A League of Nations, For Nations? Part I

Why cannot the British Government, taking the British people into their confidence, go to a disarmament conference and put our whole on the alter of international service, and go to a world economic conference and say, "We are the greatest Imperial nation in the world, we built up the greatest Empire in the world; we are willing, for the sake of peace and security, to put it all at the service of mankind?" [9]

Immediately after Lansbury said this, the various Trade Union leaders began to apply pressure on Lansbury to conform to the Party's [i.e., their] position. In early September, Lansbury was invited to speak before the Trades Unions Congress [T.U.C., the British equivalent of the AFL-CIO] Annual Conference held in Margate, England.

At the conference, Walter Citrine, head of the T.U.C., told the delegates that to vote against the current Labour foreign policy [of collective security] "... will mean turning down our leader, George Lansbury." [10] When Lansbury asked Citrine for permission to state his own position on the Ethiopian crisis, Citrine curtly replied that he could only state the Party's position. Lansbury then gave a non-committal speech, which was interpreted by many of his followers as a sell-out. [11] Lansbury, dismayed at being miscontrued, issued a public statement on September 8, 1935:

During the whole period I have been serving as Leader of the Labour Party, I have made it quite clear that under no circumstances could I support the use of armed force, either by the League of Nations or by individual nations... My own view remains if anything, stronger than ever and... I should quite loyally and cheerfully make way for someone who would be able the voice [the] views... of my colleagues... on this matter than it is possible for me to do. [12]

This and other similar speeches ignited a storm of controversy. Among other things, it aroused the anger of Ernest Bevin, a power to be crossed at one's peril during the 1930s.

Bevin's anger was very explicable: Lansbury was being disloyal to the movement. The movement did or was about to make a decision, and Lansbury's job was to implement it, not to rally against it. As Peter Weiler, a recent biographer of Bevin, has put it, it was Bevin's opinion that "decisions, once arrived at, had to be accepted and applied." [13] Bevin said at the time that "If the movement is going to win the country,

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