Labour's Conscience by Jonathan Schneer

Author:Jonathan Schneer [Schneer, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138331778
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

IV

A fundamental division between “hard” Labour leftists and the rest of the Labour Party, including the moderate Labour Left, lay in their opposing assessments of the world communist movement and of Stalinist Russia. As we have seen, most of the leading figures on the Labour Left concluded during 1945–51, with varying degrees of reluctance and at different rates of speed, that there could be no cooperation between democratic socialists and communists. A dwindling number of Labour Members, however, continued to cherish the hope that the world socialist movement, which had been split since World War I and the Russian Revolution, could be reunited in the aftermath of World War II. The most prominent and talented advocate of this line within the Parliamentary Labour Party was Konni Zilliacus.

The career of Zilliacus resembled a roller-coaster. From a cosmopolitan background, he attended Yale University in the United States before World War I. With the outbreak of war he must have returned to England, for in 1917 we find him in British uniform. Already, however, he was a radical, for he also joined the anti-war Union for Democratic Control. After the Russian Revolution he was sent as an intelligence officer with the British military mission to Siberia. He lost a foot there, possibly in action. He also opposed the British policy of intervention against the new Bolshevik regime and, in an early sign of the insubordinate nature which was to become his trademark, he sent information to Josiah Wedgwood, G. Lowes Dickinson, Leonard Woolf and others in the UDC who likewise opposed Britain’s anti-revolutionary policy. Returning to England in 1919, he immediately joined the Labour Party.35

Zilliacus possessed boundless energy. During the interwar period he was a member of the Information Section of the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva. He kept in close touch with the Labour Party, partly through his membership in the Fabian Society, which he had also joined. He worked closely with Arthur Henderson, helping him to draft the famous 1924 Geneva Protocol and, when Henderson became President of the Disarmament Conference in 1930, the “War–Peace Memorandum,” which was adopted four years later by the annual conferences of the Labour Party and the TUC. He also wrote the foreign policy section of Labour’s 1934 policy statement, For Socialism and Peace. He never hesitated, however, to express his differences with senior officials in the Labour Party or at the League of Nations. He was the pseudonymous author of innumerable pamphlets which opposed the appeasement policies of the West European governments. As he wrote in 1949, “We of the League Secretariat had been political valets to prime ministers, foreign secretaries, ministers, ambassadors and the great ones of this earth so long that they meant nothing to us.” In a foretaste of things to come, at Labour’s 1939 annual conference he opposed the foreign policy advocated by party leaders, favoring instead an anti-fascist alliance with the Soviets. At a private session, he had “a tremendous row with Mr Bevin … The uproar was so great that the Conference had to close down and resume the next day.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.