The Labour Party and the world, volume 1 by Rhiannon Vickers

Author:Rhiannon Vickers [Vickers, Rhiannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Political Process, Political Parties
ISBN: 9781847795946
Google: 0WO5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2013-07-19T05:40:52+00:00

Troops in Rhineland and German rearmament

Early in 1936 another conflict arose with the entry of German troops into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarised in the Treaty of Versailles. This posed a problem for Labour in that while it condemned Nazism, it had repeatedly blamed the Versailles Treaty for German rearmament and militarism. The NEC had even said in its report for 1934–35 that with regard to ‘the Nazi regime’s open reversion to power politics and international anarchy’ that ‘The verdict of history will assign to the British “National” Government a not inconsiderable share of responsibility for the present Nazi menace, in so far as it has been created by external factors.’40 Even non-pacifists such as Dalton supported the government’s policy of asking for a formal condemnation by the League of Nations, rather than any other form of immediate action. It was felt that no physical resistance could be taken, for ‘public opinion in this country would not support, and certainly the Labour Party would not support, the taking of military sanctions or even economic sanctions against Germany at this time in order to put German troops out of the German Rhineland.’41 Dalton later admitted that he had been wrong on this, and that Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, against the advice of even his own military advisors, had been the ‘greatest bluff of his life.’ In his diary Dalton noted that ‘Hitler’s rearmament races on. Few people in the Labour Party seem to know or care anything about it.’ He then attempted to get the PLP to abandon its yearly practice of opposing the defence estimates, but it voted by 57 votes to 39 to continue its practice of voting against them.42

The National Council of Labour reacted more strongly to the invasion of the Rhineland than the Labour Party’s NEC did alone. It denounced it as a violation of the Locarno Treaty, which Germany had signed, and as evidence of the ‘clear determination of Nazi Germany to repudiate its obligations and take what it wants by force’.43 However, it also urged that ‘a sincere effort must be made to discover a basis of negotiations with Hitler’.44 At the 1936 TUC conference, Bevin said that it was time to re-examine the labour movement’s commitment to a League of Nations system of collective security. He argued that ‘The question of collective security it in danger of becoming a shibboleth rather than a practical operative fact … We are not going to meet the Fascist menace by mass resolution. We are not going to meet it by pure pacifism.’ If this meant ‘uprooting some of our cherished ideals and facing the issue fairly in the light of the development of Fascism, we must do it for the Movement and for the sake of posterity’.45 Bullock notes that Bevin’s point ‘was accepted without challenge with that practical common sense which distinguished the discussion of foreign affairs in the TUC from the debates at Labour Party conferences throughout the 1930s’.46 This is perhaps a

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