crown and Parliament as the impartial defenders of the rules of the political game. McKibbin suggests that an important component of this hegemony was upper-class adherence to the rules of the system with the result that the working class was, among other benefits, subject to neither the coercion nor the incorporation which threatened its continental counterparts.² Instead there was a large degree of self-sufficiency and independence in the voluntary associations of the working class which adapted to and even prospered in the conditions of late Victorian capitalism.

Though class divisions ran deep, British society was relatively free of grievances which could alienate a large section of the population from the state. The massive stresses generated by the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century had also receded. A certain degree of prosperity and stability characterised the second half of the century, during which the working class experienced a rise in living standards and was able to extract benefits such as free collective bargaining. From 1875 the existing craft unions enjoyed a legal basis that was unique in Europe. But the unions represented only 15 per cent of the employed workforce as late as 1900. Much of the rest of the working class lay beyond their reach, especially women, those in domestic service, shop-workers and the penny capitalists of London. Others were difficult to reach because of the seasonal or casual nature of their employment, or their dispersal in small-scale enterprises which fostered employer paternalism and the deference of the workforce. There is no evidence that these circumstances were any more obstructive of class solidarity and organisation than was true in continental Europe. But there is evidence that by 1900, having no major linguistic, sectarian, or national differences among them, the British were more easily united in their patriotism, their support for the monarchy, the armed forces and the Empire.³

After the franchise extension of 1867 it was the Conservative Party which enthusiastically associated itself with the defence and promotion of these institutions and beliefs. By the time the Labour Party came into existence the Tories had already had considerable experience in the art of depicting their opponents (the Gladstonian Liberal Party) as unsound in relation to the national-imperial virtues. Once Labour emerged as the primary opposition party in 1918, the Conservatives lost no time adding ‘socialism’ to the list of unpatriotic evils which had to be guarded against. Judged by their ability to form governments and command much of the working-class vote – a fact which Labour’s parliamentary leaders were bound to be impressed by – the Conservative Party’s success in the period 1916–45 owed a great deal to these cross-class issues. Universal suffrage, far from heralding the end of the Tories, opened up a period of unprecedented governmental dominance for them. While Labour’s national leaders struggled after 1918 to promote the party as a national rather than a sectional interest, the Conservatives successfully mobilised the fears, prejudices and aspirations of ‘the public’ against it.⁴ In part this differential is explicable with reference to the organic link between the unions and the Labour Party, especially when we remember that the unions, though a declining force from 1920, had done enough between 1910 and 1920 to thoroughly antagonise the middle class and help drive most of it into the Conservative Party. But if Labour was handicapped by its close association with a sectional interest, the Conservative Party held the advantage of standing for values and beliefs which permeated all classes. Thus while the unions never managed to organise more than 45 per cent of the inter-war workforce, the Conservatives – with double the individual membership of the Labour Party by 1925 – could capture as much as 55 per cent of the working-class vote and thus build on and reinforce the undoubted social unity of their middle-class core supporters in class-divided England (and Scotland).

Colonies

Colonial rivalries generated repeated crises between the Great Powers in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in the context of a competitive struggle to annex new colonies, especially in Africa.⁵ The first decade of the twentieth century produced even more vivid evidence than hitherto – certainly for the British public – of an arms race that might lead to war in Europe. The precise impact on the public of this virtually continuous narrative of British imperial adventure and Great Power tension is hard to gauge.⁶ But there is no doubt that it was subject to a barrage of imperialist propaganda from both of the principal political parties, all of the governments formed between 1880 and 1914, most, if not all, of the churches, various pressure groups (such as the Navy League), most of the press – including the jingoist mass circulation Daily Mail – as well as the permanent institutions of the state, such as the armed forces and the monarchy. The least result that might be expected from this organised chorus was a reinforcement of the nationalist and racist prejudices so evident to foreign observers and ‘most welcome to many political parties on the Continent’ with a national mission of their own.⁷ Nor was this purely for the benefit of the lower middle class and the masses beneath them in the social hierarchy. The political and intellectual leadership of the country at the fin de siècle routinely explained levels of civilisation in terms of race and worried about the fitness of the British imperial race to carry the burden of Empire. The mania in these circles for ‘national efficiency’ and eugenics was undoubtedly related to fears that Britain might fall behind in the struggle between nations.⁸ The result was that ‘a Social Darwinistic tone . . . permeate[d] virtually all the writings of . . . imperialist politicians and intellectuals’ in the quarter century before 1914.⁹

The relevance of all of this for the Labour Party begins with the fact that it was born into this context, as was the working class and its organised, trade union minority, which was re-made in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It had once been possible to criticise British imperialism as a huge system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy – an unwanted, unnecessary, liability. Politicians such as Richard Cobden and John Bright were famous for having done so and still had an intellectual following in the Liberal Party, though the Liberal Imperialists were ascendant by 1892.¹⁰ But the days of Britain’s unchallenged commercial supremacy were over by the time the fight for independent labour representation began. Politicians might still profess conviction in the virtues of free trade imperialism and in 1877–8 Gladstone could even advise against further expansion of the empire, arguing that Britain had already swallowed more territory than it could digest and was in danger of forgetting that the source of its material power was domestic industry, not overseas expansion.¹¹ But Gladstone’s intervention was a rare exception, even for him. For he also believed, in company with virtually the whole of the political class, that the British were inherently an imperial race, that their ‘dominant passion’ was extended Empire and that such overseas interventions as the British government thought fit were a natural feature of the civilised order.¹² Disraeli and the Tories, in Gladstone’s view, simply erred by making the wrong moral choices in relation to Empire by pursuing a reckless policy of adventure and prestige designed to ‘set up false phantoms of glory’ among the British people.

Despite the increasing hegemony of the imperial mentality in British society the Liberal Party continued to act as home for those who took a more critical view of British foreign policy than the Conservative Party was wont to do. To the Manchester Liberalism of Cobden and Bright there was added a critique of imperialism inspired by the self-promotion of the Tories as the popular party of its aggressively patriotic wing. Of course Liberals could respond to the Tory rhetoric – which depicted them as weak-kneed idealists and pacifists, if not actual traitors to the national interest – in a variety of ways. The Liberal tradition also had space for the Palmerstonian approach to international relations which was prepared to undertake intervention abroad on ethical grounds. This was simply one variant of the British tendency to intercalate morality and foreign policy. As Richard Crossman, the Labour MP, described it in 1956, Labour drew from a tradition which held that ‘power politics are wicked and must be subjugated to the rule of law; that Britain must stand for applying morality in international affairs and, in particular, for helping small nations to achieve their independence; that rich and fortunate nations have an obligation to raise up the backward colonial peoples; that the elector everywhere wants peace if only the politician will allow it; that what [the] British above all hate is a bully who breaks the law’.¹³ It was easier to imagine the British Empire being consistent with these sentiments if one thought of it as the advanced guard of a movement to bring commerce, Christianity, free trade and liberalism to the peoples of the world. This is what the Liberal imperialists did. British imperialism gained in popularity during the 1880s and 1890s in part at least because of its supposed civilising mission and by the beginning of the twentieth century both major political parties stood for its maintenance and even extension. But the attraction of an ethical foreign policy was more keenly felt within the Liberal coalition than among the Tories, especially on the Radical wing of the party which was strongly inclined to deprecate British involvement in continental power politics. It was here that the greatest outrage had been felt in response to the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ of 1876 and to the cynical realism which lay behind official indifference to them.¹⁴ The popular agitation which erupted in 1876 has been aptly described as ‘the greatest public incursion into the official conduct of foreign affairs in British history’.¹⁵

It was undoubtedly related to the great Nonconformist revival of the 1860s. The feeling that British foreign policy should be informed by moral considerations exercised a strong attraction for the Nonconformist conscience, as did the conviction that the Great Powers should act in concert, not unilaterally. Turkey’s violent suppression of a peasant revolt in the Balkan domains of the Ottoman Empire brutally contradicted these principles and caused a moral outrage in Britain when Disraeli publicly made light of the atrocities in the summer of 1876. British interests, it seemed, were only concerned with the maintenance of the Ottomans as an obstacle to Russian expansionism. The nature of Ottoman rule in the region was an irrelevant consideration according to this way of thinking. But this ‘realist’ mentality excited an unprecedented extra-Parliamentary agitation whose intensity surprised contemporaries. The episode is instructive on a number of counts. The Conservative Party itself was the least affected section of public opinion. The agitation was strongest in the constituencies containing a strong Nonconformist presence, in local Liberal associations and working-class organisations. Once it began, Gladstone ended his self-imposed retirement to lead the popular opposition. But Gladstone’s denunciatory rhetoric obscured the fact that he supported all the essentials of British policy in the region. What is of more interest in the present context is the evidence that the disaffection he sought to lead sprang from a novel conjuncture composed of a newly enlarged electorate, four-fifths of whom were enfranchised as recently as 1867; together with an innovative, graphic and sensationalist popular journalism; and a Nonconformist constituency which retained the vigour of its 1860s revival, particularly among the Liberal intelligentsia and the ‘new’ men steeped in the tradition of Radicalism. The public also consisted of many men who had been disappointed by their exclusion from the franchise extension of 1867, as well as those irreligious proletarians who attended the flourishing working-class clubs of London. The politically frustrated were also most likely to be the ones feeling the economic downturn as the period of mid-Victorian prosperity came to an end in the heavy industries.

By September 1876 Gladstone was able to address crowds of up to ten thousand on the question of British foreign policy. But this first phase of the agitation gave way to a very different mood. By November an Anglo-Russian war seemed likely when Russia confronted Britain’s ally Turkey. Radicals now found themselves in the uncomfortable position of supporting reactionary Russia in its stand-off with Turkey. They were also in danger of lending their support to a country with which Britain might soon go to war. When Russia invaded Turkey in April 1877 the patriotic newspapers in Britain did everything to stir sympathy for the ‘gallant Turk’. While working-class groups became involved in anti-war agitation, there was also evidence of jingoism – in fact the word was coined at this time from the words of a popular song inspired by a defiant speech of Disraeli’s declaring that Britain would fight to defend its imperial interests if it had to. A bellicose nationalism came to prevail by December 1877 as the Turkish armies seemed on the point of collapse. Big anti-Russian demonstrations were held throughout the country with working-class support. Anti-war meetings were attacked by mobs – men from the Woolwich Arsenal being prominent in breaking up a Trafalgar Square meeting on 31 January 1878. Large pro-war demonstrations were held during February and Gladstone’s London home was among those which were attacked.¹⁶

Whereas the Nonconformists had dominated the original anti-Turkish agitation, the working class was more prominent in the anti-war demonstrations of the winter of 1877–8. But it was also present in the pro-war demonstrations. Some of the organisers of the anti-war camp, like the Radical journalist W. T. Stead, initially felt that the bellicose lobby had been routed by this first show of strength. But their judgement was premature and reckoned without the pro-war mobilisation of the Conservatives and the jingo fervour which tried to isolate liberals like Gladstone as traitors. It has been interpreted as a lesson in how masses of people could be mobilised behind Crown, Empire and Conservatism and how pacifist and neutralist sentiment could be driven...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Party and Liberal nation
• 2. The First World War
• 3. Peace in our time
• 4. Crisis of liberal internationalism
• 5. The Second World War
• 6. Great Power strategies
• 7. A party divided
• 8. The last pretence
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index