A Campaign For Unity: Cripps' Unity Campaign, 1935-39, Part III

Nevertheless, Cripps pressed on, holding several rallies in 1936, where he advocated the creation of a United Front. His speeches were attacked by Conservatives as well as some Labourites. The National Executive Committee [the chief executive branch of the Labour Party] even went so far as to issue a public condemnation of Cripps in 1936, after he insinuated in one of his speeches, in a purely hypothetical manner, that a British military defeat at the hands of Germany would create a worker's revolution as it had in Russia. [1]

Neverthless, Cripps carried on, writing in mid-1936, that:

The only possibility of peace in the world lies in the formation of a powerful group of socialist or democratic states knit together by common economic ties and a concerted programme of defence. With a socialist France and Spain, as well as Russia, a socialist Great Britain could form such a group which would be strong enough to dominate Europe for peace [emphasis mine]. [2]

In late 1936, Cripps and several other left-wing Labour political leaders, dissatisfied by The Daily Herald's [the paper of the trade unions and the Labour Party] trade-union orientation, formed a new socialist weekly, The Tribune. [3] The newspaper was used to propagandize for the Unity Campaign, which was launched on January 24 by Cripps, William Mellor [the former editor of The Daily Herald], James Maxton of the I.L.P., [4] and Harry Pollitt of the Communist Party of Great Britain. [5]

This move, and the decision made at the same time by the Socialist League [a group of left-intellectuals led by Cripps] to participate directly in the Unity Campaign, directly led to the N.E.C disaffiliating the Socialist League on January 27. [6] Two months later, the N.E.C. issued an even harsher ultimatum, threatening to expel any member who continued to belong to the Socialist League after June 1, 1937. [7] Behind these two actions was Ernest Bevin, who was disgusted by Cripps' display of political defiance. Bevin, in a letter to G.D.H. Cole, a leftist intellectual within the Party and later the author of A History of the Labour Party from 1914, wrote:

You write about driving Cripps out. Cripps is driving himself out. The Annual Conference came to certain decisions. If I did not accept the decisions of my own union I know jolly well what the members would do with me. [8]

Again, this showed the magnitude of the divide between Cripps' and George Lansbury's notion of personal conscience taking precedence over Party loyalty and Bevin's exact opposite conception. Yet for once, Cripps, under much pressure from fellow members of the Socialist League, did the politically expedient thing: he decided to disband the organization in May 1937. [9]

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