This week we publish in 3 parts a history of British Trotskyism by Martin Upham. This was a PhD thesis on the subject, and while we would not agree with all the points raised in it, we believe it deserves a wider audience, particularly for those interested in the history of our movement. For a more in-depth study of the subject readers are urged to consult Ted Grant's book on the the History of British Trotskyism.

The History of British Trotskyism to 1949

by Martin Upham

PART TWO
(1938-1944)

IX
APPLYING THE MILITARY POLICY:
1938 – 1941

British Trotskyists, like the general labour movement, were increasingly concerned about war. During the peacetime years up to 1939 they were able to live off the traditional Bolshevik view of imperialist war, though there was already controversy about what this meant in practical terms. No Trotskyists supported the war when it finally broke out: all factions continued to maintain that it was an imperialist war. But a bitter and protracted dispute developed between the RSL, the WIL and the Fourth International over the application of the anti-patriotic line.

The general Trotskyist attitude to war was established as early as 1934. War and the Fourth International (1934) [1] declared that a future world conflict would be imperialist and called for opposition to patriotism in all capitalist countries. War was likely to threaten the Soviet Union and there it was the duty of the working class to seek defence. The support of socialist and trade union leaders in every country for their government in the event of war was predicted as a certainty. British Trotskyists vigilantly watched the rising threat of war which they saw as a political issue dwarfing most others. In 1935 it had been enough to reverse the policy of the Marxist Group. From that year also, part of the Trotskyist charge against communism was its willingness to support an alliance of anti-fascist powers, if such a project should be cobbled into reality. When Trotskyists speculated on war, they drew on knowledge of the Great War, the only precedent they had. In 1936 Groves forecast dilution, the skeletal emergence of strike-breaking machinery and the exclusion of “leftists” from war industry. He predicted a gradual loss of trade union rights and recommended resistance to conscription, which was likely to be introduced in peacetime. Only thus would democratic countries be able to match their national resources to those of fascist countries. [2]

Suspicion of war preparations led Trotskyists to oppose every step in that direction. Their difficulty was that if their response was confined to opposition of this kind they were doomed to impotence. The Marxist Group recognised the problem early on:

“While we must combine planning for protection with anti-war propaganda, and must make every effort to present the outbreak of another world war, we cannot neglect to face the possibility of that war, and meet the problems involved”. [3]

But that conclusion could be drawn only after a frank recognition that the international situation was deteriorating faster than Trotskyism was gathering strength. There was no widespread disposition to face the implications of this unpalatable truth. [4] When E.L. Davis argued within the Militant Group for penetration of ARP organisations [5] he was rebuked. [6]

Just as Trotskyists assumed that labour and trade union leaders would rally patriotically, they were also sensitive to signs of backsliding within their own movement. [7] This made it difficult to move beyond an abstract anti-war line. But the capitulation of socialist leaders had taken place, among other reasons, because of intense mass pressure. This was hardly a problem for Trotskyists to worry about, and time was to show that chauvinistic hysteria would not, in any case, recur. If Trotskyism was to break out of isolation, it needed something more than a formal programme, however well grounded in Leninist precept. The Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, the second major document of the movement on war, tried to reach beyond pacifism, arguing “workers must learn the military arts” [8], but it was also an optimistic document declaring that crisis would shatter all parties and the Fourth International must be available to rally the proletariat.

This strictly general guidance left Trotskyists in Britain and elsewhere in a formal argument. They faced a political environment which was utterly different to that whose precedents provided so much of their inspiration, the prelude to World War One. The political battles of the left about war and rearmament were fought not in 1939 but in the mid 1930s. Key events in shifting the Labour Party from a broadly anti-war position were the trouncing of Lansbury at the 1935 conference and the critical vote of the PLP in July 1937 to abstain on the Service Department estimates, reversing its earlier position of opposition. [9] British Communist policy had been unqualified as late as 1934 [10] but by a series of national and international changes its main thrust became a drive to make sure Britain was on the right side in a peace front. [11] This induced increased political loneliness which tended to reinforce Trotskyists’ views.

They rejected any involvement with war preparations. No fine distinctions between attack and defence were allowed to pass, even a zigzag trench. [12] For all the occasional doubts of individuals, there were no differences here between the factions. [13] The RSL conducted an internal discussion over ARP, which culminated in the executive declaring against it after being advised by Jackson not to stand on passing proletarian moods. “The workers”, he advised, “are in general backward and lag behind the necessities of history.” [14] ARP was another means of reconciling the civil population to war. This attitude contrasts strongly with contemporary communist policy. [15]

Early 1939 saw Trotskyism resigned to being swamped by chauvinism on the outbreak of war. [16] But its isolation did not spring from the anticipated patriotic wave. Conscription, an important step towards militarization, was introduced in April 1939 for the first time in peace. [17] Resentment was qualified, even among the communists. [18] In the battle against conscription and the National Register only Trotskyism, the still pacifist ILP, and Labour mavericks battled it out minus reservations. The RSL however was later to reject the policy it followed at this time, whereby it allowed its members to make conscientious objection at tribunals. [19] Faced with imminent war, Trotskyists consistently called for Soviet defence. The circumstances leading to the Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 were criticised, but not the right of the Soviets to conclude such an agreement. But WIL did attack the way communists in Britain presented it. [20]

The Militant Labour League greeted the outbreak of war with a manifesto branding it as imperialist and calling for the overthrow of the British ruling class. At this general level there was no patriotic incursion into any of the Trotskyists’ ranks. Where the factions differed was in their expectations of what the first few months would be like. The Socialist Anti-War Front, partly through its activity in the No-Conscription League had some success in putting itself at the centre of a movement with support from trades councils. Reg Groves used the extra channels open to him as a Labour candidate to maintain a stream of criticism until official party policy changed. [21] The RSL [22] and WIL both expected heavy and immediate suppression, and WIL actually anticipated it by moving a centre into exile. [23] The RSL had a particular fixation with chauvinist hysteria and continued to believe it was rampant in the face of all evidence. [24] There was opposition to the war, but it tended, like support for it, to be low key, devoid of enthusiasm. Everyone had lived with the likelihood of war for some time, and for political activists there was also the comforting thought that Britain was at least in a war against fascism. [25] These two factors, one affecting the majority and the other the minority isolated all revolutionaries, some of whom misread unanimity for enthusiasm.

As for the form of objection to the war, this was a problem in itself. The Call of the SAWF publicised conscientious objection, but this presented theoretical problems for Trotskyists. Mere refusal to take part was simply pacifism. The RSL expelled SAWF participants for this very reason. But while their view was that arms could be taken up either to defend workers’ organisations or overthrow a capitalist government, this was of little help in the concrete circumstances of September 1939. Capitalism still existed: it had not been overthrown. On a basis of non-complicity in an era of growing militarization of life, it would be difficult to distinguish Trotskyism from pacifism. Trotskyism had a rich Marxist legacy to draw on. Liebknecht had argued that the enemy of the workers was in their own country. The Bolshevik slogan for the turning of the imperialist war into a civil war was well known. [26] Revolutionary defeatism was considered the duty of the Fourth International. Even before the war, however, Trotsky was trying to reach beyond these simple principles. He reminded the International, “An irreconcilable attitude against bourgeois militarism does not at all signify that the proletariat in all cases enters into a struggle against its own national army”. [27]

Trotskyism expected the CPGB to support the war. This had been the drift of party policy before 1939. When it was reversed a month after war began, the communists moved to a policy which was radical but not Leninist. The most radical phase of this policy fell between October and the Fall of France. [28] During this time the war was damned as an imperialist conflict by the party, with the main blame falling upon the British and. the French. [29] It did not call for the war to be turned into a civil war, but demanded the replacement of Chamberlain with a new government pledged to begin peace negotiations. [30] WIL regarded communist policy at this time as pro-Hitler, and this belief was a motive behind the revulsion of many on the left from the party. [31] The change in the programme of the CPGB did not make it more well disposed towards Trotskyism. [32].

But the bourgeoisie was no more inclined to civil war than the proletariat. The first nine months of the conflict, the Phoney War, were notable for relaxation at home, if anything, to the irritation of many in the labour movement. [33] This again conflicted with forecasts. WIL argued that the pliancy of labour leaders rendered a strong state apparatus superfluous and concluded that the National Government had a “firm hold”. [34] But elections continued, and offered an opportunity for anti-war candidates of various kinds to oppose it. In this phase of the war, the general absence of discontent was reflected in their low votes. [35]

The Fall of France shifted the balance of communist policy [36] and tilted WIL in a new direction. [37] If the much heralded patriotic wave had any substance it was during the period from Dunkirk to the start of the Battle of Britain. [38] This could only strengthen the convictions of the RSL. WIL concluded that this was the time to build on an anti-fascist mood. It still expected government repression but began to see an opportunity to differentiate between those who would and who would not fight a genuinely anti-fascist war. [39] But the RSL saw in responses to the Fall of France “a determination to make any sacrifices to help British imperialism to win”. [40] It continued to assume that the first sign of a move to the left would be war weariness. In the WIL and in the SWP, however, thoughts were turning towards a programme on which those participating in the war could stand. It was the beginning of a search for a “Military Policy” which would advance positive proletarian tactics for winning an anti-fascist war.

The Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, held in New York in May 1940, issued its own manifesto. [41] It did not treat Military Policy in any detail, though it affirmed it as the only programme adequate for the needs of the epoch. Military Policy, it suggested, was an approach, not a principle. The war was merely a theatre in which Trotskyists advanced their views: Just as in a factory, they shared the experiences of other workers. Since the proletariat had failed to prevent war, it must now seek to remove the ruling classes from leading positions within it. The RSL received this manifesto with considerable embarrassment, and published it with a partial disclaimer. [42] WIL’s reception was cordial and from 1940 Youth for Socialism carried its own military programme in every issue. [43]

What became known as the American Military Policy (AMP) rested on two principal texts: a speech by J.P. Cannon to the Chicago convention of the SWP in September 1940 and his presentation on behalf of several defendants at a trial for sedition the next year in Minneapolis. At Chicago Cannon called for public money wherewith the trade unions might set up their own military training camps. [44] He argued that the pre-war policy of the Fourth International had been sound but insufficient. Trotskyists had warned against war yet failed to prevent it:

“It is not quite correct to say that the old line was wrong. It was a programme devised for the fight against war in time of peace. Our fight against war under conditions of peace was correct as far as it went. But it was not adequate. It must be extended.” [45]

As Cannon recalled, Trotskyism was at a disadvantage when it lacked concrete suggestions as to how Hitler might be resisted. It had formerly argued for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and then repulsion of the invaders. Now, he suggested, the two tasks must be telescoped. At the Minneapolis Trial of October 1941, Cannon went out of his way to reject sabotage of a war effort or. indeed any hindrance to it. He also opposed draft dodging. [46]

The RSL was to accuse WIL of lifting Military Policy from its American context, but there was stimulus enough for it in the last writings of Trotsky and even in some of his articles from before the war. Trotsky had been involved in a lengthy discussion with SWP members on attitudes towards war preparation. He advised against draft avoidance [47] and argued for using military training to acquire skills of arms. Military Policy

“... is revolutionary in its essence and based upon the whole character of our epoch, when all questions will be decided not only by arms of critics but by critiques of arms; second, it is completely free of sectarianism. We do not oppose to events and to the feelings of the masses an abstract affirmation of our sanctity.” [48]

What Trotsky advised was that the Fourth International should counterpose a genuine struggle against fascism to the “false fight” of the Petains. He also suggested that denunciation of war had not been the totality of the Bolshevik programme. While the Bolsheviks had won a majority between the February and October 1917 revolutions this was achieved chiefly, not by refusal to defend the fatherland, but by the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” [49] The need for a positive programme in wartime made a deep impression on WIL and from the late summer of 1940 it tried to counter embryonic Vichyism with its Military Policy: elected officers, government-financed trade union-controlled training schools, public ownership of the armaments industry and a class appeal to German soldiers. [50] Trotskyists had to have a policy to meet every phase of experience of workers. Setbacks to the Allied cause in the spring and summer of 1940 apparently provided ample evidence for the WIL argument that a fight against fascism could not be won under the old ruling classes. Fifth column activities in Europe showed that there were people in influential circles who feared the workers within more than Nazism. [51]

The RSL, with the former Militant Group in complete control by the outbreak of war, drew opposite conclusions. The Fall of France had not led in its perception to war-weariness, only to grumbling, which had not been converted to a struggle against capitalism. [52] Coalition government resting on the patriotic mass provided for the present an acceptable substitute for fascism, but this would not prevent rapid deterioration of the political position at home. [53] Since revolutionaries were inevitably isolated under such circumstances, the RSL was not surprised that some should seek to break out by means of short cuts. These were opportunists however:

“The basic task of revolutionary socialists in such a period is not to seek opportunist ‘short cuts’ to the mass but to explain patiently the reactionary nature of the war .” [54]

The RSL thought some workers might support the slogan “Labour to Power” for the wrong reason, that it would bring a more efficient prosecution of the war. But it also believed that in the experience of seeking to make the slogan a reality, they would turn against the war itself. Trotskyists themselves, argued the RSL, had a guarantee against backsliding in the policy of revolutionary defeatism. The alternative was to end up like the WIL and the Fourth International. [55] Cannon’s Chicago policy was “in the spirit of Kautsky”, a “petty bourgeois hotch potch”. [56] WIL and others had failed to counterpose class features to nationalism, thus giving a left veneer to patriotism. Only in the case of the Soviet Union was it right for workers to assume a patriotic attitude. WIL was quite prepared to confront this argument. It saw positive features in popular willingness to fight fascism. People were willing to defend working class organisations, the true root of democracy. [57] It was sectarian to condemn defencism from an isolated position: analysis of war propaganda showed that the government sought support by projecting the conflict as a war for democracy against fascism. Far from abolishing workers” parties, the government leaned on their leaders to gain social support. [58] After a year of war the conviction that future political developments would favour the workers was a steady feature of WIL thought.

But neither of the two main Trotskyist factions was monolithic in its reaction to war. The RSL had always been under pressure from within against compromises with chauvinism. When RSL leaders dallied with the possibility of deep air raid shelters, the League branch at Leicester, where JL Robinson was the dominant influence, sternly reminded them, “Marxism remains the same in London as in Leicester”. In the view of Leicester, the heart of what was to become the Left Faction, no demands whatsoever on the war should be put. If one favoured a deeper shelter, why not a better gas mask, a more rapid firing machine gun, a faster tank? [59] If revolutionaries began to make concessions of this kind they might be led inexorably to improving the military efficiency of capitalism: they had to desire their own government’s defeat. [60] Hitler’s victory was preferable for the British workers; Churchill’s victory was preferable for the German workers. When the RSL Central Committee resisted Leicester’s critique the branch concluded that its “concessions” to chauvinism must be a tendency and that they should be removed from the leadership of the British Section. [61]

WIL also had a debate within its ranks where Haston led a minority of the EC He was not opposed to Military Policy as such, but argued that WIL had from early 1941 moved away from this policy as expounded by Trotsky and Cannon. WIL had, he asserted, shifted to making its main enemy the foreign enemy, and by reference to an alleged new popular mood. [62] WIL had argued for the distribution of arms to the workers who might then repel invasion [63], though it insisted its purpose was to separate workers from the bourgeoisie not to bring collaboration about. But Haston, like the Leicester RSL branch, thought Military Policy was being misused in Britain. [64] The formation of the Home Guard had been quite misunderstood: it was not a concession to the workers” desire for arms but the outcome of a full-blooded capitalist campaign. [65] Whereas WIL in the past had said that the best workers were against the war, it now said, “we want to fight Hitler but the bourgeoisie won’t let us”. [66] But when Healy answered Haston on behalf of the WIL leaders, he stated what was to be a major theme of its perspectives documents from now on – that all its arguments were directed towards demonstrating the need to take power. And he insisted that WIL based itself on the popular mood which regarded such bodies as the Home Guard as a defence against invasion:

“... the radicalisation of the workers is taking place at the moment not around the question of democratic rights as such but around the manner in which the bosses are prosecuting the war.”

Although Trotskyists were always projected as enemies of the Soviet Union, at least since the Moscow Trials, they had in fact consistently called for Soviet defence. Common ground among all [67] British Trotskyists at this time was that Russia remained a country where capitalism had been overthrown, [68] but they were not optimistic about its chances of withstanding a fascist assault. [69] They were faced with a rapid reversal of communist policy to a call for prosecution of the war to the full. [70] There was also far greater intensity in communist attacks on Trotskyists whom they accused of being dishonest in their calls for Soviet defence. The WIL argument was that Britain under a Churchill government must still be waging an imperialist war. Acquisition of a Soviet alliance could not, it insisted, alter this fact. The war could only become a just war if the workers of Britain took military and state power into their own hands. Otherwise all the criticisms made of the British government before Hitler invaded Russia retained their validity. [71] WIL did not propose inactivity in support of the Soviets but, like Tait and others in the ILP, called for all aid to be sent to Russia under trade union control. It began to see a road to workers’ power through a struggle over the handling of the war. Aided by quotations from Lenin it argued for a positive programme whereby the predatory war might be transformed into a just war. It argued that Lenin’s main drive in 1917 was not against war but for a workers’ government. Its own pre-conference thesis of 1942 was published under the ambitious title Preparing For Power. There it was suggested that military incompetence was a sign that the bourgeois system had outlived itself, and that it was leading workers to question the regime. [72] This provoked the RSL, which still insisted that a revolutionary mood could not possibly arise through a desire for more efficient prosecution of the war: WIL, it charged, was distorting the popular mood:

“When social explosions come, as come they will, they will not arise upon the basis of demands by the workers for a more effective prosecution of the war. No class struggles can arise on this issue because it is not a class issue as far as the workers are concerned.” [73]

Workers would be taking a class approach when they desired peace. WIL, charged the RSL, was concealing its own chauvinism behind revolutionary – sounding slogans which, in the wartime context, had a counter-revolutionary content. [74] When WIL replied, effectively, concluding the discussion, it was at its most unapologetic. It was against all occupations, but not to oppose the occupation of Britain would be to carry literal opposition to patriotism too far. It would be “inverted chauvinism”, supporting a foreign bourgeoisie while opposing one’s own. WIL agreed it had talked of an anti-fascist war, but claimed it had always explained that British imperialism could not wage such a war. [75] Exposure of social patriotism was not a live issue: revolutionaries now had to aim at workers’ power: “Our position towards war is no longer merely a policy of opposition, but is determined by the epoch in which we live, the epoch of the socialist revolution. That is, as contenders for power. Only thus can we find an approach to the working class.” [76]

Lenin’s task, reflected WIL, had been to hold an internationalist faction together in a patriotic time. Support would not come to Trotskyists who merely repeated his arguments. WIL reflected on the drift of Trotsky’s last article where he had argued that Fourth International policy did continue that of Lenin, but that “continuation signifies a development, a deepening and a sharpening”. [77]

Notes

1 The full text of this document, which was written by Trotsky, is in Writings (1933-34), 299-329.It appeared as a document of the IS.

2. R. Groves, Arms and the Unions (1936). This pamphlet was published by the Socialist League.

3. Fight, June 1937.

4. One of the Marxist Group recruits to the Labour Party opposed a purely negative attitude towards defence, raising the call for adequate protection, as far as possible under the control of workers’ organisations, (R.W., Air Raid Policy, Sept. 1936, Warwick MSS 15/4/2/15).

5. Quite early on Davis demanded “real protection” and called on the government to spend as lavishly on defence as on armaments, (Air Raid Policy, 27 May 1937, Internal Discussion Bulletin, June 1937, H.P., D.J.H. 2a/2, 7-10).

6. By Robinson, Nicholls and, (later), Bone.

7. Gould, an SWP delegate to the 1938 international conference, was alive to the fact the patriotism was not a danger for the Trotskyist movement (Minutes of the Founding Conference of the Fourth International, Documents, 294-6).

8. Military Training by the labour movement, the thesis advanced by the Transitional Programme, had respectable socialist antecedents in the armed wings of the Austrian and German social democrats. The RSL of 1938 had delegates present at the discussion of the document in the first session of the Founding Congress. In 1940, however, the RSL was to argue that a transitional demand for workers” arms did not have timeless application and certainly could not be advanced in a patriotic period where it might be used by imperialists for recruiting purposes.

9. C.L. Mowat, Britain Between the Wars 1918-1940, 1955, 632. For the evolution of Labour policy see J.F. Naylor, Labour’s International Policy, (1969), 261-92.

10. R.F. Andrews’s often quoted Labour Monthly article of 1934 which demanded that British and French workers should “under no circumstances” support an attack by their governments on fascist Germany, even if that country attacked the U.S.S.R, was well known to Trotskyists (See Workers Fight, Oct. 1938).

11. Following Hitler’s march into Austria R.P. Dutt reviewed communist policy since 1933 on the danger of war (Notes of the Month, Labour Monthly, April 1938, 195-219).

12. “While it may be true that a trench of itself is not an aggressive measure, when it is seen as means to continuing an Imperialist war, then it is obviously as important a part of the Government’s war plans as the construction of bombers” (Militant, Oct. 1938). ARP was also condemned, incidentally, as unlikely to work.

13. “‘Defence’ cannot be separated from offence. The gas-mask is the counterpart of the poison-gas bomb, air-raid shelters are the counterpart of the bombers. To tolerate the one is to tolerate the other, and the revolutionary must implacably reject both” (Voluntary Conscription, WIN, Dec. 1938, 1-3).

14. A central committee statement of 27 October 1938 was followed by a brisk discussion on ARP in which Robinson was sharp and intransigent on patriotic concessions and Hampstead declared the committee ultra-left, (RSL, Special Internal Discussion Bulletin, Nov. 1938, H.P., D.J.H. 13a/5, 5-8). At the February 1939 conference of the RSL only five votes were cast against the executive position on ARP Within the Labour Party ARP was something of an immediate issue because it was raised by local government representatives. This meant the RSL needed a policy (interview with J. Archer, Nov. 1973). WIL, also in the Labour Party, took a similar point of view: “No support for the National Register, no support for ARP , no support for capitalist ‘defence’ – these must be our slogans” (Voluntary Conscription, WIN, Dec. 1938, 1-3).

15. The communists had been agitating for deep shelters in London since 1936, and with some success, (P. Piratin, Our Flag Stays Red, 1978 edit., 64-7).

16. “It must be remembered that on the outbreak of imperialist war we, as revolutionaries, will at first be politically isolated from the masses who will turn to ‘National Defence’ and class collaboration”, (Draft Resolution on the Policy of the RSL on the Outbreak of Imperialist War, 12 Jan. 1939, H.P., D.J.H./391, 4.)

17. Chamberlain announced conscription for twenty and twenty one year olds on 26 April 1939. It was extended on the outbreak of war.

18. “Give us our ideals to serve, give us a policy worth serving, give us the means to fitness, and we will show what latent strength there is in our democracy, and how unitedly we can shoulder our responsibilities to defend it:” (J. Gollan, Youth Will Serve For Freedom, [1938], 11). WIL predicted that communists would support conscription once Chamberlain was out of power.

19. It later regretted its involvement with the Socialist Anti-War Front and, on 11 March 1940, its executive rescinded the decision on conscientious objectors. For the SAWF, see Chapter X.

20. J.R. Strachan, The War Crisis – The Way Out For Workers (1939). “J.R. Strachan” was a pseudonym, possibly for Ralph Lee and Grant.

21. For Groves and the SAWF see Chapter X.

22. For some time before the war the RSL had devoted time and space to “special” (i.e. illegal) work.

23. In an obscure episode Haston and Healy with seven others moved on the outbreak of war to Ireland, (Interview with J. Haston, July 1973). James Maxton fought a parallel tendency in the ILP, (J. McNair, James Maxton: Beloved Rebel, 1955, 286-7). R. Barltrop, The Monument, 1975, 101-22, contains an interesting account of how the S.P.G.B. reacted.

24. A Mass Observation Survey of 2 September 1939 unearthed 2% of those interviewed who would be glad if there was a war, 34% who preferred anything to war, and 43% who would rather get it over with (Mass Observation, War Begains at home, 1940, 35). The predominant feeling seems to have been sullen acquiescence. “The declaration of war brought none of the excitement, none of the ‘ebullitions’ as the Observer put it, which had marked the August days of 1914: no rounds of cheers, no dancing in the streets yet ‘the sense of moral release’ was inexpressible” (A. Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War, 1968, 257). See also the comparison of public perceptions of the two wars in H. Pelling, Britain and the Second World War, 1970, 325-6.

25. “But for the ordinary men who fought it, was this war much different from the first? If there was perhaps less passionate dedication there was probably a greater feeling of inescapable purpose: war resistance was a negligible factor this time “ (A. Marwick, The Explosion of British Society, 1914-62, 1963, 105). Gallup found a majority behind Chamberlain from October 1938, which grew from the outbreak of war (H. Pelling, ibid., 38).

26. In 1914 Lenin had described this as “the only correct proletarian slogan” (The War and Russian Social Democracy, Collected Works, 21, Moscow 1964, 32-3). But Lenin was seeking to draw a definitive line between revolutionaries and social patriots which by 1939 was well established.

27. Trotsky argued that the true meaning of revolutionary defeatism was that defeat of one’s own imperialist government was a lesser evil than political prostration of the proletariat within national unity. It may have been significant that it was WIL which published this argument (Learn to Think, WIN, Aug. 1938, 4).

28. The war was “not a people’s war, but a war in the interests of the big capitalists against the people”, The Trade Unions and The War [1939?], (This was a resolution of the party central committee). For the period 1939-41 see H. Pelling, The British Communist Party, 108-119.

29. London district committee (of the CPGB), Workers Against The War, [1939?], 9-10.

30. W. Gallacher, The War and the Workers, [1939?], 16.

31. Gollancz wrote that the CPGB had adopted the policy consistently held by the ILP (Where Are You Going?, in V. Gollancz (ed.), The Betrayal of the Left, 1940, especially 6-7). The Russian invasion of Finland sundered the close observation of communist policy by Tribune (W. Jones, The Russia Complex, 1977, 50).

32. Trotskyism, with pacifism, belonged among those political tendencies “which confuse and disrupt the growth of working class opposition to the war” (Workers Against The War, [1939?], 7).

33. Rationing, for example, began only after four months of war and then limited to sugar, butter and bacon. Nor had conscription reached beyond the twenty five year olds by April 1940. At that date there were still more than a million unemployed (H. Pelling, Modern Britain: 1885-1914, 1974, 164).

34. The Ballot Box Test, WIN, March 1940, 6. But WIL also believed that “sober discussions” about state repression had taken place in ruling circles immediately before the war. It deployed the evidence of army manoeuvres and the text of insurance policies (which excluded civil war from the list of covered hazards) in support (Slump, WIN, June 1938, 8).

35. See the results for 1940 By-elections in C. Cook and J. Ramsden (4), By-Elections in British Politics, 1973, 372.

36. On 7 July 1940 the People’s Convention movement, an initiative of the CPGB, first met in public to open a six-month campaign. D. Childs, The British Communist Party and the War, 1939-41, J.C.H., Vol.12, 1977, 237-53, leans too heavily on D. Hyde, I Believed, 1953, to explore communist policy with any thoroughness. R. Black, Stalinists in Britain, 1970, 131-59, is a Trotskyist account.

37. “B. Farnborough” (Brian Pearce) dates WIL’s Military Policy from the Fall of France, (Marxists in the Second World War, Labour Review, April-May 1959, 25-8). The RSL believed adoption of such a policy at such a time was proof that it was a defencist concession.

38. A government call for the suspension of holidays, an end to absenteeism, and long working hours received wide backing, but only temporarily, (A. Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War, 1968, 295). Pelling concurs but stretches national unity into 1941 (Britain and the Second World War, 1970, 29).

39. In June 1940 WIL spoke ambiguously of an imminent threat to workers’ rights (Workers’ Fight, WIN, June 1940, 8); in July it thought the bourgeoisie would not “pounce” but that the main threat would come from “the Stalinist machine and the Labour bureaucracy”, both more politically astute and the latter now in government (The Lesson of France, WIN, July 1940, 12).

40. The Electoral Tactics of the Workers’ Vanguard, 1940, H.P.

41. Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, Documents, 311-50. Although this was a manifesto Trotsky had warned before the war that a binding policy could not be imposed on all sections of the Fourth International because of national differences (Learn to Think, WIN, Aug. 1938, 5).

42. See appendix to Imperialist War and the Proletarian World Revolution, in Marxist Discussion Bulletin, Aug. 1940, 2 (H.P., D.J.H. 6/5). The RSL remarked that the section entitled “workers must learn the military arts” might be opportunistically misconstrued. When consciousness was low, calling for arms for the workers had a reactionary effect. The League wrote to the IEC asking for clarification.

43. This included demands for the election of workers’ officers, full trade union and political rights for soldiers, etc.

44. J.P. Cannon, Military Policy of the Proletariat, WIN, Jan. 1941, 4.

45. J.P. Cannon, Our Military Policy, WIN, March 1941, 10.

46. WIL published his evidence as Smash Fascism – End War. The case for socialist revolution. An A.B.C. of Trotskyism. The testimony of J.P. Cannon in the U.S. Labour frame-up Trial, WIN (special volume), 1942, 1-40.

47. “If he is draftable, let him be drafted. I do not think he should try to avoid the draft – he must go with his generation and participate in its life” (Some Thoughts on American Problems, WIN, March 1941, 1).

48 Another Thought on Conscription, 17 Aug, 1940, Writings (1939-40), 119

49. Leon Trotsky’s Last Article, WIN, Feb. 1941, 9. The RSL later attempted, somewhat unconvincingly, to counter this argument. “This is not to say that the masses can be won to the banner of the Fourth International on the slogans of “turn the imperialist war into civil war”, etc., “but slogans which are evasive and ambiguous with regard to the proletarian attitude to the war are a betrayal of Socialist International” (Attitude of the Proletariat towards Imperialist War, H.P., D.J.H. 6/12, 3 ).

50. An uncritical account of WIL’s opposition to the war is W. Hunter, Marxists in the Second World War, Labour Review, Dec. 1958, 139-146. “B. Farnborough” (Brian Pearce) tried to put right the omission from this article of any treatment of Military Policy (Marxists in the Second World War, Labour Review, April-May 1959, 25-8), but did not cover the dispute between the RSL and WIL. D. Parkin, British Trotskyists and the Class Struggle in World War 2, Trotskyism Today, No.2, March 1978, 27-30, criticises both Leagues.

51. The Lesson of France, WIN, July 1940, 12.

52. The Electoral Tactics of the Workers’ Vanguard, 1940, 1-2.

53. [NOTE MISSING]

54. ibid., 7.

55. By 1941 the RSL had concluded that the FI was in the hands of “defencist” tendencies, brought to the fore by the fear of the proletariat in Britain and America of losing their privileged position.

56. Attitude of the Proletariat Towards Imperialist War, H.P., D.J.H., 6/12, 1.

57. A. Calder (The People’s War, 60) doubts that ideological motivation against Nazism was common. One atypical exception was George Orwell (W. Steinhoff, The Road to 1984, 1975, 102). Orwell thought socialist renewal the only policy likely to bring Britain victory.

58. WIL, Reply to the Political Statement of the Revolutionary Socialist League, 1941, 2.

59. Bolshevism and Defencism, May 1941, 10

60. “A revolutionary class in an imperial war desires the defeat of its national army in order to utilize the situation of humbling of its masters to overthrow them irrespective of the nature of the enemy” (Brief Notes on the History of the Left Faction, [1960?], 2; interview with J. Goffe, July 1974).

61. Bolshevism and Defencism, 11. Youth Militant was also singled out for criticism by the Leicester branch. While making an international onslaught the Left Faction (as it soon became) had some ideological companions elsewhere, notably Grandizo Munis of the Spanish section, currently in Mexican exile, who protested against Cannon’s exposition of the Military Policy at the Minneapolis Trial.

62. “J.H.”, A Step Towards Capitulation, Internal Bulletin, 21 March 1941, 5, H.P., D.J.H. 14a/3.

63. Military Policy or Confusion, Internal Bulletin, 20 March 1941, H.P., D.J.H. 14a/2.

64. His argument was that Trotsky’s advice to the Americans had been offered in the context of a dynamic and developing labour movement confronted by the prospect of universal militarization: his ideas should not be used as an alternative to an anti-war struggle.

65. Shortly after this exchange, Haston protested against the emasculation of an article he had written for Socialist Appeal and suggested that the formation of the Home Guard proved that the bourgeoisie was not in fact fearful of arming the workers (The Military Policy as applied to the Home Guard, Internal Bulletin, 21 April 1941, 1-7, H.P., D.J.H., 140/4).

66. ibid., 20.

67. G.H., The Home Guard – An Approach, Internal Bulletin, 19 May 1941, H.P., D.J.H., 14A/5.

68. The views of Burnham and Shachtman found no echo in Britain at the time of the Russo-Finnish war and the RSL disowned C.L.R. James when he defected to Shachtman’s side early in 1940. Nor did Trotskyists reject Soviet manoeuvres between the Great Powers, only the argument that socialist principles should be jettisoned in allied countries.

69. The Trotskyist view was that the USSR had been weakened by diplomatic bungling and purges of the Red Army. See A. Scott, Stalin’s Diplomacy Leads to Defeats, WIN, Dec. 1941, 1-6 and Trotsky’s earlier article The Decapitation of the Red Army, 5 July 1937, Writings (1937-38), 55-60.

70. “The urgent need now is the fullest mobilisation and active energy of all sections of the people for the fulfillment of the tasks of the common struggle with the Soviet people for the defeat of Hitler. We strive for the united national front of all sections of the people (not only of the left anti-imperialist or pro-Soviet elements, but of all opposed to Hitler and supporting the Pact) to drive forward the maximum effort in the joint war with the Soviet Union for the defeat of Hitler” (R.P. Dutt, Notes of the Month, Labour Monthly, Aug. 1941, 356).

71. “But the same class is in control. They are still fighting for the same interests – their profits, markets, colonies, etc. And they can fight for no other interests. They are still fighting to keep India under their own subjection and to keep Africa enslaved.” (A. Scott, Britain’s War Remains Imperialist. It is not altered by the alliance with the Soviet Union, WIN, Nov. 1941, 7. This article was also published separately as a pamphlet.

72. Preparing For Power, WIN, Sept. 1942, 5.

73. RSL, A Criticism of the WIL Pamphlet Preparing For Power in WIL, Policy and Perspectives of the British Trotskyists, 1943, 2.

74. The example given was workers’ control of production to increase production for the war, (RSL, loc. cit., 5).

75. Reply of WIL to the RSL Criticisms of Preparing For Power, in WIL, Policy and Perspectives of the British Trotskyists, 1943, 16.

76. WIL, loc. cit., 17.

77. Bonapartism, Fascism and War, [Aug. 1940], Writings (1939-40), 121. WIL Published this as Leon Trotsky’s Last Article in WIN for February 1941.

X
THE RSL IN UNITY AND DISUNITY
(SEPTEMBER 1938 – MARCH 1944)

The Revolutionary Socialist League was a failure. It did not hold together and it proved unable to capitalise on wartime opportunities. The Marxist League cadre drifted away from it to joint activities against military measures with dissidents inside and outside the Labour Party. The RSP refused any kind of Labour Party work, tried independence and later entered the ILP. The Militant Labour League was left in control of the RSL with official backing from the International. But from 1940 it stagnated within the Labour Party and fell out with the International over the correct line to be advocated against the war. These two factors added to a third, the contrast presented by the growth of the WIL, gave rise to intense factionalism and the effective separation of the RSL into three parts. It drew together at the end of 1943 but only as a preliminary to dissolution in the much larger WIL to form the Revolutionary Communist Party.

The new Revolutionary Socialist League was formed on the eve of the war scare associated with the Munich crisis. This was a test which exposed the fragility of the union forged in July 1938 as each faction reacted in its own way. The MLL argued that the crisis underlined the need for it as the only pole of revolutionary Marxism in the Labour Party. [1] In October, sales of Militant reached a peak figure of 3,000. On 6 November 1938 its conference met. [2] As the public face of the Revolutionary Socialist League, the MLL spent the post-Munich months trying to dig itself in. But until a conference of the RSL was held to establish a firm policy on Labour Party work the energy of the whole organisation could not be concentrated on the MLL What was the reaction of those signatories of the Peace and Unity agreement with a clear preference for “open” work?
 

(i) The Revolutionary Socialist Party

But while Militant continued to appear regularly during these turbulent months all was not well with other commitments made by the fusion. The RSP had surrendered its paper, Revolutionary Socialist, for the promise of a revamped Fight, rechristened Workers Fight, for “open” sales. To a tiny party whose mode was street meetings and outdoor sales, regular appearance of the outside paper was vital. The paper came out in October 1938, marking C.L.R. James’s last connection with the British Trotskyist movement. [3] It firmly opposed ILP reaffiliation to the Labour Party [4] and continued Fight’s tradition as an open Fourth International journal. [5] There was no change in the political line in November. Both these issues appeared late however, and that intended for December failed to come out at all. [6]

This caused disquiet in the RSP as well as among other devotees of outside work. The RSP leaders had signed the Peace and Unity agreement as individuals and were meant, within a week, to have won the assent of the party as a whole. Failing to manage this, they were allowed time to hold a referendum. This was completed late in October 1938, and indicated unanimous backing for joining the RSL. But Maitland and Willie Tait told the RSL central committee the next month that conditions were attached to the union: a guaranteed continuation of open work and an open paper, and the placing of the editorial and business control of Workers Fight in the hands of the RSP! This ultimatum was refused on the grounds that a revolutionary organisation must centrally control all its publications and that the overall tactics of the RSL could be changed only by a national conference.

RSP suspicions of a lack of interest in London in activities outside the Labour Party continued to fester. It formally joined the RSL on 15 December 1938, but presented the League’s executive with a lengthy critique. [7] The RSL central committee, under fire also from London apostles of the independent life, pleaded that as well as the perennial dearth of funds the League lacked able and willing organisers for outside work. [8] There had to be, it argued, a period of common experience on the part of all signatories to the Peace and Unity agreement. The RSP, however, was making its own experience by outdoor rallies on the Munich issue [9] and an intervention in the West Perthshire by-election. [10] It was never really integrated in the RSL.
 

(ii) The Socialist Anti-War Front

Meanwhile the centre of the RSL was under pressure from the other independent strand of thought within it. The entire leading cadre of the old Marxist League was involved in September 1938 in launching the Socialist Anti-War Front. A London conference to found the SAWF brought together members of a wide spectrum of organisations, though none of them lacked Trotskyist participation. [11]

It elected Hugo Dewar secretary, formed a provisional committee and issued a “call to action” in view of the Munich crisis. [12] On 1 October a youth section was set up [13] and the next day a demonstration in Hyde Park was held. At this stage the SAWF was mainly a London organisation. [14] The SAWF was formed to organise working class opposition to war and to achieve unity among socialists. Its general analysis did not differ from the accepted Trotskyist view and the MLL joined the provisional committee in mid-October. But the truth was that SAWF appeal was couched in terms sufficiently ambiguous to carry support from the ILP as well. Indeed, it was ILP interest which made the SAWF as broad as it was. [15] Later both the MLL, and the WIL, which had also participated, were to condemn the SAWF for pacifism. [16]

Within the RSL ways began to part, first of all over the SAWF thesis that a block of socialist parties could prevent war, expounded in its pamphlet War and the Workers (1939). Workers Fight commented that while unity was a progressive step, only a revolutionary party could overthrow capitalism, the cause of war. [17] In November, the Front declared the National Register part of a dress rehearsal for military and police dictatorship. In Resist the Register, [18] Hugo Dewar argued for non-cooperation, rejecting the government argument that conscription was defensive and voluntary. [19] When the Military Training Bill was introduced without strenuous opposition, a new organisation, the No-Conscription League, was launched, which gained important support and in which the SAWF functioned as a militant working-class wing. [20] At the Bermondsey convention of the N-CL, on 4 June 1939, Groves [21] moved an SAWF amendment to the main policy resolution. With support from Wicks he secured a pledge for agitation against the Military Training Act, for trade union assistance to victimised objectors and help for shop stewards resisting industrial conscription. [22]

The outbreak of war itself geared up the SAWF an extra notch. Its manifesto, issued on the day of declaration of war, called on trades councils to make themselves the centres of opposition to encroachment on civil liberties, and condemned Labour and the CPGB for their willingness to stand with exploiters behind rhetoric about an anti-fascist war. The Front launched its own journal, The Call, in November 1939, and showed signs of gathering round it substantial numbers of dissident Labour candidates [23] and trades councils. There was some encouragement in the declaration of the Home Counties Labour Parties for socialist peace terms and against the political truce, and The Call claimed resolutions on these matters were “pouring” into Transport House. [24]

On 12 November 1939, the N-CL held an all-London convention against war and conscription, where Alex Sloan MP moved and C.A. Smith seconded a resolution opposing the war, urging repeal of the National Service Act, calling for the maintenance of civil liberties and an end to the truce, and demanding an immediate Labour Party conference to formulate Socialist Peace proposals. An SAWF amendment was carried with support from the N-CL executive. [25]

It seems that the SAWF now carried the hopes of the former Marxist League in much the same way as the earlier SLF had. To Groves, and perhaps now to the others as well, a gathering of anti-war Labour dissidents in a convention “would mark an end to the division, the fractionisation, the hole-in-the-corner groupings that in the past have ruined all effort to secure a large left-wing movement”. [26] The Front was militant, anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist. [27] It was also, by the meagre standards of these years, a success. Against this it mattered little that it did not call for a Fourth International whose hour had not struck. [28] The Front rejected a purely pacifist appeal which it considered would not rally the working class, but it did demand peace on “socialist principles”. This was what divided it from WIL and – after initial hesitation – from the MLL. It built up a significant movement against the anticipated demise of civil liberty and the militarisation of life [29] and even occasionally moved out of the realm of propaganda into direct intervention in events. [30] When confronted by the Call-up, however, it had only negative individual resistance to suggest. [31] An attempt was made to transcend this limit [32], but the Front was not a political party and when the end of the Phoney War made military resistance irrelevant, it also died. The Front disappeared after April 1940, despite ambitious plans [33], and a broadening of its interests to embrace problems of working class life. It had for once provided a genuine movement in which many of Trotskyist origins might work, but the new phase of the war [34], together with increased Transport House vigilance against party dissidents, now finished it off.

To Wicks and Sara, executive members of the RSL, from the time of the July 1938 fusion, the SAWF was a way of tapping the kind of revival in the movement anticipated in the Transitional Programme. They expected they might build as they had in the months following their expulsion from the CPGB [35]: the issue and – for them – the geographical location was similar. It also offered a forum for unity with Groves and Dewar, the one in the Labour Party, the other in the ILP. Sara and Wicks were similarly divided. But on the pacifist appeal of the SAWF itself, they parted with the RSL early in 1939. [36]

The first RSL conference, convened just outside the six month schedule set when the League was formed, did not reveal a healthy state of affairs. The centre was in conflict with three distinct groups: the former Marxist League, dissidents within the first RSL, and the RSP The proceedings opened acrimoniously when the expulsion of Lane and Duncan, of Islington, was upheld. [37] This led to a walk-out of at least [38] ten members who were to attempt to found a new organisation. Jackson, the RSL secretary, then had to report the aborting of attempts to fuse with the WIL. [39] Finally it was announced that fusion with the RSP remained unconsummated and new ground rules were laid down for bringing the moment of it near. [40] Conference then approved an uncontroversial – if lengthy – constitution [41] and returned an executive with strong Militant influence. [42]

Conference endorsed the executive position on Air Raid Precautions, which rejected a distinction between offence and defence and called for a boycott, but not before dissent had been voiced, an anticipation of the factionalism which shook the whole League in 1942. [43] It went on to affirm the split perspective, an inevitable development which it believed might benefit centrism (the ILP) or the Fourth International. It also still believed in an open centre, the MLL: all outside work was subordinate to that. The major controversy of 1938 was thus resolved in the Militant’s favour. Finally conference recognised that it would not gain support before war broke out, that hostilities would delay the swing to the left (though they would also intensify it), and that the organisation would have to act in collective prudence in order to avoid provoking physical obliteration by a stark, presentation of policy. [44]

The MLL, focus for the Militant Group before the Peace and Unity conference became, by fission, the hub around which the whole RSL turned. On its behalf Matlow and Wood made speeches to Labour’s 1939 conference, the first it had held for a year and a half. [45] Youth Militant reappeared, (after a lapse), in February 1939 as the paper of the youth section of the MLL. [46] It reviewed the attempt of earlier years to rally delegates for a socialist policy and advanced a positive and detailed youth programme stimulated by the TUC Youth Charter. It retained the distinctive stamp of appealing for a Third Labour Government and autonomy for the Leagues of Youth. But the LLOY was now in decline, debilitated by a repressive party apparatus and peacetime conscription. [47] The MLL had fifteen delegates at its annual conference [48] but there was now no future for youth work.

In November 1939 London executive members of the RSL had advanced a proposal to their central committee that an open Fourth International paper should be published. The provinces’ representatives voted them down, thus ensuring continued dependence on a Labour Party presence. J. Middleton and G. Shepherd, secretary and national agent respectively, warned local Labour Parties in January 1940 against pacifist attacks on party policy and candidates. By February early talk in Labour’s propaganda of a German revolution had ceased. Harold Laski’s pamphlet, Is it an imperialist war? appeared, intended to assuage the more “ideologically minded”. He argued that the war might be imperialist but distinguished the contracting (Anglo-French) strain from the aggressive (German) kind. [49] Reg Groves wrote a forceful reply which was to lead later to conflict with Shepherd and the NEC. [50] Van Gelderen tackled the same job in a review for Militant. [51] At this point early in the year, however, party conference had not pronounced on the war.

Lack of constitutionally decided policy did not protect the MLL from the Labour Party apparatus. In early March 1940 it resolved that the League was “a communist organisation for the promotion of Leon Trotsky’s views and policy” [52], and that membership of it was not compatible with party membership. The League protested that no reason had been given for the ban, that it was “a denial of democracy and political freedom within the workers’ organisation”, “a Gestapo-like attempt ... to crush honest political criticism”. [53] Jackson anticipated the Fourth International itself in his attempt to put a brave face on the ban. Labour leaders, he suggested, were less secure as awareness of the reactionary nature of the war began to spread:

“It is not accidental that the MLL is banned at the period when British Imperialism plans to extend the war and talk of further sacrifices in blood and money is in the air.” [54]

Jackson threatened Labour with continued activity after the MLL itself disappeared. On 16 March 1940 the RSL executive had in fact recommended MLL dissolution. Later that month, on 23 March, an RSL conference met followed by a conference of the doomed MLL. It was resolved to follow the RSL recommendation, although the leaders were faced with Our Present Tasks, a “document of the fourteen”, whose authors thought the main political developments would, as in 1915-18, take place in the factories, workshops and streets. They flatly denied that there would be a swing to the left within the Labour Party [55], but the meaning of acquiescence in the ban had to be that retention of Labour Party membership was an overriding RSL objective. The executive and J.L. Robinson’s Leicester branch came together to reject the call to launch an openly Fourth International paper, and suspend Militant and the MLL in favour of open work. [56] On 9 April 1940, MLL branches were urged to agitate about the ban but to stop short of provoking expulsion. They were promised a monthly Militant and the services of a full-time organiser. The promise was fulfilled when Jackson moved from a voluntary to a professional basis on 15 April at a weekly wage of £2 a week. [57] Transport House was told that the NEC action threatened to turn it into “a hardened bureaucracy”; the MLL was informed in its turn that it was committed to policies of which party conference would not approve and that an attempt was being made by it to build an organisation within the party. [58] The MLL might express surprise that conference decisions could be anticipated in this way [59], but the Bournemouth conference easily endorsed Labour’s entry into coalition as well as the war itself. MLL speakers there received some support but the emergency motion for Labour joining the government was easily carried. [60]

The drive against Labour dissidents was the very thing the MLL had always feared and tried to avoid. Expulsions and proscriptions would inhibit it from taking advantage of a swing to the left in Labour’s ranks. [61] The RSL drew the opposite conclusion from the proscriptions and isolation revealed at Bournemouth to that drawn around this time by the WIL. Late in May 1940 even the continuation of Militant itself was thought risky and it was dropped for a proposed theoretical journal. [62] Rather than pull out, the RSL concluded that Labour’s debilitated condition would permit an increase in its influence. In a tidying up operation, whatever MLL members who were amenable were recruited into the RSL, but that organisation kept an even lower public profile. [63]

This retreat afforded few encouraging signs to any with a sense of proportion. This quality was never prominent among the governing bodies of the Fourth International. In 1940 the International was faced with a double crisis. War made it impossible for Europe to function as any kind of international centre. Worse yet, the Shachtmanite schism of 1939-40 [64] had disrupted the International Executive Committee, with four of its seven members supporting Shachtman’s new party and his view of Russia. [65] Among them was C.L.R. James, now working in the SWP under the pseudonym J.R. Johnson. Faced with this crisis an Emergency Conference of the Fourth International was convened on 19-26 May in New York by the United States, Canadian and Mexican Sections. [66] Harber, an orthodox IEC member, did not attend, but the British Section did disown James who was its other representative. [67]When the conference looked at the situation in Britain it came up with a surrealistic resolution [68], inspired perhaps from only one source. It declared “a rapid revolutionary movement” was maturing in Britain, that a broad unorganised Trotskyist sentiment existed, and that the fractions British were in four groups. Only the third point was factually correct, but the International Conference made two inferences: that the ban on the MLL was motivated by the “substantial progress” it was making, and that unity might now come about in Britain. Such a call was never likely to be efficacious, even when sweetened with a nudge to the MLL to make what organisational concessions it could. [69]

Those who had walked out of the February 1939 conference attempted for a time to maintain that they were the true RSL and entitled to recognition. By October of that year they had to recognise that the International would not transfer its allegiance and changed their name to the Revolutionary Workers’ League. [70] The RWL maintained a tiny independent existence [71] publishing a duplicated paper, Workers Fight, which at Christmas changed to a printed format with ambitions of appearing fortnightly. [72] They published a manifesto [73] and a pamphlet [74], held meetings in London and reported a following in the provinces. But disorganisation led to them losing control of the Pioneer Press outlet which they had held at the time of the walk-out. [75] In summer 1940 a majority entered WIL on a critical basis. [76] Leading figures like Lane and Duncan remained aloof. In July or August 1941 twelve former RWL members, among them some who had joined the WIL, rejoined the RSL. [77]

After the Fall of France, the RSL slogan remained “For a Third Labour Government, with full power”. [78] Like WIL the RSL thought the experience of struggling round such a slogan would be the best education for the masses. [79] The masses had to see that a struggle against bourgeois methods meant a struggle against war. [80] The sign of a revolutionary temper was opposition to war. The “Third Labour Government” was considered by the RSL an elementary slogan of the kind which would break the mass from illusions [81], but it had a revolutionary significance only in the right context: “The demand for the ending of the Party truce may be progressive or reactionary. Progressive if counterposed to the bourgeois task of winning the war, reactionary if advanced as a mean to the better prosecution of the war”. [82]

Militant appeared for the last time in its pre-war series in May 1940. An enlarged RSL executive resolved on 25 May that there was no basis for a semi-agitational paper and suspended it with the initial intention of launching a theoretical journal. This was never published. The effective immediate replacement for Militant was The Bulletin of the Fourth International which first appeared in June. [83]

Though commended by the Emergency Conference, the RSL’s prospects were bleak. To general torpor within its chosen theatre of operations it had to add the practical difficulty of sustaining any kind of activity at all in London from mid-1940 on because of the blitz. [84] At the beginning of winter the London organisation, its heart, was reduced to a very weak state. [85] It believed it could provide no more than 150 sales for a theoretical journal. [86] This was somewhat academic, since no such journal ever appeared, Militant had lapsed, and its intended replacement, the Bulletin of the BSFI [87] did not appear on a regular monthly basis.

The suspension of publications landed the EC in further trouble on left and right. “The fourteen” were in defiance of an executive directive of 25 May 1940 towards Labour Party activity. In July they registered vigorous opposition to the suspension of Militant even if it were to be substituted. [88] The central committee delivered an ultimatum which, on pain of expulsion, demanded that the fourteen produce a definite alternative programme to Labour Party activities they scorned. [89] Further exchanges led to the expulsion of “F” on 5 February 1941 [90], and the decision by the three prime movers among the fourteen to launch a new faction, the Socialist Workers Group, in April. [91] It flirted with WIL, now independent itself [92], but five members of it applied to return to the RSL on 3 May 1942.

While wrangling with exponents of independence the central committee and the executive found itself in growing conflict with the Leicester RSL branch which, under the uncompromising leadership of J.L. Robinson, also challenged the suspension of Militant and the appearance of The Bulletin. Leicester was further incensed to find, in The Bulletin for November 1940, a call by Starkey Jackson for support to be given to deep air raid shelters, which policy was also followed by Youth Militant for the same month. [93] It considered the step a risk to the Labour Party tactic by its open identification of the RSL with the Fourth International, and the other a contravention of 1940 conference decisions. [94] Leicester pressurised the Centre for the next five months to clarify its position on ARP. In the absence of a statement [95], Leicester issued a document, Bolshevism or Defencism, which indicted the Centre for capitulation and a long and tedious polemic began. [96]

The breeding ground of factionalism was inactivity which was itself the product not only of a false perspective, but also of organisational incompetence. [97] The December 1940 central committee resolved to begin publication of Militant anew in a duplicated format. [98] This occurred only in March 1941 however. Again, a July 1941 decision to begin printing became operative only in September. This compares poorly with the contemporary publishing record of WIL. In fairness it must be also added that by March 1941 most RSL central committee members and alternates were in the forces. [99]

The new Militant appeared from Glasgow in September 1941 [100] published in the changed political environment arising from Hitler’s June invasion of Soviet Russia. It appeared with a strong supplement calling for Soviet defence, though differing from the CPGB in its belief that an independent factory movement was the key to achieving it. Like other Trotskyists, the RSL considered Russia unlikely to survive in view of “Russia’s complete incapacity to resist the armies of Hitler, which can only be defeated by superior military strength, which thanks to the bureaucracy and its incompetence the Soviet Union does not possess; or by propagandising the proletarian revolution”. But though such forecasts reflect part of the baggage carried from the Founding Conference [101], this Militant series was more impressive than its predecessors, not least in its ability to reflect living industrial struggles. [102]

The RSL convened its national conference on 20/21 September 1941. [103] This gathering revealed growing uncertainty in the RSL about its international standing [104] and lifted a veil from new factional lines: Conference clearly revealed a Left Fraction, around Robinson, which was intractably wedded to the Labour Party tactic, but vigilant against any concessions to chauvinism [105]; a Right which favoured a Military Policy on the war and worked for fusion with the WIL; and a Centre of Harber and the traditional MLL leaders which controlled the apparatus. Conference discussed Military Policy and concluded that it might not be binding on a section of the International. It decided to seek clarification of this point upon receipt of which a special conference would be held. [106] This gave freedom to the Right to develop its activities. Jackson, the RSL organiser, had been called up [107] and John Lawrence became organiser responsible for industrial affairs. At central committee meetings he and Harber clashed over [108] possible fusion with WIL. [109] Until the end of the year, it was possible that the RSL would be knocked off its course not only on the war but on the Labour Party tactic too. [110]

The RSL was vulnerable because the Military Policy it perceived as a concession to chauvinism had been embraced by WIL. From August 1941, under international pressure, the two organisations exchanged documents. [111] The RSL stood by its 1937 position that WIL had had no political right to exist when it was first formed. WIL claimed British Section status since it and not the RSL adhered to Fourth International policy. It had launched its paper Socialist Appeal as an avowedly Fourth International journal, but the RSL found its documents vague and saw them as confirmation that WIL was a clique. The RSL retained international backing but the door was now noticeably left open to the WIL. [112] On 12 December 1941 the RSL resolved to bring negotiations to an end.

To WIL, now outside all parties, the “Third Labour Government” slogan was “completely incorrect and opportunist”, a demand associated with the bad experiences of the past. WIL argued for advancing a Fourth International programme for Labour, in power, to implement. The RSL, it charged, had become Labour Party members on principle, not qualitatively different from the Marxist Group or the Communist League:

“Like the sectarians who attempt to place the so-called ‘independence of the organisation’ above time and place, the late adherents of the Militant Labour League turn the Labour Party tactic into a panacea.” [113]

WIL did not drop its demand for Labour to take power just because it was outside the Labour Party. Throughout the war, and after, its leaders rejected a long term presence in the Labour Party. [114] But to surrender the advantages of independence for “a problematical future possibility” of fecund Labour Party work was, in its view, futile.

From 1942 it became impossible to disentangle the wrangles within the RSL from that body’s relations with WIL and the International Secretariat. [115] The RSL Centre, supported by the Left, made three charges against WIL: it lacked internal democracy; it had abandoned revolutionary defeatism; it had rejected entrism for party building methods “basically opposed to those of Bolshevism”. [116] The central committee as a whole broadened its sights on 11 January 1942 when it declared the Chicago (Military) Policy of J.P. Cannon to be reactionary. This was not enough for the Left, which in April 1942 launched its own duplicated internal journal, The Leninist. For the Left it was in the end all one: any concessions made to Military Policy must ruin everything. If Military Policy was rejected then fusion with WIL was out of the question. [117]

When, on 21 June 1942, the IS wrote to the RSL again advancing the need for Military Policy and urging unity with WIL, Lawrence and thirteen others seized their opportunity. They circulated a statement [118] among the membership backing the IS, reserving their right to participate freely in fusion discussions unbound by RSL policy and demanding an emergency conference. It seems that the Right at this point was about to break away and join WIL. [119] On 18 July, however, an International representative, J.B. Stuart [120], visited London. He met WIL leaders, Margaret Johns and, crucially, some members of the Right, whom he persuaded to stay in the RSL and fight for a majority. The next day the RSL central committee met and suspended the fourteen signatories to the statement of dissociation, including Carson, Lawrence, Lane and Goffe [121] but the Right, which earlier might have welcomed a rupture, now submitted to being disciplined. On 26 July 1942 Stuart met Harber and Lawrence and a compromise plan was agreed to cover the conduct of the Right during negotiations for fusion. [122] This collapsed a few weeks later when it was discovered that Lawrence and others of the Right were involved in an elaborate subterfuge, that their conciliation screened concerted action with WIL. [123] In October and November nearly all members of the Right were expelled from the RSL

Meanwhile a special conference of the RSL had been held as requested by the Right. The Left was itself growing in alienation from the RSL and from the Fourth International, but it united with the Centre to vote down Military Policy and reluctantly advanced a panel for the central committee. The Left and Right captured three seats each and the Centre held four. Following the conference the League heard from the IS which condemned it for severing negotiations with WIL [124] and for the ultra-leftism of Robinson. Following the expulsion of the Right, however, a new central committee was returned, composed of six followers of the Centre and four from the Left. [125] The Right, also now known as the Trotskyist Opposition, was playing its own game, with international encouragement. [126] There was a feeling that simple adherence to WIL would mean that that body had too easily surmounted the 1938 declaration of the International. [127] From 1942 the idea took root that WIL was anti-internationalist, and that its support for the FI programme was only for the record. So the Trotskyist Opposition bobbed about independently in 1943, some of its members uneasy at a policy which had turned them back towards struggling for a majority in the RSL.

By 1942 WIL was even more convinced that the place for Trotskyists was in the open [128], seizing the opportunity to recruit directly to the Fourth International. It was now visibly beginning to derive benefit from an existence outside parties, unlike the RSL which remained immersed in the Labour Party. It would take a mass influx into the Labour Party to make it change its mind. [129] The RSL always challenged WIL’s presentation of conditions for entry. WIL had argued that Labour must be in a state of flux, at a high level of political life, and moving left. The RSL countered that political life in the Labour Party had never been on a high level and that this was not in any case material in determining Trotskyist behaviour. .Trotskyism, it insisted, had to prepare the turn to the Labour Party, a task WIL was manifestly failing to carry out. [130]

The RSL suggested that WIL was preparing to argue that workers would skip the Labour Party stage and join it directly. [131] Finally, it argued that WIL’s false attitude to the Labour Party sprang from its erroneous policy on war. WIL did not recognise present chauvinism, it charged, and it exaggerated class conflict so that it might reject the Labour Party. [132]

But the already tottering RSL was now lop-sided. Indeed the Centre now had twenty-three members on paper to the Left’s thirty six. [133] The Left believed Harber to be a liquidationist who would dissolve the revolutionary party in the centrist WIL. The Centre was deeply suspicious of an organised faction within the League, and one, moreover, which had effective control of its paper from December 1942. [134] On 9 January 1943 the Lefts were suspended for factionalism. When the charges against them were confirmed they were expelled on 23 January for refusing to divulge the names of their Fraction. [135] The Left boasted that it took with it the true industrial base of the British Section of the Fourth International [136] and the early months of 1943 passed in an ugly wrangle over the status of its paper. [137] On 4 June the Left Fraction appealed to the IS against its expulsion and received a reply to the effect that this act was indeed a violation of the RSL constitution. [138]

In July 1943 WIL made a new offer on unification. It refused to devote itself to nothing else but proposed a six month discussion at the end of which a fusion conference would vote for one tactic in a majority vote. WIL demanded for itself either recognition as the official British Section or, failing that, sympathetic status – the very request it had made in 1938. [139] WIL also had grown tired of being lectured by American representatives on splits:

The elements which began the work of the Opposition, even in the majority, were not of the best material. The difficulties of growth and the milieu in which they had to work; the composition of the Opposition itself, the different stages of development through which the organisation passed; the necessity at various stages of making sharp changes if the movement was even to survive; all these factors led necessarily and inevitably to splits. [140]

On 7 September 1943, WIL wrote to the IS about the mode of unification. On 26 September the IS passed a resolution on British Unification which identified acceptance of the FI programme principles and statutes as the sole conditions for it. Under the circumstances the door was open to WIL. Yet WIL had within its own ranks a challenge to its behaviour since 1938, a minority which, like the Right Opposition of the RSL, accused it of being anti-Internationalist in method. [141] This minority led by Healy, a party to WIL’s abstention from the Peace and Unity agreement, now condemned this aloofness in a critical resolution. [142] It reminded the WIL leaders of the need to observe majorities and warned, presciently, that such majorities had international as well as national boundaries.

The IS resolution of 26 September 1943 led the warring RSL factions to prepare unification. The Centre seems to have responded [143] most promptly: it regarded the proposed reconstitution conference as the reforming of the old RSL The IS required all three parts of the old RSL to be within the reconstitution. Bitterness persisted between Lawrence and Harber, leaders of the “Right” and “Centre” to the end [144], but a Reconstitution Conference did gather on New Year’s Day 1944 in the presence of Phelan. The Left had hoped to secure from it a unified organisation with which to join WIL in fusion. This was not the proposition however. The Right (thirty four votes) and the Centre (thirty six votes) carried the Standing Orders Committee proposal of a looser arrangement against twenty nine votes for the Left.

The Left joined with the others in giving unanimous support to the IS resolution of 26 September reconstituting the British Section, a step it later regretted. But its full vote was cast against the resolution for fusion which was carried with seventy four votes behind it. The Right emerged as the faction most eager for unity, and in the third session of conference called for immediate fusion of RSL and WIL locals. [145] An IS representative also attended the second day of WIL’s January 1944 central committee [146] from which the Minority was excluded in view of its contact with an RSL faction. Nor was the Minority allotted a place on the negotiating committee in view of lack of support for its views at the 1943 WIL conference. [147]

The Fusion Conference met on 11-12 March 1944. There were sixty-nine delegates, fifty two from the WIL and seventeen from the RSL. [148] This reflected a membership split of 260/75 in WIL’s favour. [149] And the division of the RSL delegates – seven to the Centre, six to the Trotskyist Opposition, and four to the Left Fraction – meant that whatever resistance there was to the WIL, was seriously weakened. The resolutions of the RSL Centre did not represent any programmatic change. It still saw workers” control as a slogan for a revolutionary period. As advanced in the Britain of 1941-3, at a time when the masses were under capitalist influence, it continued to believe that the slogan had “not so much a purely reformist character as a definitely chauvinist one”. It furthered the illusion that it was justifiable to increase war production. All supporters of Military Policy had taken the incidental factor that the enemy was a fascist country and made it a cardinal principle. Since this was essentially a rehearsal of the old argument, it may have been aimed at justifying the RSL’s wartime stand. When Tearse moved the WIL’s industrial policy resolution he was able to carry it with only four votes in opposition. No more successful was the Left Fraction with its motion, A Policy for Industry. The Fraction regarded the Clyde Workers Committee and MWF as paper organisations [150]: the emphasis should have been put on work within the existing organisations, and its aim should have been to achieve one shop stewards movement. “We certainly will not assist in clarifying our position by attempting to imitate the Stalinists and building our own private concern.” To the Left Fraction it was tactically preferable to court expulsion from the shop stewards” movement and then campaign for democracy in the factories. The Fraction implied that the Militant Workers Federation was being used by WIL as a kind of political party. It was no more successful than the RSL Centre had been, and secured only four votes.

Voting on conference resolutions reflected roughly a four to one majority for WIL policies. Indeed, the Fusion Conference generally was a recognition of WIL’s wartime achievement. The main WIL leaders were all returned to the new central committee and there was no representation for the WIL minority. For the RSL, Harber (now known as Paul Dixon on party documents) and John Goffe were returned as CC members. [151] The leading WIL figures were then confirmed in the key positions. Haston became general secretary, Millie Lee organisational secretary, Ted Grant the editor of Socialist Appeal. This paper was confirmed as the agitational organ of Trotskyism though Militant’s imprint was to be used in the Labour Party. Workers International News remained the theoretical journal. The decision to adopt the name Revolutionary Communist Party was at once a rebuke to the CPGB and a reflection of WIL optimism rather than the bleaker outlook of the RSL. Stuart’s report to the American Trotskyists is perhaps the source of the myths later circulated about the WIL and the RSL. [152] It saw the RCP as a marriage of the “furious activism” of the one with the “serious attention to theory” of the other, whose consummation was the fruit of two years” tireless international effort. [153]

Stuart detected two dangers as displayed by the Fusion Conference. One was ultra leftism within the Left Fraction, though he urged caution in dealing with it in view of its class composition. The other was “a deviation of national coloration”, apparently discernible in the ex-WIL leadership. He made complaints of references to “our” eighth army which were almost certainly directed at the views of Grant.

The Fusion Conference was the occasion of the last in a series of communist pamphlets attacking Trotskyism. [154] Elsewhere the launching of the RCP attracted some attention, but it was really the arrests of party leaders during an industrial crisis the following month which brought recognition. Even before this assault of the party helped bind it together, the fusion resolution declared the hatchet buried:

The past clashes on the political questions engendered deep cleavages between the leading personnel and embittered the relations between the members of the organisation. An important task for the leadership of the new organisation is to introduce a real comradeship into the political discussions and life of the party, and to sweep away all the vestiges of the bitter disputes of the past. In the interests of the fusion this Conference therefore dissolves all past organisational conflicts and disputes and closes the discussion on these questions in the British Section. [155]

The Fusion Conference was a watershed. It did not mark the end of factionalism, but it redrew the demarcation lines. WIL leaders felt that Harber and the RSL Centre adhered loyally to the new set up [156] even though they still differed from the new party’s leadership. The Left Fraction, of course, maintained its existence. But the Right or Trotskyist Opposition had some within it who were travelling in the same direction as the Healy group within the WIL, and the fusion brought them together with, in the end, profound results.

The RSL had a melancholy history. All of the WIL’s predictions concerning the fragility of the Peace and Unity agreement of 1938 were borne out. The gulf over Labour Party tactics was too wide to be bridged by such a pact. In the end it was experience which resolved this, always the most difficult question for Trotskyists in Britain. WIL grew by rejecting the Labour Party and staying independent of the International. [157] The RSL decayed and dissolved by staying within the Labour Party. The sacrifices it made for its Labour Party existence became increasingly futile as the anticipated left swing within it was seen to be a mirage. The formation of the RCP was an endorsement of WIL’s method and its policies and gave promise of a departure from a bleak Trotskyist tradition in Britain.

Notes

1. Though it maintained there was no contradiction between its own existence and that of the Socialist Anti-War Front, formed in September: “on the contrary, the strong organisation of the revolutionary left in the Labour Party will be of great assistance to its work” (Militant, Oct. 1938).

2. The MLL conference reported 150 members, adopted a programme of transitional demands proposed by Jackson, claimed 2,000 monthly sales of Militant. It also claimed to be the driving force of the SAWF in some areas, (Report of the first National Conference of the Militant Labour League, [Nov. 1938?], 3, H.P., D.J.H. 3/2).

3. James was regarded by the RSP as a pledge that open activity would receive sufficient emphasis in the RSL He fulfilled some speaking engagements despite his illness, and the October Workers Fight bears his editorial mark, but he left for the United States shortly after.

4. It was argued that the opposition of most ILP leaders to reaffiliation would evaporate. “Comrades of the ILP, you think some of you that you are revolutionaries. You are not.” Capitulation to the Labour Party, it now predicted, would allow the ILP to be used by Transport House as a counterweight to Stalinism.

5. It carried articles by James and Maitland, advertisements for Militant, the RSP bookshop and even Workers International News. The Founding Conference was reported as were other affairs of the International such as the murder of its administrative secretary, Rudolf Klement.

6. Suspension of publication was blamed on low revenue from sales, although it was claimed that October and November were sold out.

7. RSP charges against the RSL centre were set down in RSP to RSL, (29 Dec. 1938), Letter and Statement of the RSP (Edinburgh) and reply of Executive Committee, H.P., D.J.H. 13a/6. See also Statement of the RSP, 23 Dec. 1938, in WIL document on the history of Trotskyism, 9-11.

8. ibid. Chief London critics were Lane and Duncan of the Islington RSL branch. This branch did publish at least four issues of Islington Workers Voice, a duplicated supplement to Militant, early in 1939. See the issue for March 1939 at H.P., D.J.H./3.

9. It claimed to have convened the biggest protest meetings in Edinburgh; one of its complaints against the centre was that it had not been kept supplied with literature during this time. It believed that the RSL central committee was mainly preoccupied with preparations to go underground.

10. At West Perthshire there was no Labour Party candidate in the by-election, brought about when the Duchess of Atholl resigned her seat in protest against the National Government’s foreign policy. She was the author of Searchlight on Spain, 1938, a defence of the Republic, and received popular front support in her unsuccessful bid to be returned. The RSP weighed in with Maitland’s pamphlet Searchlight on the Duchess of Atholl, 1938, an analysis of why a Tory should support the Republic.

11. Present were members of the ILP London Divisional Council, the RSL, the Africa Service Bureau, the MLL, the ILP Guild of Youth and the Labour League of Youth.

12. All capitalist conflicts were denounced but the League of Nations, Collective Security and Peace Blocs rejected. The notion of a war for democracy was felt to be undermined since the British, French and Czechs were already “ruling by decrees without consulting Parliament”. For the text of the Call to Action see Militant, Oct. 1938.

13. Members of various unions attended as well as others from the Woodcraft Folk, the League of Youth, Guild of Youth, WIL, RSL and London SAWF The Youth SAWF intervened with difficulty in a Youth Peace conference that autumn dominated by Ted Willis and John Gollan (The New Leader, 21 Oct. 1938).

14. The September 1938 conference of the SAWF had formed a provisional committee for London as well as district committees all over the capital. In South London Dewar held the secretaryship in addition to the national post.

15. Reg. Groves used The New Leader regularly to expound SAWF views (see the issue for 30 Sept. 1938). Sydney Bidwell told the ILP that the Front’s anti-war call had come “like a refreshing breeze” through the labour movement (The New Leader, 7 Oct. 1938), though this was of course vitiated by the adulatory reception extended by Maxton and ILP MPs to Chamberlain on his return from Munich.

16. The RSL admitted its involvement with the SAWF during the Munich crisis to have been a mistake, but charged the WIL with sharing it (British Section of the Fourth International, Statement on relations with the Workers International League, 4 Dec. 1939, H.P., D.J.H. 13x/8, 4).

17. See its issue for January 1939. That spring the SAWF did, however, issue a message to Labour’s rank and file declaring opposition to imperialist war to be part of the struggle for workers” power.

18. Dated 7 Feb. 1939, n.p. This pamphlet, with its pacifist connotations was later withdrawn by the Front. The Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society was one organisation which struck an encouraging note when it declared the Register “a threat to the rights and liberties of Cooperators, and part of the general effort of the present Government to destroy peace and democracy”.

19. See also SAWF general circular of 13 March 1939, Warwick MSS, 15/4/1/19.

20. The N-CL was launched in February 1939 and two months later was talking of a youth section. After a year’s life the N-CL claimed 6,000 members organised in 100 branches and around a quarter of a million affiliated members (The New Leader, 23 Feb. 1940).

21. Groves and Wicks were unable to carry electoral opposition to candidates not opposed to conscription (No Conscription, June 1939).

22. No evidence has been located of Reg Groves joining the RSL, either in its first or second incarnations, though he and Dewar now linked with the other Marxist Leaguers in the Socialist Anti-War Front. For most of the first year of the war Groves was a militant propagandist against the aims of the war, using whatever publication was open to him to advance his views, and being prime mover in founding another, Home Front (See Appendix 3).

23. In addition to Reg Groves, still the Aylesbury candidate, contributors to The Call included Edgar Plaisted (Wimbledon), W.T. Colyer (Chislehurst) and Will Morris (Hampstead) who was also secretary of the N-CL. The Call claimed forty Parliamentary candidates had signed a petition for immediate peace.

24. Writing in The Call for December 1939, Will Morris claimed for the N-CL the backing of nine trades councils, eighteen DLPs and 300 Women’s Cooperative Guilds through their national organisation. In Glasgow an N-CL convention was called by the Glasgow Trades Council. The N-CL also received backing from the ISP and the RSP in 1939, and the following year the British Federation of Cooperative Youth carried an anti-war resolution with one opposed. In November 1939, seventy Divisional Labour Parties, as well as twenty MPs backed a call for peace (A. Calder, The People’s War, 67).

25. Strongest opposition came from the Peace Pledge Union which, declared the SAWF, “regarded the whole question of war and peace as an abstract one unconnected with the efforts of the workers to achieve political power”, The Call, Dec. 1939.

26. ibid.

27. See H. Sara, Pollitt and the Party Line, The Call, Nov. 1939. In December The Call condemned Stalin’s invasion of Finland while dissociating itself from official Labour opinion.

28. W.T. Colyer, in The Three Internationals, The Call, Feb. 1940, scorned the Second and Third Internationals, but kept silent on the Fourth. Colyer shared a communist background with Groves, but had left the CPGB rather earlier and for quite opposite reasons, since he opposed party control of the National Left-Wing Movement (L.J. Macintyre, op. cit., 189-90).

29. This was a perspective which it shared with the WIL and the MLL

30. Some trades councils, like that in Romford, carried out campaigns and The Call for April 1940 carried a report from former Balham Group member Steve Dowdall on agitation in the building trade.

31. From November 1939 to April 19409 its entire life, The Call carried statements from SAWF members making conscientious objection to conscription.

32. In March 1940, The Call talked of ending “the purely negative stage of opposing the war”, arguing the need for “a great forward movement of the workers”.

33. The Call last appeared in April 1940 in a more professional format than previously. It claimed to have almost doubled circulation in six months and planned pamphlets by F.A. Ridley and George Padmore. Nearly sixty lecture meetings had been held in the first five months of the war, and the SAWF looked forward to the conference of the N-CL planned for 9 June 1940.

34. For the decline of conscientious objection in wartime, see E.A. Prince, Civil Liberty in Great Britain, University of London Ph.D., 1950, 304. Another contributory factor to loss of support for the SAWF was the death in January 1940 of Rowland Hill, a steady friend of the Marxist League and its causes across the years and “an enthusiastic admirer of Trotsky ... though he was not a Trotskyist in the full sense” (The Call, March 1940).

35. Interview with H. Wicks, 30 Nov. 1979.

36. They were certainly expelled from the RSL by the middle of the year. See Conscription, WIN, June 1939, 3. After the Fall of France the SAWF contacted the RSL. The RSL countered with a questionnaire on such matters as the Fourth International and revolutionary defeatism which could hardly do other than keep the two apart. It seems likely that the SAWF was in any case a broken reed by this time.

37. No document detailing the reason for the original EC decision to expel them has been located, but they were in conflict over their belief in outside work. At the conference they charged that the RSL had effectively been dissolved into the MLL, and were accused in turn of obstructiveness. Provincial members expressed bewilderment at all this and the EC recommendation was upheld, not with full authority, forty three to twenty three. A Hampstead delegate then proposed the withdrawal of dissidents to convene an alternative conference and a walk-out took place (Report of National Conference of the RSL, [Feb?] 1939, H.P., D.J.H. 13a/91).

38. [R.S.L], Interim Report of National Conference, [Feb?] 1939, H.P., D.J.H. 13A/9K, gives sixteen.

39.The RSL had offered WIL unification on equal terms though it claimed to hold twice the membership. Both sides met with Phelan of the SWP (q.v.) to consider the RSL proposal of equal executive representation. WIL declined as it did not accept the MLL tactic; nor did it respond to a second RSL offer, for a three month discussion to be followed by a binding majority vote at a joint conference. [RSL], Report On Negotiations With the WIL, [Jan. 1942]. Two WIL visitors were denied entry to the 1939 RSL conference. Jackson told the conference that decisive steps had been taken against WIL where it had established relations with RSL contacts.

40. Jackson steered conference through the complex relations between the RSL and the RSP by reference to a thick file of documents. Conference first rejected immediate RSP entry sixteen to thirty. It then instructed the executive forty two to one to open negotiations for fusion with the party, admitting the obvious truth that this task remained unaccomplished (Interim Report).

41. This was a full blown constitution, remarkably elaborate for an organisation less then sixty strong.

42. Members were Jackson, Weston, Wood, Johns, Harber, van Gelderen, “B.Sh.”, “D.B.”, “H.S.” (ibid.). Two other members who had been prominent earlier, Bert Matlow and Roma Dewar, had drifted away from the centre of affairs and were reported in October 1941 to be inactive (C.C. Minutes, 26 Oct. 1941, Har. P.). Matlow’s last important contribution to the Trotskyist cause seems to have been his speech to the 1939 Labour Party Conference, though he remained a central committee member until December 1940.

43. There were several positions. Finchley, Islington and Hampstead did not dispute the purpose of ARP or the nature of the impending war, but they demanded transitional demands on defence. J.L. Robinson, always implacable on this matter, flatly opposed any demands on the state for protection. George Weston proposed a resolution which argued that demands for defence in war were no more reactionary than demands for more money in peace, but even he favoured abstention from ARP work.

44. “It would therefore be fatal for us to carry on open propaganda against the war immediately after its outbreak” (Our tasks in relation to the outbreak of Imperialist War, in RSL National Conference 1939, [March? 1939], H.P.).

45. It claimed three delegates present altogether, (BSFI, Statement on relations with the Workers International League, 4 Dec. 1939, H.P., 13a/8, 3-4).

46. Youth Militant appeared in February, April and May 1939 and then unevenly for at least two years. A new series began in December 1939 and continued at least to No.[16?] which appeared in summer 1941.

47. That spring Advance was ousted from control of the LLOY by Labour officials. In July, Willis, most of the now unofficial NAC and many of the rank and file joined the Young Communist League. If the YCL grew it was a temporary spurt before conscription bit into the membership of both Leagues (J. Ferris, The Labour League of Youth, 1924-40, University of Warwick M.A., 1977, 129-32; T. Willis Whatever Happened to Tom Mix?, 1970, 185).

48. BSFI, Statement on relations, 3-4.

49. T.D. Burridge, British Labour and Hitler’s War, 1976, 41; B. Jones, The Russia Complex, 1977, 50.

50. It is an imperialist war (1940) was written before Labour’s conference endorsed participation by its leaders in the Churchill government. He was threatened with discipline by George Shepherd, the National Agent, but the NEC opted in the end to give him the chance to moderate his views, (see Appendix B ).

51. See its final issue, that for May 1940.

52. LPCR, 1940, 27.

53. Militant, April 1940. No other paper printed this statement of the MLL executive published over the name of “M. Stanwick”, almost certainly a pseudonym.

54. ibid.

55. Leaders of “the fourteen” were “F” (A.A. Cooper?), Bone and Emmett, the last two veterans of the League of Youth. They had backing in the Camberwell and East branches of the RSL They attributed their defeat at the Easter conference to the low political level of the provincial members.

56. Leicester Group (of the RSL), A Circle or a Party?, [1941?], n. pag. Har. P. There had been an attempt to sustain fortnightly publication of Militant in October 1939 (A. Penn, op. cit., 115).

57. EC Circular, 16 May 1940. Seemingly there had been plans to publish twice monthly before the ban. Providing Jackson’s salary, regularly, proved a strain almost at once, and the frequency of circulars declined.

58. M. Stanwick to the NEC, Labour Party, 8 April 1940; G.S. Shepherd to Stanwick, 10 April 1940.

59. M. Stanwick to the NEC, Labour Party, 25 April 1940. Stanwick pointed out that other minorities, such as the Peace Pledge Union, had not been suppressed but that the drive was aimed against socialist organisations. He instanced the Russia Today Society and the expulsion of D.N. Pritt M.P. For Pritt’s account of his expulsion see From Right to Left, 1965, 221 and ff. The MLL had resolutions from Norwood and Eastbourne on the agenda of the May 1940 annual conference.

60. A. McDonald (Edinburgh and District) put a Leninist view of the war and reminded conference that the previous year any intention to join Chamberlain in government had been disclaimed. Joe Pawsey (Norwood) seconded, calling for a British workers” state as the surest route to defeating fascism in Germany. Among supporting speakers was Emrys Hughes (South Ayrshire) (LPCR, 1940, 127-31). Militant seems to have had illusions in the party mood. In April it had written that most of the 200 resolutions tabled were critical of party policy, that there was “growing uneasiness” if not an actual alternative. 49 out of 50 resolutions on the war, it told its readers, were opposed to the official line.

61. In May 1940 Militant argued that the proscriptions were part of a joint Labour government campaign against the left. Apart from the examples it gave action was also taken against the CPGB dominated Sheffield Trades Council, against Krishna Menon, and League of Youth members were forbidden to sell Youth for Socialism (WIN, May 1940, 5-6).

62. “A Labour Party semi-agitational paper no longer has a basis in the absence of a left-wing tendency even such as existed when the paper was first produced” (Resolution Passed by Enlarged EC, 25 May 1940). Youth Militant, it was resolved, would continue to be published. The theoretical journal did not appear. Instead it was agreed to launch an internal bulletin under the editorial control of Harber.

63. To avoid risks the EC resolved to hold its own Trotsky Memorial Meeting independently of all others and, later in the year, to take no part in the People’s Convention (Special EC, 23 Aug. 1940). Jackson remained organiser, now under the aegis of the RSL, but van Gelderen’s proposal that he seek to avoid military service was not upheld (EC Minutes, 6 July 1940). Jackson himself was uneasy at drift within the League and made a political statement deploring lack of leadership and initiative (EC Minutes, 11 Aug. 1940).

64. The course of this dispute can be traced through Trotsky’s letters to the SWP and to Shachtman and other dissidents published in L. Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, 1966. See also J.P. Cannon, The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, N.Y. 1972.

65. Of the seven IEC members elected at the Founding Conference Shachtman himself, Abern, Mario Pedrosa (of Brazil) and James were defectors, (R.J. Alexander, Trotskyism in Latin America, Stanford 1973, 13).

66. For the various decisions taken by the conference see Documents, 306-97.

67. Between March and early April 1940 the RSL contacted Trotsky or the IEC to declare their support for Trotsky’s view, (Declaration, 19 March 1940; Declaration on the Status of the Resident IEC, 2 April 1940, Writings: Supplement (1934-40), 853-4). Conference resolved, “the authority of Johnson rested upon the mandate given him by the British section. But the British section in its organs and in all communications received, condemns defeatism in the Soviet Union and continues to endorse the entire programme of the Fourth International, including the position of unconditional defence of the USSR” Documents, 354.

68. Resolution on the Unification of the British Section, Documents, 359. The four FI factions in Britain are identified as the MLL, RWL (q.v.), WIL and the Labour League of Youth. The erroneous belief that the League of Youth stood for Trotskyism reveals how ill-informed the International actually was.

69. While remaining within its principles and those of the Founding Conference. The proceedings of the Conference were reported in Britain as The Emergency Conference of the Fourth International, International Bulletin, July 1940, H.P., D.J.H. 18/2. On Harber’s proposal the RSL attempted in August to set up a European subsection of the Fourth International, but only one meeting was held before contact was lost with other sections, (EC Minutes, 11 Aug. 1940). Members were Harber, Johns, van Gelderen, one German, one Czech, and one Polish advisor. Present in London during this period was the IKD (German Trotskyists) in exile. It too declared against Shachtman and reported a new layer of contacts (Organisational Report of the International Communists of Germany [IKD], Documents, 369).

70 RWL, For Members Only, 27 Oct. 1939, in WIL document on the History of British Trotskyism. This was a resolution which deplored the IS failure to conduct an investigation into Britain.

71. As late as May 1940 Workers Fight was telling revolutionaries in the ILP to join the Fourth International.

72. Workers Fight, 23 Dec. 1939.

73. The manifesto, dated 20 Dec. 1939, stressed the Finnish issue and called on workers to retain organisations independent both of Stalin and Mannerheim.

74. Though they did not follow Shachtman in his view that Russia had ceased to be a workers’ state, they did publish his important pamphlet Finland and the Fourth International, [1940?].

75. RWL to M. Abern, 7 Dec. [1939], H.P., D.J.H. 6/2b. Abern was also to follow Shachtman in the split from the SWP to set up the Workers’ Party, but the RWL’s connections with American dissidents seem coincidental.

76. Though a fusion of the WIL and the RWL, almost in response to the May 1940 resolution of the Emergency Conference, was announced by WIN in June 1940 and Youth for Socialism incorporated Workers Fight, only twelve RWL members joined WIL, and it seems that half of them left soon after. Those who joined saw the WIL as providing the nucleus for what might become a true British Section of the FI.

77. Six of them, including Rose Carson, were to form the core of the Right Opposition, which was soon to crystallize within the RSL One curious feature of the RWL’s brief existence was the use of the name “D. Gray”, presumably fictitious, on Workers Fight. The same name was also used by Workers International News and Youth for Socialism in 1940-1.

78. [RSL], The Electoral Tactics of the Workers’ Vanguard, 1940, 1.

79. It believed the slogan itself might win it dissidents from within WIL.

80. Thesis on the Crisis of Capitalism and the Tasks of the British Section of the Fourth International (adopted by RSL central committee, 11 Aug. 1940), Bulletin of the British Section of the Fourth International, Sept. 1940, D.J.H. 6/3, 8.

81. RSL, Statement of the Executive Committee of the British Section of the Fourth International, Marxist Discussion Bulletin, 2, Aug. 1940, H.P., D.J.H. 6/5, 25.

82. RSL, Attitude of the Proletariat Towards Imperialist War, H.P., D.J.H. 6/12, 4.

83. The June 1940 issue drew immediate complaints from the Leicester branch of the RSL, in August, that its appearance in the name of the Fourth International amounted to a declaration for open work, was an assertion that Trotskyism “had an independent role outside of the social democratic movement of the masses”, and offered Labour officialdom a chance to take repressive measures (Leicester Group, A Circle or a Party?).

84. A move of the centre to Glasgow to avoid the blitz was announced to members on 28 October 1940. In December the Central Committee announced it had become impossible to maintain a full national apparatus but early in 1941 returned to London.

85. The London Organisation Report of 3 Nov. 1940, gave eight to twelve members in Croydon, but their Labour Party had collapsed and inter-member contact was poor; East London had two members left; Lambeth had ten but they were starting to be called up; Staines had one left as had Balham; Camberwell had eight; North had five but had not met for two months.

86. ibid.

87. Sometimes entitled Marxist Discussion Bulletin. Alison Penn (op. cit., 159) gives the last Bulletin as September 1940, but there are references in RSL papers to one for November.

88. There must be no compromise, 24 July 1940.

89. Dated 11 August 1940.

90. “F” was expelled for opposing the Labour Party concentration at a December 1940 members meeting, and for general inactivity (F, B, E, For the building of the British Section of the Fourth International, 30 April 1941, H.P., D.J.H. 7/1, 8).

91. They declared that “the theory of the Labour Party perspective now has no harmony with reality” and that the official section of the Fourth International in Britain no longer existed. They would launch a bulletin, Socialist Fight to achieve a regrouping of Fourth Internationalists and to direct propaganda and activity towards “the industrio-military field” (ibid., 8-10).

92. Fusion was prematurely announced in WIN.

93. Leicester threatened to move expulsion of the whole CC if such concessions to chauvinism continued. The dispute between Leicester and the centre can be traced from August 1940.

94. Central Committee, 15 Dec. 1940.

95. The RSL Centre composed a Reply to Leicester and claimed to have despatched it in February 1941. The Leicester branch claimed to have received it on 2 July 1941.

96. Bolshevism or Defencism was published by Leicester on 25 May 1941 and marks the effective beginning of the Left Fraction of the RSL. For the argument of this and other Faction Documents, see below, The Centre’s reply, dated June 1941, was entitled Leicester’s House of Straw, and has not been located.

97. The December CC virtually confessed this by its announcement that wartime conditions made full implementation of the 1939 constitution of the RSL impossible. Early in the New Year this position was confirmed. National Conferences were declared to be impossible and would be replaced by enlarged national committees and London general membership meetings. The central committee would become the highest body in the party (E.C. Statement, Our Constitution and the War, Feb. or March 1941, in Leicester Group, A Circle or a Party?).

98. It was duplicated in Glasgow and edited in Norwich ([Anon], Dear Friends, [1943], H.P., D.J.H. 13A/18). The general work of the League was geographically dispersed from August (EC Circular, 1 Aug. 1941).

99. EC Circular, 19 March 1941. In December 1940 the central committee had been Harber, Johns, Davis, van Gelderen, Pawsey, Matlow, Jackson, Wood, Archer, “M.S.”, Robinson, “M.Q.”, with Tom Mercer as an alternate. By late 1940 Tony Doncaster, another senior Militant Group member was in the Navy (A. Newell [secretary, Aylesbury DLP] to Groves, 2 Dec. 1940). That autumn the RSL had changed its attitude towards conscription sufficiently to dissociate itself from four WIL members in Sheffield who had evaded military service.

100. Sub-titled Organ of the Socialist Left of the Labour Party. It appeared as from the Pioneer Publishing Association, possibly transferred after the collapse of the RWL’s attempt to run a PPA outlet in December 1939 (see above, 313).

101. Signs which contradicted 1938 predictions were consistently misinterpreted. Family allowances? It was no accident they existed in Italy and Germany. ABCA? A means for administering “imperialist dope”. Reveille? “a pornographic-demagogic rag”. The paper showed a steady inability to recognise the potential in any development which fell short of the full revolutionary programme. See the issue for October 1941.

102. London took 500 and Glasgow 300 of the September issue. Every other area took dozens or fractions thereof. Only Glasgow sustained high sales, however, reflecting a steady drive into the Lanarkshire coalfield. And it was the Glasgow RSL branch’s opposition which prevented a new suspension in 1942 when sales declined elsewhere ([Anon], Dear Friends, [1943], H.P., D.J.H. 13A/18.) What was noticeable in this Glasgow Militant was its close coverage of trade union affairs. Disputes north and south of the border were closely watched, especially where factory floor feeling clashed with the opinions of union officials or communist stewards.

103. Thereby contradicting the intention announced by the Central Committee at its meeting of December 1940.

104. The RSL had learned of contacts between the IS and WIL and was vulnerable by reason of its internal disputes and its differences with the International over Military Policy. A November 1941 communication from the IS reassured the RSL that it was still the official British Section.

105. The Left Fraction comprised principally J.L. Robinson and his supporters in Leicester, and the Glasgow backers of Tom Mercer, an alternate member of the Central Committee and Nan Milton, daughter and later biographer of John MacLean.

106. It later heard that Military Policy was not binding upon national sections of the Fourth International.

107. Jackson became a submariner. On 9 January 1943 the Central Committee was told that he was missing, presumed lost at sea.

108. EC Minutes, 26 Sept. 1941, Har. P. The Left Fraction later claimed that at this time the RSL issued two pamphlets, Class War in the West and Production committees and the Soviet Union, each of which reflected the line of the Right. Neither has been located. Each was withdrawn when the RSL heard from the IS that Military Policy was not binding upon it. On 5 January 1942 the RSL recommended that Lawrence be made a professional.

109. At the October meeting Harber moved “that fusion with WIL is not politically necessary” (CC Minutes, 26 Oct. 1941). The following month Lawrence demanded immediate fusion (EC Circular, 26 Nov. 1941) but the Central Committee voted against it in November and December (CC Minutes, 7 Dec. 1941).

110. The October 1941 central committee heard gloomy reports about the League of Youth and the Labour Party. Youth Militant had control of the League in the Midlands and South Yorkshire and its activists believed in a long entrist perspective, but the organisation as a whole was small. The Labour Party had “no leftward tendency” and was ‘stagnant”. Remarkably, the central committee concluded six to two that little could be done in the Labour Party and that the RSL must go into industry as an organised left. An open challenge was tabled at this meeting to the Labour Party tactic (Anon., Opportunism and the Labour Party Perspective, late [1941?] Har.P.,F6; CC Minutes, 26 Oct. 1941; West Riding Faction, Labour League of Youth and Our Perspectives, [1941]).

111. RSL to WIL, 5 Aug. 1941, Report on Negotiations with the WIL, [Jan. 1942?]. The RSL sent WIL its documents The Crisis of British Capitalism and Political Statement (to its 1941 conference). WIL returned, somewhat tardily, its Reply to the Political Statement of the RSL.

112. “The decision of 1938 was not taken by chance, but on the basis of a definite attitude of the Lee group. Since then many things have occurred and our relations are not exempt from development, but that could be done only through a thorough explanation” (IS to WIL, 28 Oct. 1941, ibid., 6). Eight months later, the IS attitude had hardened. It told the RSL:

In our opinion. your attitude towards the WIL is utterly false. Without ignoring personal differences inherited from the past, it is necessary to recognise that your false attitude flows directly from a false political appreciation of this group. You see in it a centrist group ”moving away from us”. This is an opinion which we can by no means share. (IS to RSL, 21 June 1942)

113 WIL, Reply to the Political Statement of the Revolutionary Socialist League, 1941, H.P., D.J.H. 5/7, 4.

114. “This tactic is designated for a period, when, under the impact of events, the leftward moving rank and file of reformist or centrist organisations in a state of flux, can be won in a short time to a programme of revolution. The perspective is not of long years but of one or two, or even of months” (ibid., 4).

115. One curious development early in the year was a sharp attack by Jackson on Harber for breaking off fusion negotiations with WIL (E.S. Jackson, On the Workers International League, 18 Feb. 1942, Har. P.).

116. The charges mingle. Thus WIL was accused of building its independent organisation by “pandering to the chauvinism of the workers” with its slogans of “Arm the Workers” and “Nationalise the Arms Industries under workers’ control” (D.D. Harber, Our Political Estimation of the WIL, accepted by the RSL central committee, 29 March 1942).

117. This stricture also applied to other protagonists of “independence”. It was Robinson who intervened to prevent the speedy admission of five SWG members who had applied to rejoin the RSL on 3 May. The terms he set were softened by Harber however (Minutes, Emergency CC, 17 May 1942). Robinson, almost incredibly, suspected Harber of being soft on the WIL. At the June 1942 meeting of the central committee he intervened to prevent the RSL selling WIL publications in public. Connections with “centrism”, he warned, would damage the League’s integrity. (J.L. Robinson, Answer to the. Statement of the EC, [March 1943?], in Dear Friends, etc., H.P., D.J.H. 13A/18.)

118. This happened on 14 July, (History of Expulsions of Members of the WIL Faction (Right Wing) accepted by a majority of the C.C., Dec. 1942).

119. WIL Document on the History of British Trotskyism, 13.

120. J.B. Stuart (Sam Gordon) was the administrative secretary of the FI appointed by the Emergency Conference in 1940.

121. Resolutions passed by the CC, 19 July 1942. Their appeal to international opinion was neutralised by Harber, who argued that while the IS had a view it had not taken a decision on which the Right might act.

122. The plan was Harber’s. He proposed that a period of discussions be held within the RSL and the WIL and that when exchanges began between the two the Right could remain silent. Harber was reassured by Stuart that the RSL’s status with the Fourth International was safe, but he suspected Stuart’s relationship with the Right and was disturbed that he did not meet the Left. He later told the RSL

“The IS seeks, in my opinion, to push us into a fusion with the WIL, which they know would automatically give the supporters of the AMP (American Military Policy – M.U.); a majority. Such a tactic is typical of Cannonism ...” D.D.H., Report of Conversations with Comrade S. of the IS, 7 Aug. 1942.

123. It is generally agreed that from about this time Lawrence began to act as a WIL agent within the RSL branch at Leeds. On at least one occasion he actually received a salary from WIL. Lawrence, Lane and others of the Right were also holding secret faction meetings with Haston and Grant of the WIL from August 1942 onwards.

Lawrence’s activities on WIL’s behalf were revealed at the August central committee of the RSL and Harber’s compromise plan was then withdrawn. E.L. Davis interviewed members of the Right involved in the WIL meetings on 5 September 1942. On 3 October they were confronted with the charge of acting as WIL agents and, after a lengthy discussion, expelled. Others who supported their action were expelled in November (History of Expulsions of Members of the WIL Faction (Right Wing), Dec. 1942; Gradjine, Who Speaks For Bolshevism?, 19 Nov. 1942).

124. The RSL met the WIL on 25 Oct. 1942, where proposals for a joint discussion bulletin were opposed by Harber. He also blocked the holding of a joint conference before a full exchange had taken place between the groups.

125. Gradjine, Who Speaks for Bolshevism?, 19 Nov. 1942.

126. For the Trotskyist Opposition, see WIL document on the History of Trotskyism, 16-17.

127. “It would be criminal to assume that, because it (WIL) pursues a by and large correct policy today, that is all that is important” (J.B. Stuart to J.Lawrence), 4 Feb. 1943, ibid., 17).

128. “The proponents of entry have their eyes glued to “the future visage of the Labour Party and not to its present posterior. Using the example of the last war, they argue, correctly enough, that the first big revolutionary wave will revive the Labour Party” (Preparing for Power, special issue WIN, Sept. 1942, 22).

129. “If as the result of the mass upsurge, hundreds of thousands and millions participate actively in the organisation of the Labour Party, then will come the time to enter (ibid., 23).

130. A Criticism of the WIL Pamphlet Preparing for Power, in, WIL Discussion Bulletin, Policy and Perspectives of the British Trotskyists, 1942, 3. Here the RSL rejected a further WIL argument, that a turn of other parties such as the ILP towards Labour also confirmed the time to enter. The RSL reminded WIL that the ILP had had no interest in the Labour Party in 1936 when Trotsky had proposed joining and that the conditions to which it attached such weight did not apply during WIL’s own period in the Labour Party.

131. ibid., 4. The RSL central committee assented to this document by a majority on a postal ballot.

132. The following year WIL responded to this document arguing that there was a pre-revolutionary situation and that it would not take an antiwar character at all. It dismissed as “formalistic nonsense” the thesis that all workers must pass through the Labour Party and argued that there would be a differential response to the Labour Party within the working class (Reply of WIL to the RSL criticism of Preparing for Power, 7 June 1943, 15).

133. J.L. Robinson, Answer to the Statement, loc. cit. One rare product of RSL thought not devoted to factional conflict at this time was Harber’s preamble to a Draft Programme for the “socialist Left”, [June?) 1942 (Har. P.).

134. A Glasgow supporter of the Left, Gibbie Russell, was a former Lanarkshire miner who had retained his links with the pits. By 1942 a rank and file movement had developed among the miners in Lanarkshire. See Fife Dispute supplement, Militant (Glasgow), Sept. 1942. But it was debarred from launching a new paper by war time regulations. Russell persuaded the RSL executive to turn over the Militant to the miners in return for the proviso that all material be first submitted to Margaret Johns and Tom Mercer, both of the Glasgow RSL branch, and that the RSL be allowed a 200 word editorial. The transfer took place on 3 December 1942. Even before this a special supplement had been issued to Militant between normal issues with all. articles being written by Russell, Hugh Brannan (a Lanarkshire miner and Left Faction member) and Tom Stephenson, (a Cumberland miner and ILP member who had been a disaffiliationist in 1932).

135. P.J.B., E.L.D., M.J., D.D.H., An Answer to the Charges of the “Left”, 23 Jan. 1943 (Har. P.).

136. See the Left Fraction, On the Future of the Scottish Miner Edition of the Militant. The RSL did not dispute this assertion, (Dear Friends, etc., H.P., D.J.H. 13A/18). For Trotskyists in the Scottish pits in wartime see Chapter XI.

137. Russell and another member circulated all RSL branches on 18 February 1943 urging joint BSFI – Lanarkshire miners control of Militant. By May circulation of the paper, now duplicated, had fallen below 300 (Minutes of the CC held on 9 May 1943, Har. P.).

138. The IS specified that it continued to abhor Left Fraction policies (Brief Notes on the History of the Left Fraction, 2).

139. WIL offered, tongue in cheek, to treat with the RSL factions separately or together (Conference Resolution On International Affiliation, H.P., D.J.H. 14B/17).

140. Political Bureau, Internal Bulletin, 11 Sept. 1943, 12. WIL also recalled Trotsky’s part in splitting the Belgian Party in 1929 and his role in the CL split of 1933. It never conceded that its own existence was due to a personalised split but argued that even if true, this charge could not cancel out its own success while the RSL had failed. WIL took the view that the IS had in any case been for years “completely misinformed” about the real situation in Britain (WIL, Document on the History of British Trotskyism, 2).

141. See G. Healy, Our Most Important Task, Internal Bulletin, [1943?]; Political Bureau to Healy, 21 Aug. 1943; G. Healy to Political Bureau, 25 Aug. 1943.

142. H.P., Political Statement of the Minority on Unification, Dec. 1943, H.P., 14B/21. See also An Open Letter to All Group Members, 30 Dec. 1943, H.P. 14B/21.

143. Minutes of EC of 13 Nov. 1943, Har. P.

144. See D.D.H., H.G., Account of an Interview between S.G. and D.D.H. (Militant Group) and J.L. (‘T.O.’) on 4 Dec.1943, H.P., D.J.H. 13A/23; [J.L.], Letter to the RSL Membership, 18 Dec. 1943, H.P., D.J.H. 13A/24; EC of the TO, Statement to the RSL membership from the EC of the TO (RSL), 19 Dec. 1943, H.P., D.J.H. 13A/25.

145. Left Fraction, RSL “Reconstitution” Conference, [Jan.?] 1944 , Har. P. This is the only record of the conference located.

146. Another recent WIL contact with the American-based IS had been through Grant who was in the United States at Christmas 1943 (A. Wald, op. cit., 84).

147. Central Committee Report, Jan. 1944 , H.P., D.J.H. 14B/22.

148. Plus a representative from the International, Terence Phelan (alias Sherry Mangan, 1904-61). Mangan, a CLA member, worked in France as a Time-Life correspondent from 1938 until he was expelled by the Petain government for his political activities. In 1939 he had been technical secretary of the IS In 1944, again in France, he was part of the European Secretariat and was to join the reconstituted IS in 1946. After the war he was often known in Trotskyist papers as Patrice O’Daniel.

149. The WIL membership of 260 has been wrongly taken as the membership of the entire RCP (P. Jenkins, Where Trotskyism Got Lost, 1977, 3).

150. These bodies, the product in part of WIL’s wartime drive into industry, are discussed in Chapter XI.

151. Goffe had been on the RSL Central Committee and also represented an important provincial area, Glasgow

152. See T. Ali, The Coming British Revolution (1972), where it is revealed that the WIL was smaller than the RSL, that they fused after the war, and that WIL’s internal life was marked by an intense factional struggle over Labour Party entry.

153. J.B. Stuart, A Brief Report On England, Fourth International, June 1944), 168-70. The claim of the Fourth International that it played a centripetal role is set down in P. Frank, The Fourth International, 1979, 60.

154. J.R. Campbell, Trotskyist Saboteurs, 1944.

155. Socialist Appeal, April 1944. Party leaders lived up to these sentiments, taking a close interest in how the new branches were holding together and referring to the fusion as the marriage. In Glasgow there was great enthusiasm for the merger on the part of the two locals, each important in its national organisation. They had some common work behind them, (Interview with J. Goffe, M. Johns, July 1974, Nov. 1973).

156. Interview with R. Tearse, Nov. 1973.

157. WIL’s industrial successes are the theme of Chapter XI.

XI
THE GROWTH OF WORKERS INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE AND ITS INDUSTRIAL AGITATION
(1938 – 1944)

Workers International League seemed to have poor prospects at the end of 1938 with all other Fourth Internationalists grouped in one body. Yet it survived, put a regular press on the streets and became the pivot of a limited regroupment. WIL moved from its original interpretation of entry work to a position in 1941 outside all parties. This, with its ability and flair, won it industrial support from 1942 on. It intervened in all major industrial disputes from this time and was more successful than any other party in its attempt to fill the vacuum left by the communists, who had become advocates of increased production. While WIL’s achievements and influence were exaggerated, they were tangible, and culminated in a celebrated court case which brought them national publicity.

Debating in 1939 with CLR James, Trotsky attributed the failure of Fourth Internationalists in Britain to lack of ability, inflexibility and the long domination of bourgeois thought. He urged continuation of the policy of critical support for the Labour Party but sought an independent paper which might make needed attacks on ILP leaders. [1] Trotsky took no public position on the formation of Workers International League, though its leaders had written to him. It later claimed that it turned its back on the past, seeking a break with tradition. Certainly it made new recruits to Trotskyism, but it also rallied a number of those who were disenchanted with the other groups. This was a conscious policy proclaimed in the first issue of WIN. [2] It did not retain all of those whom it drew to itself in the first few months of its life [3], and others were expelled for “Molinierism”. [4] But it gained members from the RSP and the RWL as well as from non-Trotskyist formations like the ILP Guild of Youth. [5]

WIL failed to convene a national conference for the first five years of its life, though meetings of the London membership were held. It grew steadily, first around the original leadership of Ralph Lee and Haston assisted by Grant [6] but many recruited after the split from Militant gained leading positions. [7] Sometime in 1940, Ralph Lee, the dominant influence in WIL at least until 1939, returned to South Africa [8] and was succeeded as General Secretary by Haston. Illness incapacitated other WIL leaders for a time, but they were able to avoid conscription and thus kept a centre in being. [9]

WIL put a consistent press on the streets throughout this time. WIN appeared regularly, and from 1939 WIL members increasingly contributed articles, displacing the emphasis on foreign contributions. [10] In September 1938 WIL launched a monthly agitational paper, Youth for Socialism [11], to supplement its activities in the Labour League of Youth. Youth for Socialism was a lively newspaper, given to exuberant abuse of communists and their fellow-travellers in the youth movement. It seems unlikely, however, that WIL supplanted the MLL before that body was proscribed in 1940. [12] WIL had practically no one working full time, but it was more visible than the RSL because of its policy of putting its press on streets. [13] Its energetic reaction to the outbreak of war included – as well as the transference of its controlling centre to Ireland – the publication for seven months of a daily handout, Workers Diary. [14]

WIL’s belief in the autumn of 1940 was that revolution or near-revolution would shake every belligerent country. [15] In anticipation it showed the flexibility for which Trotsky had yearned. The electoral truce between the major parties had cleared the way for minor parties to oppose their candidates at by-elections. Healy may have advocated support for Pollitt in the Silvertown contest of February 1940. [16] The next month WIL openly supported anti-war candidates as the only outlet for those who wished to support revolutionary socialism. [17] Youth for Socialism was shortly put on the list of papers League of Youth members might not sell. [18] WIL remained within the Labour Party however, though its emphasis on sales always gave it the opportunity to approach those outside. A Labour Party presence was justified by reference to the arguments of Lenin and Trotsky and the early stage of WIL’s development. [19] Yet the organisation was watching developments in industry and warned that it would not hesitate to alter tactics if faced with a change in the “objective situation”. [20] It was still calling for “Labour to Power” and would continue to do so even after leaving the party. [21] But it flatly rejected the MLL tactic as applied either before or after proscription. [22]

WIL began to move out of the Labour Party in the spring of 1941, though the manner of its going was confused and protracted. [23] It was complete by September, by which date a major shift in communist policy had occurred which could only reinforce the argument for independence. Negatively, the Labour Party no longer offered the prescribed high-level of political life, debilitated as it was by the effects of conscription, air raids and the absence of regular elections. Positively there were the first signs of stirring in industry in this second year of war. To its critics the WIL turn was empiricist, an opportunist adjustment to circumstances. But it is noticeable that WIL continued to call for a Labour Government, which had not been the policy of the first RSL or the Marxist Group after 1936. [24] Plans were made for a WIL conference in 1941, but it seems not to have met. But WIL regarded itself as programmatically the true representative of the Fourth International in Britain and demanded that this be recognised by the conferral of official status. [25] It actively projected itself as a Trotskyist party and met with a good deal more success in this respect than the more inhibited RSL. [26]

It was the second wartime change in communist policy which gave Workers International League its chance. Communist policy in 1939-41 was not supported by Trotskyists, who saw it as a popular front campaign in disguise. [27] But while there is doubt about the success of the CPGB in this phase [28] it is certain that it sustained a militant opposition to the Government. What was more, the party dominated the national shop stewards movement by strong representation on its National Council. [29] The People’s Convention itself had impressive backing on paper and the possibility of a broad movement developing must have been one motive behind Morrison’s decision to suspend publication of The Daily Worker. [30] At this time communists and their followers could see no difference between the Chamberlain and Churchill administrations [31] and spoke the undiluted language of class war, often to the point of exaggeration. [32]

Trotskyist attempts to intervene in the People’s Convention met with no noticeable success. [33] But WIL did fear that it would make. headway and believed the result would be to isolate the revolutionary vanguard from the mass of workers who still backed Labour. [34] Under the new dispensation of growing independence WIL was rallying some support from dissident Trotskyists [35], though it could only hope to operate on the fringes of such a movement as the Convention. But with Hitler’s invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941, the entire British political environment altered, especially in the labour movement. Most important was the alteration in communist policy for industry to one which made increased output the top priority. [36] The communists had to operate underground in Nazi-occupied Europe. In the United States, the CPUSA, like the Comintern itself, was to be dissolved. The CPGB escaped that fate, but at the price of public contortions in policy. It put itself at the head of an opposition movement and used, with some skill, the opportunity provided when Labour shared office with the “Old Gang” from May 1940. But there was no serious groundswell of industrial discontent during the first two years of the war and the communists had therefore been in opposition at a time when objective circumstances were at their most unfavourable.

There was no great originality in WIL’s policy for industry, only in the political conditions in which it was applied. The principal Trotskyist text on the subject was Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, which Trotsky wrote towards the end of his life. Trotsky argued that under late capitalism, trade union leaders tended to draw towards the state. [37] The closer they approached the state, the less democratic they became. Instability of trade union leaders mirrored that of the capitalist state itself. At its Founding Congress, the Fourth International had adopted a Transitional Programme which argued that even minor and partial demands could not be conceded, that to achieve them required a struggle against the system itself. Trotsky observed that union leaders worked closely with popular front governments in France and Spain and thought that they were in Britain (especially in foreign policy), “obedient agents of the Conservative Party”. [38] If trade unions did not surrender their independence the “labour aristocrats” at their head would be driven away and the job done by fascists. [39] This thesis was developed by the RSL and WIL in the years before 1940. [40] That year itself brought abundant empirical confirmation with the formation of coalition government and the appointment of Ernest Bevin to the Ministry of Labour. [41] In his wake, “the higher trades unionists became ultimately wedded to the present system”, and began to feel their fate was bound up with it. [42] With electoral opposition removed, pressure increased on those prepared to maintain traditional conflict-based industrial relations for the duration. If it was true that unions tended to fuse with the state, then strikes were strikes against the state. By 1941 all strikes were, technically, illegal [43], though this was for a time of little importance in view of the infrequency with which they occurred. [44] Britain’s national resources were conscripted without great difficulty and at an accelerating rate from the summer of that year. [45]

WIL flatly opposed compulsory methods in industry [46], but there was a limited market in the middle of war for such complaints. More common than resentment was a belief that civil measures necessary for effective prosecution of the war ought to be universally and fairly applied. [47] Yet the desire to win the war did not entail the suspension of class attitudes on the shop floor. [48] These persisted and from 1941 could not find a traditional outlet.. With the official trade union machinery enmeshed in the Ministry of Labour apparatus, and the communists hostile to interruptions in production from June 1941, opportunity beckoned to the WIL. It had some success in autumn 1941. During a dispute at the Nottingham ROF factory, a consultative committee emerged on which WIL gained influence through a leading steward, Jack Pemberton, and through which it was able to make itself known elsewhere in the Group. [49] WIL also made progress in the London engineering industry, notably at De Havillands and Napiers in North West London. [50] There chance brought some of its members together with Trotskyist veterans and ILPers, now trying themselves to establish a trade union presence. Trotskyism and the ILP found themselves allies against the CPGB at local and national events. [51] Trotskyism made no early headway among shop stewards at the national level [52] but it started to make its mark at local shop stewards” conferences. [53] Trotskyism also worked through the ILP in the pits of Scotland and Cumberland, and here it was RSL members rather than those of the WIL who gained the benefit. [54]

After June 1941 the CPGB added its shrill voice to official advice against stoppages. Its view was that winning the war and helping Russia were objectives which overrode other principles. [55] Increasingly it smeared those who were prepared to support strikes as witting or unwitting friends of Hitler. The party was vulnerable to those like the ILP and the Trotskyists who sought to displace it, though its policy was not the simply class-collaborationism that they liked to believe. [56] Once the pressure of a threatening war situation was lifted, non-political workers were liable to voice what might seem like Trotskyist views. [57] The wartime conjuncture led the CPGB to mount more attacks on the Trotskyists than ever before, while the imputation of links with Hitler was now more damaging than ever:

“Remember that the Trotskyists are no longer part of the working class movement”. [58]

It is doubtful if Trotskyists had any great impact on the wartime flow of production; this was not, in any case, their intention. Communist attacks may have been motivated, not by the threat to output, but by unease at possible erosion of their industrial base. Though the charges of links with Nazism were absurd, they might yet have stuck had it not been for spiralling industrial discontent from 1942 onwards. The charge should have been lethal, but WIL replied with gusto, recalling the contortions of communist policy in recent years. It claimed that the CPGB had rebounded from advocating peace in Hitler’s interests to demanding war in Churchill’s. [59] As to the charge of hostility to the Soviet Union, it was argued by Trotskyists that the most secure ally for Russia would be a Britain in the hands of the workers. [60] Nor did Trotskyists of any British faction advocate any kind of sabotage. [61]

WIL by 1942 was a small but solid organisation. It had established a definite national framework, more independent of London than any of its predecessors. [62] It now found itself the target of attacks in Tory papers which played their part in making WIL’s lively paper, Socialist Appeal well known. This paper established itself in 1942 as the main Trotskyist vehicle [63], helped chiefly by being the badge of WIL’s energetic intervention in industry which was now being organised by the Tyneside engineer Roy Tearse. [64] Industrial developments during the year made WIL more and more optimistic. The communist drive for Joint Production Committees would fail. [65] Opportunities within the factories were “unlimited” as frustrations with traditional trade union machinery would lead to new factory, regional and national committees. [66] It was the confinement of strikes to localities which, with communist influence, had prevented “a general strike on the Clydeside, at least (sic) among the shipbuilding workers”. [67]

Something of a breakthrough was provided for WIL in early 1942 when it convened a meeting, over forty strong, of members and sympathisers involved in industrial work. The WIL executive was informed of interventions at ROF factories in Enfield and Nottingham [68], among miners in the North-East [69] and Liverpool dockers. [70] WIL played no part in the Betteshanger dispute, where Kent miners successfully defied the law. [71] But it did approach striking Yorkshire miners in the summer of 1942. There was widespread discontent among them [72] and when WIL members were noticed at the pits they were denounced by Yorkshire Miners Association leaders and the national press. [73] WIL produced a typically ebullient reply which promised a £5 reward for those who could find truth in the accusations against them! [74] It also felt justified in taking the more serious step of establishing an industrial committee, which in 1942 began to publish a periodical Industrial News. [75]

There were even minor exchanges in the House of Commons that summer about the impact of WIL literature in industry [76], but they revealed great confidence among ministers that the Trotskyists could do little harm. [77]

By late 1942 WIL had concluded that an alternative organising centre for trade unionists in struggle was needed. It approached the ILP and the Anarchists with a view to arranging united action on the industrial field. [78] Similar desires had been voiced for some time by the ILP itself [79] and WIL and the ILP already had joint activities underway. [80] In February 1943 a Militant Miners Group was established to link up workers in the pits [81], and that same month in London a committee for Co-ordination of Militant Trade Union Activity was formed by members of a variety of unions. [82] Meetings with ILP and Trotskyist speakers were set on foot and ILP interest in trade union work grew. [83] In Scotland the name Clyde Workers Committee was appropriated by a new body on 15 May 1943, which was led by expelled communists, some of whom had been recruited to WIL. [84] They were also motivated by the need to coordinate industrial militants and they convened a meeting in Glasgow on 5/6 June 1943 to which all bodies with similar aims were invited.

There was a danger that a new coordinating body might remain suspended in mid-air: there had so far been few spontaneous attempts to by-pass established industrial organisations, and the protagonists here were all politically motivated. Yet a definite vacuum existed, and the meeting of June 5/6 decided to establish a National Confederation of Workers Committees on a programme which endorsed the aims of the Clyde Workers Committee. [85] This left it with vague intentions which possibly reflected the polyglot composition of the meeting. WIL, represented there by Jack Haston, was unhappy that perspectives had not been clarified and anxious that this should be put right soon. [86] But the ILP had its own definite programme, drawn up by its Industrial Committee [87], although it could in industry sound very much like the Trotskyists themselves at times. [88] WIL’s own industrial policy was far more detailed, based on trade union control of the circumstances produced by war, for example by shop steward control of transfers of labour [89], but it put chief importance on the search by workers for a broader form of organisation which could coordinate struggles. [90] In early November 1943 the Coordinating Committee took the name of the Militant Workers Federation. Before that Roy Tearse was appointed as its organiser. A more definite programme was outlined and local presences developed. [91] In the internal contest within the MWF, WIL achieved an ascendancy over the ILP. [92] From WIL’s point of view the Federation was, of course, a source of contacts which it milked with some success. The MWF’s best chance was to displace the National Council of Shop Stewards as a focus for militant discontent. It was not a body of conscious revolutionaries however: many of its supporters were unpolitical factory activists looking for support outside their locality. Despite this, two seductive assumptions – that peace would bring a slump, and that the MWF would benefit from rising militancy – were commonly made. [93]

The timing of the MWF could not be faulted. Industry was more troubled from autumn 1943 to D-Day than it had been for many years. At Vickers’ Barrow shipyard, discontent had been festering since 1942 over a pay award, and in September 1943 a strike by 9,000 workers shut down the entire yard for eighteen days. Government guidelines may have inhibited a settlement, and state intervention remained a possibility throughout the dispute. Bevin rumbled from the platform – but did not act. [94] The Barrow district committee of the AEU was affiliated to the Militant Workers Federation, but the union’s leaders, and notably Tanner, were staunch upholders of Bevin’s no strike policy. When the district committee, after initial hesitations, endorsed the strike and tried to organise support, it was suspended by head office. [95] In the yard there were communist members.of the union, two of whom were members of the strike committee. For their opposition they were expelled and The Daily Worker ran strong criticism of the strike committee. [96] Socialist Appeal and The New Leader gave strong support to the dispute however, and the MWF spread news of it, developed contacts and raised cash. [97] Most tangibly the strike committee worked with Tearse and he spent most of the dispute in Barrow. It is little wonder that The Daily Worker correspondent saw Barrow as “the cockpit of Trotskyist agitation.” [98] The strikers showed great determination and defied a tribunal to achieve a substantial victory.

Barrow had been a great success for WIL, though it recognised that its commitment to the strikers” cause, rather than its political programme, had won it support. There were strong grounds for optimistic generalisation: only later did it become clear that the Barrow strike had been the only successful major dispute of the war. But WIL at the time wrote of “a sharp discontent and radicalisation ... transforming the outlook of the British working class”. [99] The movement had passed beyond local disputes and was steering towards national developments of an increasingly political character, it charged. Yet optimism was tempered with caution: disgruntlement had not yet hardened into a struggle to change the leadership? the MWF might be engulfed by strike before it solidified. [100] Yet WIL and the MWF had basked in national publicity and with increasing confidence approached leading convenors and stewards, Tearse moved to Glasgow at the end of 1943 and met a friendly response from militants on the Clyde. [101] WIL with some ILP members was beginning to assemble a fraction in the building trade that was to gain great influence after the war [102], and there were hopeful signs of inter-factional coordination by Trotskyists in engineering. [103]

WIL itself had every reason to look back on 1943 with considerable satisfaction. It had established a national identity and gained vital experience. In March of that year Socialist Appeal had started to publish a mid-monthly supplement – in effect it became a fortnightly paper. Its income was enough to sustain a high level of publicity [104]: Socialist Appeal leaflets supplemented its interventions in all major disputes. [105] It had eclipsed the RSL and was moving towards a fusion of British Trotskyists which it would dominate. WIL considered it of some significance that its enemies saw it as the chief representative of Trotskyism: this seemed to apply right and left. [106] This achievement had been made possible by a unique wartime political conjuncture of which it was only one beneficiary. Its cheerful willingness to break the tacit industrial truce was a parallel with the disruption of the electoral truce by the ILP and Common Wealth. [107]

Of course, CW supported the war – a fact differently interpreted by Trotskyism and communism. [108] The ILP’s platform was a pacifist one but it came close during the war to winning seats in England for the last time in its life. WIL, the smallest of the three and the least known, also recognised the opportunity and gained support, not necessarily for its programme, but for its cheerful willingness to break the consensus. WIL recognised the possibilities early on, and its success in 1943 and 1944 arose from confidently following its own forecasts of industrial unrest and a social shift towards radicalism. [109] It forecast the turn of dissident parties to the Labour Party [110] and that that party would be the main beneficiary of social discontent. [111] From its position outside the Labour Party WIL maintained a fraction within, in anticipation of a re-entry it never entirely ruled out. [112]

WIL reached a pinnacle of industrial influence and national publicity in 1944. Its opportunity arose because this was the worst year for strikes since 1932. [113] The months before D-Day saw simultaneous movements in engineering and the coalfields, Britain’s first wartime experience of such a conjuncture. [114] There was a link between the two in the form of Bevin’s programme for boosting manpower in the pits. But when Trotskyists became involved in the resisting this there seemed to be plenty of grounds for conspiracy theory. Measures to ensure voluntary topping up of the mines workforce proved insufficient [115], and when the ballot scheme was introduced [116] it encountered more resistance than any other measure of industrial conscription. The “Bevin Boys” were young but their names entered the ballot only when they reached national service age. One in ten was selected by ballot to work in the pits and no less than 40% of them appealed. [117] There was political encouragement for those who sought to resist [118], but the decisive factor in making this a national issue was the decision of engineering apprentices on the Tyne to organise collective resistance. A Tyneside Apprentices Guild founded in the second week of December 1943 gathered 15,000 members despite official union discouragement. Its purpose was to fight the ballot scheme as applied to shipyard apprentices. [119]

Local WIL Leaders were in contact with the apprentices from an early stage and established a rapport with the more political among them. [120] But the apprentices were able themselves to organise and spread an impressive strike movement. They were very far from being the Trotskyist tools of popular legend, though in a friendless world they had to find allies where they could. They were willing to listen to advice but did not always to take it, particularly when it was cautious. [121] The strike itself was caused by discontent at the apprentices” inability to prevent conscription to the pits entering the shipyards. [122] March, the first month of the strike, was relatively quiet in publicity, though it was the month when the Trotskyists with splendid timing fused to form the Revolutionary Communist Party: April was different as Tory papers vied with The Daily Worker in a hunt for the “hidden hand” of Trotskyism behind the apprentices movement. [123] It was the Labour Left and the ILP, who scorned the idea that Trotskyists could lead the apprentices by the nose. [124] Government concern at the unrest among miners led the Lord President’s Committee of the War Cabinet to discuss subversive influences on 5 April 1944 and what powers of prosecution were available to stem them. Memoranda drawn up following this meeting show the Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security was sceptical. [125] Gwilym Lloyd George, the Minister of Fuel and Power was more alarmist. He had noted the attacks made by Socialist Appeal and Militant Scottish Miner on trade union leaders. [126] The TUC, gave public expression to its concern the day the Lord President’s Committee met. [127] A second meeting of the Committee concluded that some legislative action should be taken. [128]

Meanwhile the Government decided to charge four RCP leaders with conspiracy and acts in furtherance of a strike in contravention of existing legislation: the Trades Disputes Act (1927). [129] This was a step of gross political insensitivity [130], which added spice to the reaction. By an extraordinary conjuncture the ILP annual conference was meeting in Newcastle, the storm centre, on the weekend of the arrests. James Maxton MP supported by John McGovern MP, proposed an emergency motion to the conference denouncing the prosecutions as a frame up, a diversion from incompetent control of the mines and a product of communist influence [131], and conference unanimously condemned the arrests and in camera hearings of Newcastle Crown Court. The ILP reaction was an important factor in spreading protest against the prosecutions, while the RCP noted that an act aimed against the trade union movement was being used against Trotskyism.

“This attack is a complete vindication of our whole perspective. It is a positive demonstration that we are in the van of the Labour movement; that the next period is ours.” [132]

After nearly five years of war, the sort of state action pre-war Trotskyism had foreseen came about. The RCP took the arrests as a signal to canvass vigorously for support. [133] When the War Cabinet came to discuss the industrial influence of Trotskyism it was surprisingly well-informed. [134] Advice given to the Cabinet leant against attributing great importance to Trotskyism [135], but on 17 April Bevin outflanked his earlier critics by introducing in the House of Commons an addition to the Defence Regulations, Order in Council I A (a). I A (a) gave the government powers, additional to those it already possessed, to act on disputes in essential industries by imposing a fine of £500 or a prison sentence of up to five years. Bevin had taken new powers without exhausting the old [136], and he had done it by extra-Parliamentary consultation rather than by vote. [137] He had travelled some way in the decade since his proud declaration to the Labour conference:

“I do not like emergency powers, even when they are operated by my friends”. [138]

The strong government line in April may have been a compound of anxiety to placate loyal TUC leaders who felt threatened [139], pre-D-Day nerves, and sensitivity to the situation in the pits, currently wracked with discontent. [140] Bevin’s own case for the arrests was that he was faced with acts in furtherance of strikes, i.e. political acts. [141] The RCP struggled to evaluate what his measures meant: there might be no more, there might be further arrests, or there might be outright suppression. [142] Whatever happened maximum open activity must be maintained, its members were told. [143] This was the only sensible conclusion open to the Trotskyist movement, now offered the opportunity to escape from years of obscurity and isolation:

“Far from going underground the capitalist class have put us on the map, and we must seize this favourable opportunity to conduct the widest possible forms of propaganda and recruiting.” [144]

On 24 April 1944, a provisional defence committee was formed in London [145] with a remit to provide legal aid for those arrested and others who might be, to support them and their dependants, and to pick out the class character of the measures. Two days later the committee was strengthened with the addition of a number of MPs and others who had been associated with Trotskyism. [146] After it gained further adherents the defence committee renamed itself the Anti-Labour Laws Victims Defence Committee [147], and held its inaugural meeting on 9 May with Reg Groves in the chair. An enthusiastic campaign was pushed into all corners of the country, usually by means of public meetings where prominent politicians were balanced with an RCP member:

“On the Defence Committee, the British Trotskyists, for the first time, have a platform together with the established left reformist and centrist leaders of the Labour Movement. This fact has the effect of positively integrating Trotskyism as part of the Labour Movement in the eyes of the advanced workers.” [148]

The RCP spoke of a “limited united front”, though invitations by Sastry to the Labour and Communist Parties to join the Committee were unsurprisingly rejected. No communists took part, and all Labour MPs acted in a personal capacity. As for the trade unions, a limited success was scored through support gained from local branches [149] though there was strong national opposition to I A (a). [150] Given a new opportunity the RCP reorientated itself to speak to a larger audience and called on its members to adopt a more positive attitude towards the Labour left. [151] Yet however flexible the RCP might be, there could never be a bridge between its aims in the campaign and those of MPs They could not be expected to justify the party’s political beliefs and were motivated either by a desire to defend the accused or to fight the attack on trade union rights.

The Order came before the House of Commons on 28 April. Bevan moved a prayer that it be annulled and thus initiated the only occasion when the House debated the impact of Trotskyism. [152] Bevan ridiculed the suggestion that miners were brought out on strike by Trotskyists [153] and accused Bevin of whipping up a scare in order to achieve easy passage of the Order. He defended the rights of the House and railed against imprisonment without trial. [154] Kirkwood, Bevan’s seconder, followed him in scorn for the idea that Trotskyists could cause stoppages, and defended strikes as safety valves of society. [155] No supporters of the government took the floor and John McGovern and Sir Richard Acland had the chance to follow the main argument of the critics. [156] D.N. Pritt also spoke, and in the course of a remarkable contribution argued that Bevin should not have brought in a new Order when he already had adequate statutory powers. [157] Neil MacLean put perhaps the most pertinent question to the Minister: if there were so many instigators of unrest, why had the House heard only of four arrests and not hundreds? [158] But logic and oratorical skills were impotent against a well-drilled government majority, and the annulment fell with only twenty three votes behind it. [159] Outside parliament as well as inside there was a disposition to ridicule the government’s action by the labour movement [160] though not by the communists. [161] Supporters of the Order justified it by the claim that the Minister’s present powers made it impossible for him to act against deliberate provocation. [162] The RCP leaders understood this attack and adjusted to meet it. [163] The four RCP members were detained in Newcastle from the time of their arrest in early April until the hearing at Newcastle on 18-22 May [164], when they were given bail. The court heard solicitors for the prosecution and the defence and also testimony from Bill Davy and other apprentices. Dr. Charlesworth, for the prosecution, disclaimed any intention to try the accused for their political opinions but still quoted from the apprentices” literature [165], yet his account of Trotskyist assistance seemed to concede part of the defence’s case. [166] Rutledge, for the defence, stuck closely to his brief and the witnesses – with one exception – backed him in blaming Bevin for the strike. [167] This was a dress-rehearsal for the trial itself, held at Newcastle Crown Court on 13 June before Judge Cassels. [168] The RCP defendants had to face two charges under the Trades Disputes Act and had engaged Derek Curtis-Bennett KC to appear on their behalf. [169] Davy was again put in the box as were other apprentices, and their evidence was to force acquittal on the conspiracy charges. [170] The defendants used their chance to the full to explain their general interest in working class problems, not just in strikes. Heaton Lee argued that a conspiracy was impossible. Roy Tearse explained that the MWF had a policy of coordinating struggles. Lee added that Davy had not been a Trotskyist at the time of the strike, only becoming convinced later. Haston’s advice to the apprentices, as told to the Court, was skilful but at times ingenuous. [171] The defence case concluded with the appearance of Tom Trewartha, chairman of the Barrow Strike Committee, who corroborated Tearse’s presentation of MWF activity [172], and the summoning of Ernest Bevin himself, who testified about the application of the ballot scheme to the apprentices. [173] Judge Cassels summed up for more than three hours and, in a passage which was to draw the attention of the Court of Criminal Appeal, virtually directed the jury to bring in a guilty verdict on the charge that the accused had acted in furtherance of an illegal strike. [174] This they did, but acquitted all four on the various conspiracy charges. [175] Cassels sentenced Lee and Tearse to twelve months apiece, Haston to six and directed that Ann Keen be released at once. [176] Inconsistencies were to be picked out by the Court of Appeal and must be traceable in part to this being a unique prosecution under the 1927 Act. [177] Cassels” interpretation of the “in furtherance” formula had established a precedent which might have wide application. [178] Under the circumstances it is remarkable that the National Council of Civil Liberties took no serious interest in the case. [179]

Wide potential application of the “in furtherance” provision of the 1927 Act, under Cassels’ precedent, boosted the ALLVDC’s activities. Old Trotskyists rallied round [180] and meetings were held around the country to demand the release of the incarcerated three. [181] An important trade union campaign built up over I A (a) and a powerful challenge was posed to TUC endorsement. [182] The 1927 Act was a symbol and it had been used against the RCP. Order I A (a) was an unspecific threat. Yet I A (a) was never used and even the apprentices were not charged. [183] The decision to act against the Trotskyists was certainly not motivated by wild government misjudgment of RCP strength. [184] Among the communists there was considerably more concern. [185] Lee, Tearse and Haston remained in Durham Jail for two and a half months. On 24 August 1944 Judge Wrottesley of the Court of Criminal Appeal ruled that their acts could not have been in furtherance of a strike since they had preceded it. [186] They were set at liberty but had been removed from activity for a crucial phase of the war. Cassels’ controversial ruling still stood however. [187]

The International was euphoric about RCP success during the apprentices” dispute. [188] The RCP itself was more balanced yet optimistic between the Trial and. the Appeal. [189] After the Appeal there was a period of victory rallies. [190] But the Defence Committee had been the party’s main field of work for some months [191] and with the successful Appeal this phase of activity came to an end. The MWF, which had since the arrests operated with restraint, did not take off, and in the end the anticipated wave of industrial unrest failed to materialise. The arrests and the introduction of I A (a) played their part in straining relations both within the Labour Party and the TUC however. They contributed to bringing nearer that moment when there would be a rupture in the wartime coalition: that fact in itself meant a change, as Morrison foresaw, in the circumstances which had allowed the Trotskyists to gain ground. In 1943, before the trial, Grant claimed that WIL had ceased to be “an entirely insignificant sect” because of its role in industry. WIL and the RCP played their hand to the full [192], but their opportunities were limited and ended with the war. As for the Trades Disputes Act and Order I A (a), the one was repealed by the Attlee government in 1946 without ever being used again as a basis for prosecution, and the other was never used at all and lapsed, of necessity, when the war ended. [193]

Notes

1. Trotsky’s wide ranging discussion with James is reproduced as On the History of the Left Opposition and Fighting Against the Stream, April 1939, Writings: (1938-9), 61-2, 63-5. The reference to an independent paper may have been intended for Workers Fight, the open journal of the unified RSL, but by this date it would have been more appropriate to Workers International News. This full text was published in SWP (USA), Internal Bulletin, 20 Dec. 1939 (Writings: (1938-39), 150n.

2. WIL wrote to inform Trotsky that it had bought a small printing press, which it used to produce Workers International News. He replied praising this as a revolutionary step (interview with E. Grant, Jan. 1973). No correspondence between WIL and Trotsky has been located, though Trotsky did remark, in a French connection, that an unprincipled split might lead to post hoc justifications (Letters to the POI Central Committee, 19 July 1939, Writings Supplement (1934-40), 826). Pablo, a post-war secretary of the Fourth International, later claimed that Trotsky had condemned WIL (It Is High Time To Find A Solution, [July 1947], RCP Internal Bulletin, n.p., H.P.).

3. Hilary Sumner-Boyd withdrew from collaboration with Ralph Lee after the second issue of WIN (see Chapter VIII). Michael Tippett, to whom the WIN project had appealed (see Statement of M.T., 8 March 1938) now ceased to be involved with Trotskyism. In 1940 he became Director of Music at Morley College, and in June 1943 was sentenced to three months imprisonment as a conscientious objector.

4. In 1940 WIL expelled Betty Hamilton who with Pierre Frank (then in London exile) was advancing the syndicalist propositions of Raymond Molinier’s PCI (D.F., The Lack of Democracy Within the Group and Reasons” and [WIL] Reply of the EC to Comrade D.F., 12 Oct. 1940, Internal Bulletin, n.d., H.P.). Raymond Molinier was the leader of one faction of the French Trotskyists who contributed to a seven year split in France. His influence was also felt to be at work in the East London branch of the RSL, which had produced a critical document What Is Wrong With Our Organisation?, and in Camberwell, where a statement There must be no compromise had been issued ([RSL], Circular Newsletter, 21 Aug. 1940). The RSL considered WIL as a whole to resemble Molinierism in its aspiration to a mass appeal and desire to expound popular principles. Nor was the accusation new, since it had been levelled by J.P. Cannon in 1938 (see Chapter VIII).

5. WIL recruited twelve RWL members in 1940, but retained only six (see Chapter IX; Anon., letter to the WIL central committee, 1940 H.P.). Ralph Lee and Haston visited the Edinburgh branch of the RSP, and convinced some of its members. WIL also expelled from its ranks two sympathisers who had moved towards the Leninist League, a Glasgow and Coventry faction which, like Hugo Oehler in the USA, stood for an independent existence and factory work (D.F., and WIL EC, op. cit.). The Leninist League, blocked from the Peace and Unity conference, maintained activity at least until the middle of the war. It published material from the Revolutionary Workers League of Chicago, an anti-Trotskyist party.

6. E. (Ted) Grant (1914- ) had as a young man been one of the first South African Trotskyists to come to Britain. He had been a member of the Marxist and Militant Groups. He was posted to the Pioneer Corps but fractured his skull before joining up and was discharged. Another South African, Ann Keen, joined WIL sometime in 1938 as part of its London organisation (interview with Ann Finkel [Keen], 30 July 1974). Gerry Healy, though a founder member, was a controversial figure. He resigned in 1938 when not consulted over a decision to print Youth for Socialism (q.v.). While in Ireland he joined the Irish Labour Party in opposition to WIL. He was allowed to rejoin WIL but in 1940 resigned again following criticism of federalising amendments he had proposed to the WIL constitution. Healy’s organising abilities were widely recognised, however, and he occupied important positions in the League throughout most of its life.

7. Half of its October 1940 executive was comprised of members with less than two years standing. Nor were the editors of WIN or Youth for Socialism foundation members.

8. No reason has been ascertained for Lee’s departure nor have details of his subsequent career been discovered. Lee is referred to in Haston’s 1945 correspondence with South African Trotskyists.

9. Grant was able to stay out of the forces because of a skull injury. Haston had a stomach ailment, but also changed identities, for which offence he was arrested. Andrew Scott simply did not respond to call up and worked full time for WIL for some years. When he finally reported and told a truthful story to account for his non-appearance no action was taken against him (Interview with J. Haston, 13 July 1973).

10. WIN still regularly published Trotsky, a task no other faction of the 1930s regularly achieved. WIL claimed that it published every important document of the FI to 1941. The RSL challenged that WIN’s emphasis on foreign articles left it “in the realm of the abstract”, a charge which would bolster its view that WIL had no reason to exist (BSFI, Statement on relations with the Workers International League, 4 Dec. 1939, H.P., 13a/18, 3-4).

11. Youth for Socialism bore the imprint of G. Healy from September 1938. In August 1939 Healy’s name was replaced by W. Clarke, and in September 1939 by B. French. In June 1940 the name D. Gray appeared and continued until May 1941 when the last issue appeared over the name Harold Atkinson (q.v.).

12. At the 1939 LLOY conference WIL had about five delegates to fifteen of the MLL At the party conference held that year in Southport, WIL had no delegates to the MLL’s three (B.S.F.I,. ibid., 4).

13. The RSL argued that this was “by no means the most important” kind of revolutionary activity and that WIL had an advantage over it by virtue of its freedom from international commitments (ibid., 4).

14. Workers Diary appeared daily from 22 September 1939 to 8 April 1940 (A. Penn, op. cit., 157). Copies have survived in private possession but had not been located at the time of completion of the substantive draft of this thesis.

15. “The economic blockade not only of Europe but of Britain too will become increasingly effective and this will mark the beginning of wholesale social convulsions. Long before the nations can complete their mutual destruction, the political and social structure of every country will be subjected to the severest test” (Britain Holds Out, WIN, Oct. 1940, 7).

16. RSL, The Electoral Tactics of the Workers Vanguard (1940), 2. Pollitt’s 966 votes, while six times larger than the Fascist candidate polled, were swamped by a Labour total fifteen times larger.

17. The Ballot Box Tes”, WIN, March 1940, 6-8. WIL advocated critical support for anti-war candidates, preferably the ILP rather than the CPGB, though it regarded their programme as “a vote for Hitler”.

18. It was, presumably, WIL’s electoral line which provoked this ban. However, the paper had consistently attacked the Labour officialdom which ran the League of Youth and, notably, Huddlestone, the party Youth Officer, although it had tended to lose the character of a youth paper. It had also evinced an undisguised interest in the youth sections of other parties such as the CPGB and ILP.

19. “We are still in the most elementary stages of preparing the party and consequently it is to the politically conscious and organised workers to whom we must turn our faces” (Reply of the EC to Comrade D.F., 12 Oct. 1940, Internal Bulletin, [1940], H.P., D.J.H. 14A/1, 8).

20. In October 1940 WIL had ILP and CPGB fractions but believed main forces should be concentrated at the main point of attack, viz. the Labour Party. Factory work at this point was treated by WIL with especial scorn: it had not yielded a single recruit. One possibility visualised which might change the “objective situation” was the emergence of a mass communist opposition, the appearance of which would “depend entirely on the future orientation of Stalin’s foreign policy” (ibid., 8-9). Factory work had been proposed by another WIL member in Anon., For A New Course, 26 Oct. 1940, H.P., D.J.H. 5/3.

21. Labour to Power, ILP chairman supports the war, WIN, Aug. 1940, 10-13.

22. The RSL reminded Lee and his comrades that they had not objected to the MLL tactic when they had been members of the Militant Group in 1937.

23. An undated document of the first half of 1941 put the WIL leaders” views to all locals. It foresaw a Labour Party split, with the Left and ILP joining together, and predicted a harbinger in the shape of a turn to factory committees. But while ILP and CPGB fractions would be needed, full strength had to be applied at the points of attack: the Labour Party and the unions (Statement On Policy and Perspectives, [Feb.-June 1941?], H.P.). Yet WI 1 dated its turn to open work from March 1941 in Preparing For Power (WIN, special issue, Sept. 1942, 20). In June 1941 Youth for Socialism was transformed into the broader Socialist Appeal, which declared it supported the “policy of Workers International News (Trotskyist)” and advertised meetings of WIL (Fourth International). In September Workers International News appeared openly as the organ of Workers International League. From January 1942 Socialist Appeal appeared openly as an FI paper.

24. WIL also stated that it would still issue this call even if Trotskyism had a mass following, drawing on precedent in the form of the Bolshevik slogan “All Power to the Soviets” (WIL , Reply to the Political Statement of the Revolutionary Socialist League, 1941, H.P., D.J.H. 5/7, 4).

25. The July 1941 issue of WIN carried what it claimed was the manifesto of the Fourth International in Britain. This claim, when repeated on letterheads and elsewhere enraged the RSL It was based on its record, its advocacy of the FI programme and that of the RSL since 1938. Evidence later advanced included the quality and consistency of the WIL press and the part it had played in establishing an Irish Section (WIL, For Discussion. To the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, [1941?] and Reply to Lou Cooper. The Bolshevik attitude to unity ... and splits, H.P., 11 Sept. 1943).

26. WIL held Trotsky Memorial meetings in London and Birmingham during August 1940, the month of his death, and demonstrated outside the Russian Embassy. The RSL initially resolved not to combine with other Trotskyists because this would risk its Labour Party presence: in the end it held a meeting in London and Glasgow with ILP speakers as well as its own. Each organisation held a Russian Revolution anniversary meeting on 7 November 1941. According to WIL there were 200 in attendance at its own meeting (which sent a resolution to Ambassador Maisky calling for the victory of the Red Army but opposing Stalin) but only twenty seven at that of the RSL (“D. Gray” to secretary, RSL, 31 Dec. 1941, Har. P., F7). The RSL objected to WIL holding its meeting under the auspices of the Fourth International (RSL to WIL, 7 Oct. 1941, in Report On Negotiations With The WIL, [Jan.? 1942], 4).

27. The “People’s” Convention”, WIN, Dec. 1940, 6.

28. In spring 1940 the communists performed poorly in by-elections and convened a Labour Monthly conference on 25 February, whose representation is difficult to assess. The People’s Convention movement from July 1940 did win support, particularly during the following year, though some of its claims may have been exaggerated (A. Rothstein, Harry Pollitt, BSSLH, Spring 1977, 20; M. Johnstone, Harry Pollitt, BSSLH, Autumn 1977, 24-7). The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, believed that the party itself had not grown (J. Hinton, Killing the People’s Convention, BSSLH, Autumn 1979, 27).

29. While the party lost support among the intelligentsia, most dramatically displayed in V. Gollancz (ed.), The Betrayal of the Left (1941), it had a militant line for its factory members. In 1940 the party’s central committee advised “if this industrial truce policy were to succeed, then the British workers, the pioneers of trade unionism, are faced with the danger of losing all their safeguards and having virtual slavery thrust upon them” (CPGB, The Trade Unions and the War, 1940, 10). Party influence on the shop stewards movement was revealed at the national conference of 6-7 April 1940 and that of the following year. E. Trory (Imperialist War, 1977, 157-65) gives an uncritical account of this phase of communist policy. See also R.T. Buchanan, The Shop Steward Movement 1935-47, Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society, Feb. 1978, 34-55.

30. Morrison banned The Daily Worker and The Week in January 1941, rather late in the day and clearly alarmed by the People’s Convention. The Daily Worker had already been punished for libelling union leaders the previous year (T.U.C., Union Leaders Vindicated, 1940).

31. Pritt wrote of the government:

“Its origins are pretty clear. It is surely the lineal descendant and residuary legatee of the class-government which conducted and ‘won’ the last war, made the treaty of Versailles, intervened in Russia in the name of crushing the new-born and fortunately indestructible socialist country, acquiesced in the rape of Manchuria, Abyssinia, Austria, Albania and Czechoslovakia ...” (Labour Monthly, Jan. 1941, 16-17.)

32. J.R. Campbell wrote of “Labour in chains”, “the straight jacket on shop stewards” and “compulsion in the workshop”. Joint committees were, he declared, an attempt to weaken shop stewards’ committees, their appearance, with other developments, marking “a decisive clearing of the ground for an advance to Fascism”. (Workers and the British Totalitarians, Labour Monthly, March 1941, 131-9.)

33. Sydney Bidwell’s NUR branch in Southall tabled five amendments only to have them rejected by the Standing Orders Committee (B. Farnborough, loc. cit., 27). Healy may have been a delegate. The Convention adopted a programme including the raising of living standards, adequate ARP, restoration of civil rights, emergency takeover of big business and the banks, self -determination for the colonies, friendship with the USSR, a people’s government representative of the working class and a people’s peace based on self-determination of all peoples. For resolutions passed by the Convention see Labour Monthly, Feb. 1941, 93-5. Motivation of those who supported it is discussed by J. Hinton, loc. cit., 27-32. See also the general discussion by A. Calder, The People’s War, 1971, 281-4.

34. People’s Convention. And Now ..., WIN, Feb. 1941, 7.

35. G. Weston, whose relationship with Trotskyism spanned almost a decade and a half, came over with several industrial workers to WIL. Weston was an important figure at De Havillands’ Hendon factory. As an independent group WIL attracted Arthur Cooper, who was thought to have as many as twenty young workers around him in-the Socialist Workers Group. (RSL, EC Minutes, 5 Jan. 1942, Har. P.)

36. J. Owen, How to Increase War Production, Labour Monthly, Sept. 1941, 391-5. See also William Rust’s case for lifting the ban on The Daily Worker (The Daily Worker and the National Front, Labour Monthly, Aug. 1941, 368). All the demands of the Convention except for friendship with the USSR, were dropped as immediate objectives. As Pritt observed “much of the Convention’s programme was no longer fully applicable to the situation” (From Right to Left, 1965, 285-6). However, his The Fall of the French Republic with its suggestion that the British government, like the French, was moving towards the suppression of liberties, was published in October 1941 though written before Russia entered the war. Hinton comments that the People’s Convention, which six days after Hitler’s attack had reaffirmed its call for a People’s Government and a People’s Peace, was by July 1941 looking “through victory to a People’s Peace” (loc. cit., 29n).

37. “By transforming the trade unions into organs of the state, fascism invents nothing new; it merely draws to their ultimate conclusion the tendencies inherent in imperialism” (L. Trotsky, Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, 1966, 6).

38. But the Founding Congress sternly opposed “sectarian” attempts to build or preserve small “revolutionary” unions, as a second edition of the party (which) signify in actuality the renouncing of the struggle for the leadership of the working class” (The Transitional Programme, Documents, 186) .

39. ibid., 11. For the positive side of trade union collaboration with government, see A. Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War, 1968, especially 288.

40. Of minor unofficial industrial disputes before the war Grant wrote that the bourgeoisie “issued a warning to the Union bureaucracy that unless they restored control, unless they could keep their men in check, then they would have to resort to other methods” (Our Tasks in the Coming Revolution, WIN, Jan. 1944, 10).

41. Trotsky had commented that “labour aristocrats”, who were taken on by governments to sell an unpopular policy invariably occupied the posts of Labour and the Interior. Herbert Morrison was appointed Home Secretary when Labour joined the Government.

42. Mass Observation, People in Production, 1942, 251.

43. In July 1941 Bevin introduced the Conditions of Employment and National Arbitration Order, No. 1305. Order 1305 set up a National Arbitration Tribunal whose awards were enforceable by law. It prohibited strikes and lockouts unless reported to the minister and not referred for settlement within twenty-one days. In fact there were 109 prosecutions of workers under the Order in wartime as against two of employers. One of the effects was to deepen the prewar trend towards official strikes (E. Wigham, Strikes and the Government, 1893-1974 (1976), 93).

44. E. Wigham (op. cit., 74) points out that official national disputes were absent for nearly thirty years after the General Strike. While small unofficial strikes were, as Grant had noted, rising in number during the 1930s, the number of days lost thereby did not rise.

45. At 32,000, the number of compulsory orders issued between July 1941 and June 1942 was more than ten times as many as had been issued since war began (A. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, Vol.2, Minister of Labour 1940-1945, 1967, 141). This represented a major revision of views by Bevin who had, earlier, argued that compulsion would cut output (ibid., 45-6).

46. “Industrial conscription must be ruthlessly fought because it is a measure directed against the working class as a whole, a measure to lower men’s wages by the introduction of cheap labour, to eliminate labour competition which forces up wages, a measure to utilise the badly organised state of women to smash down the standard of present working conditions”, Youth for Socialism 1, April 1941.

47. The conscription of women, for example, against which Youth for Socialism had written and which might have been an emotive issue, provoked no outburst (A. Calder, op. cit., 309).

48. The urge to beat the temporary enemy, the Axis, and the urge to beat the traditional enemy (the employer), mingle and muddle. When the situation looks as if we are bound to beat the Axis anyway – an idea the Government have for long inspired – the impulse to have a round with the traditional enemy creeps up. When things look bad, this impulse goes down again. But when things are more than normally bad, it goes down so far it comes out at the bottom. It is a barometer of the urgency of effort in war industry. (Mass Observation, People in Production, 1942, 246.) In fact 1940 was the only year of the war when the number of days lost through strikes fell below one million and the number of men involved in them fell below 300,000 (A. Calder, op. cit., 299).

49. When the consultative committee was formed during the dispute, WIL supported its absorption into the AEU machinery, perhaps foreseeing a chance to carry influence into the union. The Dalmuir (Glasgow) Works was the only factory in the ROF Group that WIL controlled. It convinced leading communist stewards like Alex Reoch who were prepared to debate with it (Interview with R. Tearse, Nov. 1973). The WIL executive heard on 22 April 1942 of strike action at the Nottingham ROF against compulsory transfers.

50. There was a Napiers’ steward in the Battersea ILP branch which included Wicks, Dewar, and their supporters. In the factory a fierce battle was fought between supporters of the communists’ engineering paper, The New Propeller, and followers of the newly launched ILP journal, The Shop Steward. The ILP and Trotskyists had some success in 1942 in keeping the credentials of one AEU steward who opposed communist policy. At De Havillands, Bill Hunter, who remained an ILP member till 1945 (when he represented Chiswick at the party’s annual conference) was at work. George Weston, the veteran Trotskyist was factory convenor. Directed there were Alf Loughton, a bricklayer and 1930s associate of the Marxist League, and Roy Tearse (q.v.). Gerry Healy worked at the nearby Park Royal works.

51. The ILP used this wartime opportunity to make its most serious drive into the factories. Wicks and Dewar joined the party’s industrial committee which brought out a small printed journal The Shop Steward (Interview with H. Wicks, 30 Nov. 1979). In 1942 the ILP appointed Walter Padley to head its industrial drive.

52. Trotskyists and others who opposed the CPGB line made a limited intervention at a production conference convened by the Shop Stewards Council on 19 October 1941, but their main motion was disbarred from discussion (Militant, Nov. 1941).

53. In October 1941 fifty De Havilland stewards passed a second front resolution but appended to it calls for trade union officers to accompany the BEF and for a joint Cabinet-aircraft shop stewards conference (ibid.). This eclectic resolution illustrated the sea saw balance of power in the factory.

54. In Scotland, Hugh Brannan, a young member of the RSL’s Left Fraction, campaigned against the Essential Work Order. Tom Stephenson, a leading Cumberland miner, who was an ILPer but not a Trotskyist, campaigned with him against Bevin’s measures for industry. Their views can be followed in The New Leader, passim. See also P.J. Thwaites, op. cit., 136-7. Trotskyism and the ILP also overlapped in the Welsh mines, through Bob Condon, who wrote for The New Leader and joined the Revolutionary Communist Party at the end of the war.

55. The Communist Party has been in the forefront of the fight to combat these shortcomings, to overcome every obstacle – whether of craft prejudice, trade union sectionalism or conservatism, suspicion of and opposition to necessary changes, such as the widest introduction of women in industry, or a narrow view of the workers” interests, or slackness – which stands in the way of maximum production. The decisive question for the increase of war production is the question of labour productivity, which depends above all on the effort, initiative and cooperation of every worker. (CPGB, An Urgent Memorandum on Production, 1942, 6)

A local pamphlet called for speed ups and an end to absenteeism at Corby steelworks, as well as an increase in output of at least 15% (Corby For Victory, [Corby 1942?]).

56. The CPGB argued that democracy at work and high output went hand in hand. Unions ought not to cooperate to the extent of handing employers an advantage over the community. Unions had to defend the standards of transferees to make this option an attractive one. A 1942 policy resolution of the party urged greater power to workshop organisations, periodic election of officials, election of district officers by the membership, annual policy conferences of the unions and the withdrawal of the “Black” Circular (CPGB, Trade Union Policy in the War against Fascism, 1942). – The Circular was in fact withdrawn by the TUC’s Southport Congress in 1943.

57.

WARNING

Many workers, trade unionists and Labour Party members, unthinkingly express views which sound Trotskyist. Don’t confuse these honest but muddled opinions with genuine Trotskyism.

The real Trotskyist is a bitter enemy of Stalin, and the other trusted leaders of the Soviet Union. That’s his fingerprint, whatever else he may say. And that’s how you can spot him. As for the people who are genuinely confused, your job is to explain. Explain. Explain. Get them to read this booklet. If they haven’t time, explain what is in it to them. (W. Wainwright, Clear Out Hitler’s Agents, 1942, 15.)

D. Childs (loc. cit., 248) suggests communist influence was not important in fomenting strikes before 1941 or preventing them later. D.N. Pritt claimed however that “left to themselves, many workers of no strong political consciousness would have struck from time to time against the innumerable irritations to which they were exposed, but the communists in the factories were able to make clear the importance of keeping up the flow of vital production for war purposes” (From Right to Left, 1965, 307)

58. W. Wainwright, op. cit. The pamphlet goes on to advise that the Trotskyist be exposed and turned out, and finally treated “as you would an open Nazi”.

59. E. Grant, The Communist Party and the War: Look at their record! (1942). Grant made no concessions to the 1939-41 phase of CPGB policy, arguing that its call for a negotiated peace with Hitler stultified any possibility of it building a mass movement in the factories.

60. All Trotskyist papers referred to the need to defend the USSR. This was a constant theme and quite unmistakeable in all their propaganda. Nor was the slogan in any way dependent on Britain being transformed from a capitalist country into a socialist one.

61. Even the Left Fraction, whose views might be said to have led in that direction did not advocate it. J.R. Campbell, in Trotskyist Saboteurs (1943), showed awareness of James Burnham’s split from the Fourth International. Yet Trotsky himself, disputing with Burnham, had written that in all countries, regardless of alliances, workers must develop the class struggle, though they might use sabotage to help the USSR:

“If England and France tomorrow menace Leningrad or Moscow, the British and French workers should take the most decisive measures in order to hinder the sending of soldiers and military supplies. If Hitler finds himself constrained by the logic of the situation to send Stalin military supplies, the German workers on the contrary, would have no reason in this concrete case to strikes or sabotage. Nobody, I hope, will propose any other solution” (Again and once more on the Nature of the USSR, in In Defence of Marxism, 1966, 36-7).

62. Lawrence told the RSL at the start of 1942 that WIL had sixty London members, twenty three Glasgow members (E.C. Minutes, 5 Jan. 1942, Har. P.). A WIL levy circular of 1942 gives eighteen branches: Kilburn, Shepherds Bush, Southall, East End, South, Edmonton, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Motherwell, Nottingham, Birmingham, Coventry Liverpool and Birkenhead, Burnley, Wolverhampton, Leeds, Northampton and Slough.

63. Lawrence informed the RSL that sales were 10,000 monthly. This may be high, but Haston had convinced the paper controllers that WIN and Youth for Socialism had vast pre-war circulations and until 1943 they were not constrained by paper shortages (Interview with J. Haston, 13 July 1973).

64. Roy Tearse (1919- ) had, as a young ILP member in Newcastle, organised peace meetings in the first year of the war. As a skilled engineer he moved to De Havillands in 1941 to test aero engines. Before he left the factory he rose to the presidency of Edgware 3, a new branch of the AEU. He had met RSL members while in the Tyneside ILP, but it was the active WIL which he joined, while still a party member, in London (Interview with R. Tearse, 28 Nov. 1973).

65. Joint Production Committees began when Jack Tanner, now A.E.U. president, persuaded a reluctant Engineering Employers Federation that they would be the best collaborative device to raise industrial output. The engineers’ example spread to shipyards and engineering (A. Bullock, op. cit., 945).

66. Preparing for Power, WIN, September 1942, 24.

67. ibid., 24. T. Dan Smith, not yet a Trotskyist, gave full coverage in The New Leader to a successful Tyneside shipyard strike in early 1942 where the men had stayed out in defiance of a personal appeal by Harry Pollitt for a return to work.

68. See the broadsheet Socialist Appeal policy for the ROFs, 16 June 1942, designed for an Enfield meeting on workers’ control of production (H.P., D.J.H. 14e/14).

69. The Industrial Organiser [Tearse?] found that a pro-communist mood among miners coexisted with “hostility to the Stalinist strike-breaking”. WIL was well received in several pits and it was reported that a Socialist Appeal committee had replaced the lodge committee at Blackhall. ([WIL], EC Report, 22 April 1942, H.P., D.J.H. 14B/11/l.)

70. Recruitment of dockers had allowed the launch of a Dockers Bulletin ([WIL] CC, 20 June 1942, H.P).

71. Betteshanger was a strong confirmation for WIL’s perspectives of increased industrial militancy and power, “the first really important victory to be won by the workers since the outbreak of war” (Socialist Appeal, Aug. 1942). See also A. Bullock, op. cit., 267-8. This important strike, whose consequences revealed the shift of power towards Labour is not mentioned by R.P. Arnot in his standard The Miners in Crisis and War (1961).

72. The mines were dilapidated even in 1939 and Labour would not propose nationalisation under the terms of the moratorium on controversial issues. Younger men had been conscripted into the forces and in early 1941 there was a “sharp fall” in total production and output per man and wages were comparatively low. There had been therefore an inadequate response to Bevin’s call for former miners to return to the pits, so he applied the Essential Work Order to the industry in May 1941. He registered all who had worked in the pits at any time and it was now that the committee was established which would propose the Bevin Boys scheme. Nevertheless, 160,000 Yorkshire miners struck in May and June 1942.

73. Propaganda in the Coalfields (Morning Post, 15 July 1942) included an interview with Haston and Grant. Joseph Hall, YMA president had charged that young men were being paid £10 a week to tramp the Yorkshire coalfields with Socialist Appeal. See also the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph for the same date.

74. Socialist Appeal, an open letter to the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, 18 July 1942, H.P., D.J.H. 14E/20. See also What Socialist Appeal said. The Minister of Home Security questioned in the House of Commons (April 1942, H.P., D.J.H. 14e/13), an earlier WIL broadsheet. A second open letter appeared in Socialist Appeal for January 1943.

75. See Industrial News, [3?], Aug. 1942 (H.P., D.J.H. 14F/1). This publication may have replaced another entitled Workshop News (A. Penn, op. cit., 61).

76. When questioned in the House by a Tory MP, Morrison showed great scepticism about Joseph Hall’s claims; he also reminded William Gallacher MP, another questioner, that “this organisation is only pursuing the same political policy as he and his own political friends did before the Soviet Union was attacked” (HC Debates, Vol.381, Cols.1330-1, 16 July 1942).

77. Morrison resisted further calls for suppression and disputed the more exotic claims for WIL size and influence. He also went so far as to taunt Gallacher with the suggestion that the CPGB had inspired some of the alarmist stories in the Conservative press (HC Debates, Vol.381, Cols.1493, 1515-16, 21 July 1942).

78. G. Healy, Industrial Militants Need a Programme, Socialist Appeal, Jan. 1943.

79. The New Leader, passim. Padley had offered its pages to industrial workers seeking to coordinate their struggles, and a number of rank and file workers had taken the opportunity to call for a new organisation to do the job undertaken by the National Council of Shop Stewards to June 1941.

80. Hunter, Don McGregor and Tearse had shared an ILP platform in Tooting, and Grant had debated with Padley on apparently equal terms elsewhere.

81. The Glasgow Militant gave way in February 1943 to Militant Scottish Miner, also from Glasgow, and sustained monthly publication until December. In January 1944 it was succeeded by the irregular publication The Militant Miner. Militant Scottish Miner with The New Leader was used by Hugh Brannan of the Lanarkshire coalfield to campaign for reform. Brannan stood for the presidency of the Lanarkshire miners in 1943 against an upholder of the wartime industrial truce. His poll of 7,792 was only 1,400 below that of his opponent.

82. Members of the AEU, TGWU, ETU, NSP, NUR, ASW, AUBTW, AESD, and others attended and Don McGregor of Wood Green ILP was made secretary (The New Leader, 20 Feb. 1943).

83. On 21 February militant trade unionists heard Tearse, McGregor, Bidwell, Jock Milligan (a Trotskyist builder) and Healy speak in London. The New Leader was giving a regular and growing space to industrial policy and the ILP’s 1943 conference voted to oppose industrial collaboration, build a militant shop stewards movement and strive for industrial unionism; it stopped short of making Padley’s position full-time, however (The New Leader, 1 May 1943).

84. They were led by Bob McCrory and Alex Reoch. The committee drew up a seven point programme on which to campaign and resolved to try to embrace all industries in its work. McCrory, Reoch and ten others broke with the CPGB about this time, and nine of them joined WIL. Reoch was a shipyard worker recruited through paper sales, in which the Glasgow local of WIL excelled. McCrory and the others were expelled from the CPGB for association with the ROF consultative committee in defiance of party instructions. WIL claimed that Glasgow area communist shop stewards were equally split between Stalinists and Trotskyists. (Interview with A. Finkel (Keen), July 1974; A Letter from England, Fourth International (ICY), June 1943, 190.)

85. The statement of the NCWC read:

Realising the necessity of a National Organisation in defence of the workers’ interests, this delegate conference representing organised workers from London, Newcastle-on-Tyne, Barrow, the Midlands, Yorkshire and Glasgow, declares that we basically agree with the understated seven points of the “Clyde Workers Committee”.

1. Co-ordination of all militant T.U. activity.
2. Annulment of all anti Working Class legislation.
3. Every shop a closed shop.
4. Workers control of transfers.
5. 1. Higher standard of life for all workers.
   2. Better standard of wages and allowances for all workers in the Armed Forces.
6. Confederation of all Workers Committees (Nat.)
7. Workers’ control of Industry.

We call on all workers to rally to the fight. (Socialist Appeal, Mid-June 1943.)

86. Haston’s concern centred on the belief of the ILP industrial committee that coordination should be confined to engineering and allied trades. This, he declared, would repeat “all the worst blunders that were committed by .the industrial movement at the end of the last war” (Socialist Appeal, Mid-June 1943). The WIL leaders were very aware of the 1914-18 precedent. Their keynote document, Preparing for Power, had borrowed that title from J.T. Murphy’s account of the movement and engineering stewards in the First War. WIL declared “the conquest of power is the axis of our propaganda”; Murphy had written “it is significant that in all these discussions the central question of the CONQUEST OF POLITICAL POWER by the working class was entirely overlooked” (Preparing for Power, 1972, 159).

87.

1. Maintain Trade Union practices.
2. Restore right of works assembly and literature distribution.
3. Shop Stewards control of deferments, transfers and dismissals.
4. Equal pay for the job.
5. Independent T.U.’s and Shop Stewards – NOT whips for the bosses.
6. For Workers Control of Production. (ILP Industrial Committee, Renew the Wage Demand (1942), 1.)

88. “‘But’, you may say, ‘we don’t want pious sentiments; we want planes and guns and production for Russia now:‚ Reflect a moment. Are you getting this from capitalism? How is capitalism running its war? .... You may think you can use capitalism but capitalism is using you, and I say that the only true friend of the Soviet Union is the International Working Class” (J. McNair, Make Britain Socialist Now, 1942, 12-13). The ILP also denounced communists as “strike-breakers” (T. Taylor, Defend Socialism from the Communists, 1942, 3). In 1942, the WIL, perhaps swayed by its own perspectives, was recording that the ILP was “beginning to penetrate the fringes of the trade union movement” (P. Thwaites, The Independent Labour Party, 1938-50, 134).

89. See Appendix

90. A New Stage in History (draft resolution of WIL central committee to 1943 conference), WIN, Sept. 1943, 8.

91.Trade union independence, union democracy, 100% trade unionism, workers” control, and the confiscation of war profits were in the programme (The New Leader, 6 Nov. 1943). The London Group was more definite still raising such demands as soldiers representation on Trades Councils (P. Thwaites, op. cit., 137).

92. Socialist Appeal, in its industrial coverage, refers occasionally to Anarchist influences, and WIL would occasionally debate with Anarchists, but their importance seems to have been slight.

93. Within the RSL, the Left Fraction strongly disputed that the MWF could become a mass force and maintained its view after the RCP was formed in March 1944. The Trotskyists, it argued, should work within the national shop stewards movement until expelled. Only then would a separate movement be justified, A Policy for Industry (submitted to the 1944 Fusion Conference, March 1944, H.P., D.J.H. 14C/m).

94. For this he was criticised in The Times and elsewhere. His key speech at Farnworth on 2 October 1943, where he spoke of the “anti-war people” without specifying that he intended Trotskyists, is discussed by A. Bullock, op. cit., 269. Nevertheless he took the Barrow dispute and troubles on the Clydeside Shipyards and Rolls Royce (Glasgow) seriously enough to have them investigated by MI5. His informants told him communists and Trotskyists only found an echo where grievances already existed (E. Wigham, op. cit., 92).

95. Tanner sent officials to the district committee early in the strike to plead for opposition to it. They were rebuffed and three weeks later the suspension took place.

96. These communists (according to Socialist Appeal) distributed leaflets in opposition to the strike. Jack Owen, The Daily Worker’s correspondent, was hostile to the strike throughout. He suggested that the strikers could have campaigned for an inquiry as an alternative to industrial action. When they stayed out after a tribunal had called for such an inquiry, he blamed the strike committee (The Daily Worker, 27, 29 Sept., and 1 Oct. 1943). The Times pondered all this with some bewilderment:

... but it has to be recorded to the credit of the strike committee that it has endeavoured to keep all politics out of the dispute and make it purely industrial. Only yesterday it expelled two members from the strike committee for alleged political activities. At the same time there has been a somewhat Gilbertian situation in the town. Communist meetings have been held and communist literature circulated in an endeavour to persuade the strikers to return to work. (The Times, 30 Sept. 1943.)

Common Wealth also had a member in the yard. Acland and Loverseed, leaders of CW, visited the yard and offered sympathy but argued for restraint. (A. Calder, The Common Wealth Party, 1942-5, University of Sussex Ph.D. thesis, 2, 1969, 24)

97. The MWF and WIL were well received because the strikers were glad of any support in the face of such an imposing array of enemies. One strike leader claimed that Socialist Appeal alone had put their case (Socialist Appeal, Oct. 1943). In fact The New Leader also explained the dispute sympathetically and savaged the communists with some gusto. It had the advantage over Socialist Appeal of being weekly: see the articles by Padley in the issues for 25 September and 2 October 1943, the second of which contains a strong attack on the CPGB.

98. The CPGB was embarrassed by the role it felt compelled to play in industry and irritated that it received no gratitude from Bevin. On 27 September 1943, JR Campbell charged WIL with seeking a national anti-war engineering strike (The Daily Worker, 27 Sept 1943) and the accusation was extended to embrace the ILP also when the AEU Huddersfield district committee resigned in solidarity with the suspension of its Barrow counterpart. When Bevin coupled his denunciation of the Trotskyists with gibes against the CPGB, in a speech delivered at Farnworth, The Daily Worker for 4 October lamented his inability to distinguish between the friends and foes of fascism. After the strike was concluded, William Rust, the paper’s editor, was sufficiently stung by further attacks from Bevin to address the Minister in an open letter. “The handling of the Barrow strike has not been an easy job for The Daily Worker”, he wrote, “I have had many headaches over it”. Communist loyalty to the truce was remarkable. It was, apparently, without blemish in industry and ruptured electorally only once, when the party supported the successful candidature of the independent socialist Charlie White against an effete pro-Government candidate in West Derbyshire in 1944.

99. In its immediate aftermath Haston noted the solidarity of women with the Barrow strikers, their friendly relations with the local police and mayor and a sympathetic feeling among soldiers and sailors on leave. But he warned that “there is a growing awareness that if the workers do not gain concessions for themselves now, when they have the employers where they want them, they will not be able to gain concessions after the war” (Socialist Appeal, Oct. 1943).

100. Tasks of the Industrial Militants (a resolution adopted by the 1943 conference of WIL), WIN, Oct.-Nov. 1943, 6-9. WIL could take some satisfaction from the confirmation of its forecast that factory committees would be built by militants forced to by-pass the quasi-official shop stewards structure.

101. Tearse was now a WIL professional and still MWF national secretary. A number of convenors, who were not Trotskyists, were prepared to sell Socialist Appeal, raise money and even ask advice of WIL (Interview with R. Tearse, Nov. 1973). Yet WIL made no really large gains in membership despite attention it paid to Albion Motor Works, Singers, John Browns and other Clydeside factories (H. McShane and J. Smith, op. cit., 23b).

102. The MWF line was to oppose Payment By Results in building and civil engineering (J. Milligan, Payment by Results, [1943], H.P., D.J.H. 10/I).

103. South London AEU members who were in the SWG, WIL and dissidents in the RSL met to concert action on 14 March [1943].

104. Income for 1943 was £2,654, a sum which included Millie Lee’s income of £350 and £781 from sales of Socialist Appeal (The Trotskyist Movement in Great Britain, Cabinet Paper W.P. (44), 202, 13 April 1944).

105. See Cortonwood Supplement, Jan. 1943, and Barrow Workers fight for living wage, Sept. 1943, H.P., D.J.H. 14E /21 and 23. The circulation of WIL’s publications in 1943 were 8-10,000 for Socialist Appeal and 2,000 for WIN.

106 The Economic League drew similar parallels between the German Workers’ Challenge radio station and articles in Socialist Appeal. It saw Trotskyism as undermining faith in the government by suggesting there was an Anglo-American conspiracy against the Soviets (Notes and Comments, 9 July 1943). This conflicted with the communist view that Trotskyism sought to undermine Russia, and yet J. Mahon (Hitler’s Agents Exposed, 1943) wrote “so Hitler needs something more than a radio station. This is where the Trotskyists take up the work”. Mahon charged that Trotskyism and the radio station had identical views on the war and both called for a general strike. In fact Socialist Appeal did not once call for a general strike throughout the war. But WIL thought Mahon’s pamphlet the first attempt by the CPGB to deal with the programme of Trotskyism (A Letter from England, Fourth International, June 1943, 190), though that did not stop him dubbing Trotskyism “a special detachment of fascism”, alleging that they were consciously playing Hitler’s game and asking “sooner or later we shall have to deal with them: why not now?”. Mahon also achieved a remarkable exegesis of Socialist Appeal:

“There are somewhere about 22,000 words in each issue. In November one sentence of 24 words might be construed into a criticism of Hitler. The remaining 21,976 words were attacks on Hitler’s enemies” (op. cit., 16).

107. Electoral contests were the raison d’etre of Common Wealth: when the truce ended, it died. Its story is thoroughly told in A. Calder, The Common Wealth Party, 1942-1945, 2 Vols. (University of Sussex Ph.D. thesis, 1967). The remarkable sequence of wartime results is discussed in P. Addison, By-Elections of the Second World War, in C. Cook and J. Ramsden, op. cit., 165-90. It is remarkable that D.L. Prynn in Common Wealth – a British Third Party of the-1940s, JCH, Vol.7, No.1-2, 1972, apparently had not read Calder.

108. The CPGB construed the rise of Common Wealth as a crack in national unity and the appearance of a potential fascist ally. It was forced to withdraw a hostile pamphlet, R.P. Arnot’s What Is Common Wealth? (1943), which stated this thesis. WIL drew encouragement from the adoption of a common ownership platform by J.B. Priestley (who was a precursor of C.W.),and Sir Richard Acland (WIL, Reply to the Political Statement, 2). The flavour of C.W.’s appeal, which had something in common with that of the Militant Socialist International in the less favourable environment of the 1930s can be derived from Acland’s belief early in the war that “only under common ownership can we abolish class distinction, unemployment, inequality and strife. Only under common ownership can we free ourselves from the system which positively encourages every man to seek his own personal advantage here on this earth” (Unser Kampf, 1940, 94).

109. This was the substance of WIL’s rejection of the RSL argument. In 1942 it forecast “more and more the workers will tend to break the bonds with which the Labour leaders have tied them to the fortunes of capital and advance on the road to independent action” (Preparing for Power, Sept. 1942, 22-3). The next summer it noted “within the ranks of the armed forces, among wide strata of the middle classes, a growing clash, a growing ferment and a process of radicalisation has been taking place” (Reply of WIL to the RSL criticism of Preparing for Power, 7 June 1943, H.P., D.J.H. 14B/15, 15).

110. WIL supported CPGB affiliation to the Labour Party on the grounds that the communists were not revolutionary and therefore not entitled to a separate existence (Amendment to Stalinist Resolutions Proposing Affiliations To The Labour Party, [1943?], H.P., D.J.H. 4/13, 2). It preferred that the ILP should also join and believed this would sift both Labour and the ILP between reformists and revolutionaries.

111. Although independent, WIL always advanced the slogans, “End the Truce” and “Labour to Power” (A New Stage in History, WIN, Sept. 1943, 7). But it believed the moment of Labour coming to power would be the moment of “its period of decline, of splitting and breaking up” (E. Grant, Our Tasks in the Coming Revolution, WIN, Jan. 1944, 11).

112. WIL noted 36 divisions calling for a break in the coalition on the 1943 Labour Party Conference agenda. It claimed that there were two which put its own position (A Letter from England, Fourth International (New York), June 1943, 190). Although WIL sent no one into Common Wealth, there were ex-Trotskyists within its ranks (A. Calder, The Common Wealth Party, Vol.1, 193 and Vol.2, 150-1).

113. 2,194 strikes took place during 1944 (E. Wigham, op. cit., 92).

114. The coalfields were generally quiet during the 1914-18 war, though massive unrest occurred in the first years of peace. But in January-March 1944 850,000 days were lost in South Wales, and elsewhere, in strikes against a tribunal award. In March and April more than one million days were lost in strikes over the home coal allowance. Coal mining was responsible for more than two-thirds of the 3,714,000 days lost in the year (ibid., 92). In these circumstances the inverse ratio noted by Mass Observation, between military crisis and industrial unrest broke down. R.P. Arnot, The Miners in Crisis and War (1951) traces the accumulation of discontent in the pits but not the effect of dissident political opinion.

115. Bevin had registered all ex-miners, but only a quarter of them (about 100,000) were fit and willing to return to the mines.

116. A Ministry committee advanced the idea of the ballot scheme in 1942 and Bevin introduced it in December 1943.

117. Five hundred Bevin Boys were actually imprisoned for refusing to do pit work (A. Bullock, op. cit., 260).

118. As early as 29 May 1943 Tom Stephenson of the Cumberland area of the MFGB had asked New Leader readers if the coercion of young surface miners underground should be permitted, and on 31 July-1 August the National Administrative Council of the ILP opposed conscription of sixteen year olds to the mines.

119. Anti-Labour Laws Victims Defence Campaign Circular, 5 May 1944 (Warwick MSS).

120. In January 1944 Bill Davy, a lapsed YCL member and leader of the apprentices, visited London with another apprentice. There he met Haston and Tearse.

121. Their January 1944 statement. “We refuse to carry the burden imposed on the industry by the lust for profit and inefficiency of the coal owners. Since they are directly responsible for the coal crisis, it is against them that compulsion must be directed” may have been influenced by the Trotskyists. And yet the Guild officials resolved on 7 February 1944, having heard Tearse’s advice, to break off relations with the MWF (J.B. Stuart, A Brief Report on England, Fourth International, June 1944, 170). The Trotskyists were to be accused of fomenting a strike but Tearse’s advice had been to explore first all legal channels, enter the unions, and send a deputation to London.

122. In February 1944 an apprentice was actually conscripted. On 10-11 February a deputation of apprentices from six centres visited Bevin in London but he refused to see them. They then gave three weeks notice of a strike to begin on 7 March and in the absence of any word from Whitehall came out a week early on 28 February 1944. There were 6,000 strikers on the Tyne, 5,000 on the Clyde and 1,000 in Huddersfield.

123. The Daily Worker reported on 4 April 1944 that a Tyneside apprentice had “exposed the Trotskyists”, that Davy, Tearse and Haston had met and that wild rumours about the ballot were circulating in Newcastle. The next day the paper added to its plea for an end to the strike, a call for miners, currently on strike against the Porter award, also to return to work. After the apprentices called their strike off The Daily Worker for 10 April ran J.R. Campbell’s pamphlet These Trotskyist Saboteurs as an article. Frustration boiled over when the BBC reported RCP activities without explaining the difference between the parties. All of this was a kind of tribute (R. Black, Stalinism in Britain, 1970, 171).

124. For the reactions of MPs, see below. The New Leader was sympathetic to the apprentices and on 8 April ridiculed the notion that “one or two ‘mystery men’ could impose their will upon 26,000 intelligent young workers”.

125. “There is little evidence before me to show that their activities have resulted in the starting of a strike or contributed to any material extent in prolonging a strike.” (Memorandum by the Home Secretary, Use of Regulation 18B against fomenters of strikes, 12 April 1944, Cabinet Papers, CAB71/16, LP (44) 67, 1.)

126. “My task would, I think, be made easier by the imposition of a check on inflammatory propaganda, which, although it may not cause strikes, engenders feeling hostile to the Government, the coalowners and the trade union leaders alike, and encourages the prolongation of strikes once they have begun” (Memorandum by the Minister of Fuel and Power, Distribution of Subversive Propaganda in the Coalfields, 13 April 1944, Cabinet Papers, CAB71/16, LP (44) 68, 2).

127. Ebby Edwards, TUC Chairman, and Sir Walter Citrine, T.U.C. Secretary, issued a statement about “persons and organisations who have been active in fomenting disturbances” (The Times, 6 April 1944).

128. The Lord President’s Committee met to discuss subversion for a second time on 14 April 1944. For its conclusion, see CAB71/15.The Legislation Committee approved a draft regulation, to be published as I A (a), on 17 April 1944.

129. On 5 April 1944, the Harrow Road premises of the RCP were raided by the Special Branch, who took away copies of the Socialist Appeal’s latest issue. Simultaneously, there was a raid on the home of Ann Keen and Heaton Lee in Newcastle and documents relating to the strike were confiscated. There were other raids in Nottingham and Glasgow (The Times, 6 April 1944). On the next day Heaton Lee and Ann Keen were arrested. They appeared on a conspiracy charge on 8 April and were remanded until 26 April (The Times, 10 April). In the early hours of 11 April Roy Tearse was arrested in Glasgow and charged with the same offence (The Times, 12 April). Haston had been sent by the party central committee to organise affairs in the North-East. He had travelled on from there to Edinburgh but, on learning that the police were also seeking him, he gave himself up (Interviews with J. Haston, E. Grant, July, Jan. 1973). These dates were contradicted by ALLVDC, op. cit.

130. The Trades Disputes Act was regarded by the labour movement as Tory revenge for the General Strike. The Labour Party was pledged to repeal it. Lee, Keen, Tearse and Haston were the first people to be charged under its provisions and a mighty propaganda lever was thereby handed to the RCP. It is remarkable that Sir Alan Bullock did not comment in his biography of Bevin on the paradox of a Labour Minister of Labour being the only one in whose term of office there was a prosecution under this Act, yet wrote that Bevin sought repeal of the Act (op. cit., 244).

131. In his peroration, Maxton declared:

“I say this to Ernest Bevin and to the Prime Minister. If they really believe that the ILP and the Trotskyists are associating together in a plot to stir up industrial trouble, don’t let them go after the boys. I am the Parliamentary leader of the ILP. Let them haul me into the Courts and, if I get there before any judge who is fair-minded, the verdict will be ‘not guilty’.” (The New Leader, 15 April 1944)

132. RCP Circular, Following the Arrests, 12 April 1944, n.p. H.P.

133. This had been the intention behind the despatch of Haston to the North. There seems to have been no dissent from the party leaders’ decision to meet the challenge head-on, though E.L. Davis ceased his activities around this time.

134. The War Cabinet met on 19 April 1944 and took note of a four page memorandum by Morrison, concise and largely accurate, with which an appendix, giving personal details of seven RCP leaders, was printed. Morrison coolly analysed the situation which had permitted increasing RCP activity and influence and concluded:

“These advantages are temporary and, unless the Trotskyists can exploit them much more rapidly than at present, it seems unlikely that they will ever rise to a greater position than that of sparring partners to the communists, who would very much like to see the Trotskyists and their small paper suppressed. (Memorandum by the Home Secretary, The Trotskyist Movement in Great Britain, 13 April 1944, Cabinet Papers, CAB66/49, folios 7-9A, W.P. (44) 202, 4.) See Appendix H.

135. Morrison knew that WIL sent speakers to locations of industrial strife, “but hitherto their influence has been almost negligible”. He argued against the use of 18B since it would be difficult to employ it against Trotskyists without also clobbering local strike leaders not opposed to the war. If a miner were to be the subject of an action under 18B, he argued, a widespread strike might result. Morrison was not complacent but felt the great majority of people had no desire to hinder prosecution of the war (Use of Regulation 18B against fomenters of strikes, 3).

136. In addition to the Trades Disputes Act there was available Order 1305 (introduced by Bevin in 1941), which banned strikes and lockouts and bound parties to disputes to accept the rulings of arbitration courts.

137. It emerged in the Commons debate of 28 April 1944 that Bevin had secured the prior approval of I A (a) of the General Council of the TUC as well as that of employers” representatives. Will Lawther, the MFGB president had insisted in a speech that the Trotskyists be taken seriously and called for I A (a) (Tribune, 14 April 1944).

138 This was a riposte to the legalistic revolutionary proposals of the Socialist League (LPCR 1933, 161).

139. Psychologically Bevin himself would have to be numbered among them. Some in the press had attributed his bitterness at Farnworth to injured pride at a loss of influence with the unions (A. Bullock, op. cit., 269-70).

140. M. Foot (Aneurin Bevan, 1 (1966), 386-8) traces Bevin’s public statements of concern against the mining background.

141. Strikers had been arrested on a number of occasions earlier in the war, and nearly 2,000 of them had been convicted on various charges. The April arrests were unique, however, in covering those not on strike but assisting one.

142. These three possibilities were discussed at a central committee of 16/17 April 1944.

143. The Central Committee took a number of decisions: to prepare a second line leadership, to appoint a special committee of three to review problems on a day by day basis, and to conduct the forth coming trial politically, despite the risk of heavier sentences. They had a lawyer, Ajit Roy (an Indian Trotskyist), available, but they resolved to hire a barrister for the trial “and check his background for Stalinist sympathies” (CC Report, 19 April 1944, H.P., D.J.H. 15A/21, l).

144. ibid., 2.

145. Initial members of the committee were Brockway, G. Pittock-Buss, Padley, Bob Turner, M. Kavanagh of the Freedom Association, Grant, and McGregor. V. Sastry of the Federation of Indian Associations was made provisional secretary.

146. Sydney Silverman, Rhys Davies, McGovern, R. Blake and Sorenson were MPs who joined. Maxton was made chairman and W.G. Cove MP treasurer. John McNair, Dick Beech, Arthur Ballard and D. Ballantine were added as well. At a meeting in the House of Commons, only George Harney MP declined to join his fellow members on the committees (ALLVDC, Circular, 5 May 1944, Warwick MSS). John McNair mistakes the dates of Maxton’s interest and that of the ILP as 1943 (James Maxton, the beloved rebel, 1955, 324).

147. Early in May 1944, the most obvious gap in personnel was put right by the adherence of Aneurin Bevan. [ALLVDC,] The Facts of the Case, [June? 1944], reports that two more MPs, Alex Sloan and S.O. Davies, also joined.

148. [RCP] Political Bureau, Political Letter, 24 May 1944, 1. The RCP discovered however that while ILP MPs were wholeheartedly committed to the campaign, the more orthodox Labour MPs were more uneasy at association with Trotskyists. The RCP, believed that whereas Maxton always addressed a meeting if he could Aneurin Bevan, for example, was less determined. All local groups of the ALLVDC were established on RCP initiative ([R.C.P] Political Bureau, Perspective of the Party Work on the ALLVDC, Sept. 1944, 1) .

149. Resolutions against the arrests were passed by Southall NUR, E Trades Council and GMWU, from Paddington NUR; Newcastle Trades Council; Slough ETU and Trades Council; Edmonton Trades Council; Camberwell National Society of Painters; Newark ASLEF; AEU branches in Mitcham, Thornton Heath and the Glasgow district committee, [ALLVDC], The Facts of the Case, [early June?] 1944. This list indicates that it required a Trotskyist presence to mount a trade union campaign in a locality.

150. See below.

151. [Some workers] “are openly hostile to the right wing of the Labour and Trade Union movement. But to destroy their illusions in the ‘lefts’ it is not sufficient that we denounce Bevan as we have done in the past. It is necessary to be explanatory; to go through their experiences with them, calling on Bevan to match his words and gestures with deeds” (Political Letter, issued by the Political Bureau, 24 May 1944, H.P.; D.J.H. 12/3).

152. There had been minor exchanges about WIL, inter alia, on 16 and 21 July 1942, at the time of earlier miners’ strikes (see above).

153. “Are we seriously asked to believe that these solid Yorkshire miners came out on strike because of a number of evilly-disposed Trotskyists?” (HC Debates, Vol.399, Col.1065, 28 April 1944).

154. Holding the Trotskyists without trial and hearing their case in camera was, he charged, “disgraceful, and shows the extent to which public morale had degenerated under the leadership we have at the present time” (HC Debates, Vol.399, Col.1068, 28 April 1944). Perhaps the strongest outcry over Bevan’s biting speech was stimulated by his attacks on what he claimed was an unrepresentative TUC. For this and the debate, see M. Foot, op. cit., 390-402.

155. Kirkwood focussed on Bevin’s refusal to meet the apprentices and told that when he had been warned there would be a strike Bevin had retorted, “we are ready for them”. “The Minister of Labour”, Kirkwood declared, “is a man who has lost his soul” (HC Debates, Vol.399, Col.1076, 28 April 1944).

156. McGovern followed the RCP argument that repression would establish it, not because of its policy but because of the heroism of some of its members (ibid., Cols.1086-92). Acland, amused by the way Pritt and Bevin played up the importance of Trotskyism, told the House the party had 500 members, total weekly expenses of £10 and a fortnightly press circulation of 5,000. “This”, he taunted, “is the size of the organisation which, it is suggested, can bring 130,000 miners out on strike” (ibid., 1092).

157.

Is it really suggested that the whole machinery of the law is powerless? The whole law as it stands at present is not strong enough to deal with this Trotskyist instigation, say the Government. As I have said, I do not minimise this Trotskyist instigation; I think it is serious, and I think it has grown up partly because of the persistent refusal of the Home Secretary to do anything about it. The Home Secretary has two fiddles to play:

Mr. E. Bevin: The hon. and learned member wants 18B?

Mr. Pritt: Not only 18B but also 2D.

The Government, instead of supplying paper for Socialist Appeal, should stop the paper itself. (H.C. Debates, Vol.399, Col.1107, 28 April 1944.)

Bevin told Pritt that he had considered introducing Order I A (a) earlier in the war for use against the CPGB, but had been forestalled when it ceased to believe that the war was imperialist. “The Trotskyists”, he ruminated, “were the ‘wee frees’ who did not accept that”. Pritt, in his autobiography, made no reference to the case.

158. ibid., Cols.1138-9.

159. All ILP and CW members voted for the annulment. The noes totalled 314, which suggests that a bare majority of MPs were present to vote on this prime parliamentary occasion.

160. See PLEB, A Socialist’s War Diary, The Plebs (May 1944), 65; R.S.W. Pollard, Strikes and IAA, The Plebs, Aug. 1944, 98; D.G. MacRae, Organised Labour in War Time, Fabian Quarterly, Jan. 1945, 74.

161. The Daily Worker line on I A (a) evolved during April 1944 and by 27 April it was reporting widespread opposition. Unlike other labour movement papers, however, it supported government action under existing powers:

“For example, the Socialist Appeal could have been closed down under Regulation 2D and all matter published by the Trotskyists could have been stopped under Regulation 2C. There is also Regulation 18B, under which a number of Fascists, blood-brothers of the Trotskyists, are still held in detention.” (Government already has power to deal with Trotskyists, The Daily Worker, 13 April 1944.)

WIL had protested against suppression of The Daily Worker: see Lift the Daily Worker ban, [1941?], 3 , H.P., D.J.H. 14E /6. Socialist Appeal was at last beginning to suffer paper difficulties. In 1943 it appeared for a time on narrower sheets than hitherto. The Cabinet in its 1944 discussion noted the paper’s lack of difficulty with newsprint supply (The Trotskyist-Movement in Great Britain, 2).

162. The Times, 19 April 1944.

163. To the RCP it seemed clear that I A (a) was intended to prevent those activities which were the raison d’etre of the MWF: the coordination of policy, action and finance, and the exchange of information. Carrying on as before would be “the worst sort of adventurism”. The central committee therefore switched the direction of the MWF to activity through the trade union machinery and presented the change to the membership as a retreat in good order (Political Letter issued by the Political Bureau, 24 May 1944, 4, H.P., D.J.H. 12/3 .

164. They had been remanded again on 28 April, the day of the Commons debate. The proceedings were held in camera, a fact referred to in the debate by Bevan.

165. Charlesworth presented to the Court three pamphlets, Appeal from the Tyneside Apprentices to the whole Organised Working Class, Apprentices fight the Pit Compulsion Ballot, and Appeal from the Tyneside Apprentices to the Miners. He argued that the apprentices’ advocacy of resistance to the ballot and mines nationalisation was introduced from outside and suggested the leaflets were composed by Lee with Davy’s assistance at Lee’s Newcastle house (Socialist Appeal, June 1944).

166. After he had explained the sub-committees established to run the strike, Charlesworth continued,

“Without them to develop such a scheme, it is very doubtful if the movement among the apprentices would have remained more than a budding movement, or that any strike at all would have occurred, or if it had occurred, would have assumed even such proportions as it did assume.” (Socialist Appeal, June 1944)

167. Davy testified that he had only met Lee and Keen late in December 1943, and declared “there would have been a strike if I had never met any of the accused”. The apprentices had already concluded that nationalisation of the mines would render conscription unnecessary, the provenance of which political idea was an important feature of the prosecution case. The exception was the Blyth apprentice Donnachie, the informant of The Daily Worker. Yet while Donnachie’s evidence differed from that of the other seven apprentices called to the box, he was not opposed to a strike against the scheme, but to making mines nationalisation the issue on which they would come out (ibid.).

168. There is no transcript of this trial, although shorthand writers attended. Socialist Appeal reported verbatim many speeches and exchanges and gave a generally full coverage. The Times published brief reports on each day’s proceedings with few quotations. This account rests on the two papers’ reports. Socialist Appeal claimed that the capitalist press was deliberately playing the trial down in its issue for June 1944.

169. Curtis-Bennett was to prove unsatisfactory through his failure to cooperate with the party aim of treating the trial politically. The party also concluded that he did not even put forward the legal arguments as well as the defendants themselves might have done (Statement to Members from the Political Bureau, 22 June 1944, H.P., D.J.H 12/4, 1). He was not dismissed because it was felt that this would cause “a sensation throughout the country”.

170. Paley Scott, the prosecuting counsel, warned the jury before Davy went into the witness box that he was a reluctant witness. Davy was emphatic as to the role of the accused:

“Our object was to prevent apprentices being conscripted for the mines at any price. That was our view without the intervention of the four accused. None of the defendants ever addressed any public meeting advocating a strike. None of the four even advocated a strike privately” (Socialist Appeal, July 1944).

In April, Morrison had written of the RCP, “the party’s slogan is not ‘Strike’, but ‘Break the coalition: Labour to power’” (The Trotskyist Movement in Great Britain, 3).

171. Haston told that he had advised against lobbying MPs until the apprentices realised how ineffective it would be. Once they saw through such activities they should undertake them for propaganda gains. Haston also told the Court that he had urged the apprentices to declare that they would observe the ballot if the mines were nationalised, but his advice was rejected in both cases (Socialist Appeal, July 1944).

172. Trewartha appeared for the defence by unanimous decision of his district committee of the AEU (Interview with R. Tearse, Nov. 1973). Trewartha compared Tearse’s role on the Tyne with that he had played at Barrow, an important parallel, for the prosecution had projected him as the apprentices’ eminence grise. Socialist Appeal commented on the improbability of this since Tearse, at twenty-five years of age, was only three years older than some of the apprentices. Trewartha, it transpired, had been approached by the police some weeks earlier, to testify for the prosecution (ibid.).

173. Bevin denied that his conversation with Kirkwood had ever taken place: he had not known the apprentices were waiting on him but would not, in any case, have received them. He claimed his job was to meet with official bodies only, whereas the T.A.G. was unofficial. While he had once given exemption from the scheme to the Tyneside lads, changing circumstances of war meant that he had to withdraw it. Millie Lee reported he was “shaking like a leaf” while in the box (Socialist Appeal, July 1944). His appearance there was a singular omission from Lord Bullock’s biography.

174. “It is not necessary that the act in furtherance of an illegal strike should be during the actual time of the strike; it may be an act which could reasonably be regarded, upon the evidence, as an act in preparation for the strike and that the strike was an illegal one” (The Times Law Reports, Vol.171, 11 Nov. 1944, 288-9).

175. Socialist Appeal for July 1944 damned the jury as middle class types with not one worker among them.

176. There was little evidence against Keen, amounting chiefly to the charge that she had typed out a letter and pamphlet under Lee’s and Davy’s direction. She was sentenced to thirteen days, which she had of course already served. Though Haston received a shorter sentence, he had not of course been active on Tyneside. Ebullient to the end, Haston told the judge he hoped to serve his class as well as he (the judge) had served his (Socialist Appeal, July 1944).

177. The word illegal effectively meant political under the Act, and the apprentices’ action qualified by being aimed at coal industry nationalisation.

178. This may have been an extra thrust behind eventual removal. Yet it is surely misleading to project the 1946 repeal by Labour as a linear development and to shake out the contradictions in Bevin’s role:

“As things turned out the unions had to wait for another fifteen years by which time not only did they have a Labour Government with a majority large enough to make easy the fulfillment of the party’s programme, but they had as its most powerful member a man who had been at the centre of the General Strike, Ernest Bevin.” (D.F. MacDonald, The State and the Trade Unions, 1960, 109-110.)

179. H. Pelling (Britain and the Second World War, 1970, 316) alleges that the Council simply did not take up the case of those of whose politics it disapproved. The RCP was convinced the NCCL was under communist influence. Ewart A. Prince, Civil Liberty in Great Britain (University of London Ph.D. thesis, 1950), makes no mention of the case. The Anarchists were another non-communist group to experience NCCL indifference (G. Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit, 1970, 20-3). After the appeal RCP members were urged to keep local committees in being and work for “a real Labour Defence organisation”.

180. Sara made himself available as speaker (H. Pratt, acting secretary, ALLVDC, to Sara; H. Sara to Pratt, 17 June 1944, [Warwick MSS]). Groves chaired meetings in Birmingham and South-West London.

181. Ann Keen was much in demand as the only one of the accused at liberty. She and Millie Lee were offered space from which to run the campaign at the ILP head office, when the RCP centre at Harrow Road was menaced by flying bombs (interview with Ann Finkel [Keen], July 1974). At a 6 August 1944 meeting, chaired by Dick Beech, Ernest Silverman, one of the speakers, told of how he had warned Haston that an appeal might double his sentence and that Haston had replied this did not matter if trade union rights were asserted (The New Leader, 12 Aug. 1944).

182. NUDAW at its annual conference demanded the withdrawal of I A (a) “after hearing its acting general secretary Alfred Burrows ridicule the idea that the Trotskyists might be responsible for the apprentices’ movement. The Scottish TUC and SWMF added their condemnation of I A (a). In the autumn, the Trades Union Congress accepted an invitation to approve of I A (a) and the conduct of the General Council at the time of its introduction by 3,686,000 to 2,802,000. One surprising convert to opposition, in view of his wartime record, was AEU president Jack Tanner.

183. At the May hearing, Bill Davy had told of three consecutive days interrogation he had undergone at Wallsend Police Station. It was suggested to him at the time that he could go to prison, but nothing came of it.

184. Morrison knew the exact London membership (though he exaggerated the national figure). He could make a shrewd evaluation of the RSL, “stultified by internal strife” and devastatingly predicted that the RCP under present leadership was unlikely to submit to dictatorship from the Fourth International. He had seen the 1943 accounts of WIL, and could make a subtle comparison of the communists and the Trotskyists. The strongest probability is that there was an informant within WIL who, by providing documents and knowledgeable opinions, gave Morrison the data from which to draw his perspicacious conclusion:

“These advantages are temporary and, unless the Trotskyists can exploit them much more rapidly than at present, it seems unlikely that they will ever rise to a greater position than that of sparring partners to the communists, who would very much like to see the Trotskyists and their small paper suppressed” (The Trotskyist Movement in Great Britain, 1). This memorandum is produced in full as Appendix H.

185. In the wake of the trial, the CPGB, brought out the last of its wartime attacks on the Trotskyists, J.R. Campbell’s Trotskyist Saboteurs (1944). Campbell’s pamphlet was full of knockabout stuff: all Grant knew of the British working class movement might have been picked up “on back veldt”; Haston’s contribution to the workers’ cause in Edinburgh might be written on the back of a 1d stamp; Roy Tearse was a third rate inefficient shop steward. Yet there was some nervousness in Campbell’s deployment of a quote from “a working woman” who had heard the RCP defence: “what kind of communists are these? They are even against Stalin”. Campbell’s plea for publicity to bring the Trotskyists into the light of day did not compel conviction.

At the end of the war, the CPGB called for removal of the 1927 Act and I A (a) from the statute book (Britain for the People, [1945], 17).

186. Key guidance for the Appeal Court came from a House of Lords ruling that a strike could only be furthered during its course, Conway v. Wade, 1909. Cassels had ignored this in a three hour summing up. But this ruling was inconsistent with acquittal of the four on the conspiracy charge so Wrottesley upheld the Appeal. (The Weekly Notes, 14 Oct. 1944, 200; The Law Times, 11 Nov. 1944, 287-9). The Daily Worker, which had not closely followed the trial did not report the successful Appeal.

187.ALLVDC, A Victory for Labour, 1944.

188. J.B. Stuart’s belief that the Welsh miners had “seen through Bevan and the communists” was quite mad (A Brief Report on England, Fourth International, June 1944, 168).

189. “The fact that they were found not guilty on the conspiracy and incitement charges is a victory for us, particularly in the light of the vicious press campaign directly or indirectly accusing the comrades of instigating and inciting the Tyne Apprentices and other strikes. It completely vindicates our contention that we do not incite or conspire to bring workers out on strike as the capitalist press and the Labour and Stalinist leaders were charging, but that the workers come out on strike only when they have a genuine and legitimate grievance” (Statement to Members from the Political Bureau, 22 June 1944, 1).

190. A large rally was held in Glasgow with some communist stewards on the platform (interview with R. Tearse, Nov. 1973). The RCP could also consider its decision to rely as much as possible on legal and open activity vindicated.

191. Socialist Appeal claimed that soldiers abroad were following the case and quoted a headline from an Eighth Army paper, “Right to Strike is one of the freedoms we are fighting for”.

192. “But the remarkable feature of industrial relations in the Second World War, as compared with twenty five years earlier, is the relatively small proportion of trouble due to strikes, and the almost entire absence of political motivation in the strikes that did take place”! (H. Pelling, Britain and the Second World War, 1970, 250).

193. “Our Party was the instrument through which the ruling class suffered a defeat on this issue. For the first time the limits within which legal work can be conducted have been fixed by the precedent of this trial ...” (RCP Political Bureau, Perspective of the Party Work On The ALLVDC, [July 1944?], H.P., D.J.H. 15B 5, 1).