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The British Labour Party and Foreign Policy, 1900-31, Part II

© Joseph Sramek

Although disheartened, some Labour leaders still attempted to stop England from going to war. On August 2, 1914, Ramsay McDonald, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury, and other Labour leaders hed a "War Against War" rally in London's Trafalgar Square. Instead of garnering support, though, the rally ended in disorder as the leaders were shouted down. [1] Bertrand Russell, a Socialist against the war, observed that most average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war. [2]

Lansbury was among those unfazed by this opposition. If anything it made him more determined to fight war. At the rally that day, he said:

• Wars are only in favour of the possessing classes. The workers of all countries have no quarrel. They are all sweated, robbed, exploited in times of peace and sent out to be massacred in times of war.... Go back to your homes and let the Government know that you, the workers, will fight to the death against this atrocity.[3]

Unfortunately for Lansbury and other opponents of the war, a majority of the workers, instead of refusing to fight, joined the army in record numbers. After Belgium was invaded by Germany on August 3, even a majority within the Party supported going to war. [4] There was a significant faction of the Party which did not, but this did not seriously divide it.

The resultant split in the Socialist movement between supporters and opponents of the First World War was fatal or damaging to all European socialist political parties save one: the British Labour Party. Although it split just as the other socialist parties did, the Party was actually strengthened by the war. After the war, the Party supplanted the Liberal Party to become one of the two major political parties in Britain. In so doing, the Party absorbed many former Liberals, and adopted a foreign policy with many Liberal overtones. <[5] Foreign policy had also gained an importance that it had not had previously.

The pro-war faction was made up of the Trade Unions and their MPs, while the anti-war faction consisted of mostly I.L.P. members. Most of the Labour Party initially supported the war as well, and in May 1915, Labour took office when Prime Minister Henry Asquith formed a Coalition Government.

Opposition to the war only started to increase after it began to drag on without an apparent end in sight. This outlook was accelerated by the Battle of the Somme, where, on the first day (July 1, 1916), over 19,000 British soldiers lost their lives and 57,000 sustained casualties. It was the most disastrous day ever in the British Army's history, and the day with the most casualties in the entire war. [6] Writing on the subject about 50 years later, A.J.P. Taylor, a noted British historian, wrote that the battle had caused "the zest and idealism with which three million Englishment had marched forth to war" to disappear. [7] So did the initial enthusiasm shared by a majority of the Labour Party. The replacement of Asquith as Prime Minister by David Lloyd George in December 1916 temporarily abated this shift, but only for a short while. Then, in early 1917, Scandinavian socialists planned an International Socialist Conference to be held in Stockholm, Sweden. If this meeting had taken place, it would undoubtedly have been a serious attempt at peace. [8]

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