I thought that was crystal clear from Bevin’s biographical details in Wikipedia. However, he was the leader of the T&GWU, Britain’s largest trade union at the time, and a dominating figure in the trade union movement. His personal attack on Lansbury at the Labour Party conference in 1935 evidently had wide resonance as shown by the many citations of it in the histories of the period.

As for the Labour Party being indecisive, there were only 154 Labour MPs left in Parliament after the election rout of November 1935, which the Conservatives had won with more than half the total votes cast, an outcome that is difficult to quibble about.

I believe Peter Clarke’s well-reviewed history: Hope and Glory (Penguin) should sort out any residual uncertainties for readers. The references above to RJ Mitchell – designer of the Spitfire at Supermarine – make clear that much work for rearmament was already progressing behind the scenes as early as 1935 and Baldwin’s government defined its own position on rearmament quite unequivocally in the White Paper of March 1935.

I thought my many postings here had previously demonstrated that defending the history and image of the Labour Party has never been part of any personal brief. What I am concerned to do is make clear that the Conservative government became committed to rearmament early in 1935, regardless of George Lansbury’s pacificism or equivocation on the part f the Labour Party.

The politics of “the left” generally in the late 1930s was thoroughly murky. News of the colossal death toll from famine in the Ukraine in 1932/3 had leaked out. Orwell had blown the whistle on the executions in International Brigade during the Spanish civil war in his book: Homage to Catalonia – he and his wife had escaped across the frontier into France just ahead of an arrest warrant issued by the Republican government. The spectacle of dedicated Communists in the Soviet Union making ludicrous confessions in the Moscow show trials of 1936/7 and their subsequent executions was widely reported.

But let’s be clear, assessments of the Nazi government in Germany among senior Conservatives in government in the late 1930s were far from monolithic. Some, like Lord Halifax, an advocate of appeasement, were sympathetic – as was Britain’s ambassador to Germany in 1936/7:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~pv/munich/czdoc07.html

One early decision of Churchill on becoming PM in May 1940 was to order closed a diplomatic channel for communicating with the Nazi German government via Sweden, which remained neutral throughout WW2 – see Lukacs: Five Days in London: May 1940 (Yale UP). Alan Clark, one of Mrs T’s ministers, made a retrospective case for reaching a peace settlement with Germany in 1940.

Btw what video clip are you referring to? And I’ve never played football in my life, nor do I follow the game.

This is my last post on this subject. I’m sorry if you were offended by my suggestion that you do some reading, but I still urge you to do so.

History is not like a game of fantasy football. You do not retrospectively get to choose your dream team Bevin was not leader of the Labour Party between the wars. Lansbury was the leader until the end of 1935 and even under Attlee the Labour Party voted against rearmament until 1937. Even if you want to play fantasy football, frankly you lose. You choose Bevin. I can trump you for the Liberals with Archibald Sinclair, who though a leader of a rump of 25 was firmly against appeasement and worked closely with Churchill. And of course the Tories win with Churchill himself.

There are several clips in the video which, far from being “an evocation of a political milieu or culture of which the LP is one expression” as Stuart White says in his comment, are demonstrative of the Labour Party’s failure between the wars. Frustrated by the Labour Party’s failures and indecisiveness a significant minority of working people and left leaning intellectuals rejected the Labour Party and were drawn to the parties of the far right and left. The clips showing the Communist NUWM demonstration, the (again Communist organised) Battle of Cable Street and Mosley, are all filmed records of Labour’s failure.

The video is historically illiterate nonsense. However, as a LD member I’m all for the second video. The confused gent at the end who appears to think it is 1945 and he’s just been demobbed should get my party a substantial number of votes.

New Labour was mostly a (successful) marketing gimmick.

Neither Harold Wilson nor James Callaghan were enthusiastic about nationalising more industries – and recall that the Heath government had nationalised Rolls Royce plc in 1971 for thoroughly pragmatic reasons.

Unlike Tony Blair, neither Wilson nor Callaghan were unilateral nuclear disarmers and nor were they committed to withdrawing Britain from the European Common Market.

The New Labour initiative was really about returning the Labour Party to where it had been rooted before the influence of Bennery and the Militant Tendency gained the ascendancy those factions did achieve by the early 1980s.

The Labour setback at the 1983 election and the growing electoral success of the Social Democrats were sufficients jolts to prompt rethinking.

As for why Labour didn’t win the 1992 election after a stint of rethinking:

“Worcester has no doubt that it was the Sheffield rally, just eight days before polling day. On the eve of the rally, three polls came out, showing a seven-point lead, a six-point lead and a four-point lead for Labour. That day, Labour peaked.”
http://www.newstatesman.com/199812110020

To get a flavour of why the Sheffield rally generated such an adverse reaction, try this video report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TOgB3Smvro

Don’t be silly and offensive. Your post created a misleading impression of the Baldwin government’s decision on rearmament, which went back to the white paper published in March 1935 and set in train a series of resource allocation decisions in rearamement which significantly shaped Britain’s diplomacy vis-a-vis Germany and subsequent war effort.

Lansbury, the Labour leader until the 1935 election in November, became notorious for his personal commitment to pacificism but other high-profile figures in the Labour movement didn’t share his commitment, hence the very personal attack on him by Ernest Bevin, who was a leading personality in the trade union movement at the time – if you check out his Wikipedia entry. The frequency with which histories of the period quote Bevin on Lansbury suggest that Bevin’s comments at the Labour Party conference struck home and left a lasting impression with his audience.

My quotes of history were to allow readers to assess the history sources for themselves.

Bevin was not the leader of the Labour Party between the wars. His personal record on opposing appeasement was honourable, as was that of other individual politicians in the Conservative and Liberal parties, but they were in the minority until 1939.

This stuff ain’t controversial you know? Instead of looking at web pages you should try reading a few history books. At a time when European history seems to be repeating itself, combining economic crisis with a rise of extreme nationalism and disillusionment with social democracy, anybody who is politically involved has a duty to understand what went wrong last time. What isn’t acceptable, is for the Labour Party to forget its own history and substitute a fantasy history of a radical tradition it does not have, which is what that video is.

“Mitchell devoted most of 1935 to work on the Spitfire”
http://freespace.virgin.net/john.dell/spitmich.htm

By Peter Clarke’s account in his history of Britain in the 20th century, rearmament spending was increasingly skewed towards the RAF, for air defences, and then the Royal Navy, with the army left very much as Cinderella. The lack of equipment for the army and its poor preparation for fighting became evident with the performance of the British Expeditionary Force in France leading up to the Dunkirk evacuation between 26 May and 4 June 1940.

In retrospect, we have good reason to value the decisions to give spending priority to air defences. Few recall nowadays, that Britain’s resident population of 40 millions in 1940 was almost exactly half that of the combined populations of Germany and Austria.

After the war, Von Rundstedt, c-in-c west in the German high command at the end of the war, was asked by Soviet interrogators to say which was the decisive battle of the war. To their disgust, he said: The Battle of Britain, and he was correct. Had Britain been neutralised by whatever means, Germany would not have faced the continuing threat of a second front entailing the commitment of all the military resources for its western defences.

You left an impression that the Baldwin government was more tardy in starting a commitment to rearmament than in fact it was.

Ernest Bevin, who became foreign secretary in the Attlee government after the war, made clear his opposition to Lansbury’s pacifism:

“During the 1930s, with the Labour Party split and weakened, Bevin co-operated with the Conservative-dominated government on practical issues. But during this period he became increasingly involved in foreign policy. He was a firm opponent of fascism and of British appeasement of the fascist powers. In 1935, arguing that Italy should be punished by sanctions for her recent invasion of Abyssinia, he made a blistering attack on the pacifists in the Labour Party, accusing the Labour leader George Lansbury at the Party Conference of ‘hawking his conscience around’ asking to be told what to do with it.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Bevin

Attlee, who became Labour leader after the 1935 election, was not a pacifist and more-or-less went along with the government’s rearmament programme.

That claim leaves a misleading impression of events.

This following is start of the Guardian’s report of 4 March 1935 on the Baldwin government’s rearmament White Paper:

“In a major reversal of rearmament policy Britain today announced new expansion plans for its army, navy and air force. The plans, in a defence white paper, are to demonstrate that Britain does not take lightly Germany’s continuing rearmament.

“The white paper calls for an enlarged fleet, improved defences for warships against air attack, more aircraft for the RAF and new coastal and anti-aircraft defences. The emphasis on air defence follows fears that Britain is an easy target for cross-Channel air raids. . . ”
http://century.guardian.co.uk/1930-1939/Story/0,,126998,00.html

“The fact is that the rearmament programme was seriously begun under Baldwin, pushed along more slowly than Churchill wanted, but more quickly than the opposition advocated. Defence spending, pegged at about 2.5 per cent of GNP until 1935, increased to 3.8 per cent by 1937.” (Peter Clarke: Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-2000 (Penguin Books))

At the general election on 14 November 1935, the Conservatives won with a landslide. Only 154 Labour MPs were returned – against 432 Conservatives – and George Lansbury, the Labour leader, lost his seat. Attlee, his deputy, was elected as Labour leader in his place. That election was the last at which the winning party attracted more than half the total votes cast.

This webpage yields insights into the beginnings and pace of German rearmament with Hitler as Reich chancellor since January 1933:
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob90.html

Two years later, in 1935 Italy invaded Abyssinia. Most of the Labour Party supported the National Government’s imposition of economic sanctions, but Lansbury did not. He tried to resign, but his followers would not let him go. The situation was not resolved until the party conference at the end of the year when Lansbury was replaced by Attlee. When the Spanish civil war started the Labour Party approved of the policy of non-intervention. Those individual party members who went to fight in Spain did not do so with the Labour Party’s blessing or support.

Meanwhile, Britain was failing to re-arm. Prime Minister Baldwin perceived the public mood as against re-armament and apparently thought that if he moved towards re-armament he would lose the next election to the Labour and Liberal parties. Britain started re-arming only after the election in 1935. The Parliamentary Labour Party did not stop voting against re-armament expenditure until 1937.

Also in 1937 a United Front against fascism was proposed by Stafford Cripps and the Labour affiliated Socialist League, to include the Communist Party, Labour Party and ILP. Stafford Cripps was told that if he and his supporters continued to act as a pressure group for the United Front, they would be expelled.

And also in 1937 Churchill (remember him?) started talking to other like-minded Conservative, Labour and Liberal MPs concerned about foreign policy.

By 1938 there was a Liberal/Labour Popular Front against fascism, but the Labour Party was still split.

Here endeth the history lesson. All of the major political parties in the UK failed to deal adequately with the rise of militaristic nationalism and fascism. It is easy to be critical with hindsight, but they were only reflecting the public’s understandable mood of pacifism following WW1. It is also understandable that the Labour Party was more infected by the pacifist mood than the others. However, as I stated above, this was not Labour’s shining hour, and I ask you, what record of fighting fascism are you referring to?

No, but I’m not trying to steal the history of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Feminist movement, and Anti-Apartheid to invent a past that the Labour Party doesn’t actually have.

What you don’t mention (what a surprise!) is that Lansbury was effectively ousted from the leadership because of his position on such issues. I also note that you don’t mention DLG’s little trip to see a certain little man in the new Germany – hmm…

Historically, this is surely right.

Right now, however, there is obviously a huge gap between the LP and the radical culture of the ‘fighters and believers’. Looking ahead, the LP needs to build its bridges back to this culture (and give up any hope or pretention that it can somehow monopolise the representation of this culture). And a key first step in doing this is for LP members to be much more vociferous about the government’s collusion in the intimidation and degradation of today’s protestors.

However, another suffragette leader Mrs Pethick-Lawrence became a Labour MP. I see that Wikipedia lacks a full biography for her, which is shameful given that she was one of the first women MPs. Somebody should remedy this.

Compare:

“Julie Gottlieb’s Feminine Fascism would disabuse them. Its brilliant analysis of the place of women in Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists does much to change our preconceptions. Where women played comparatively little part in the fascist movements of other European countries, more than 25 per cent of the BUF members were women, many of whom were prominent in the movement’s activities. All this, despite the macho image, so similar to that of continental fascism, displayed by the leader and by so many of his acolytes.”
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=157840&sectioncode=6

After the franchise was extended to all adult citizens in 1928 for the 1929 general election, some more-or-less prominent suffragettes moved to join the British Union of Fascists following its foundation by Mosley in 1932. Julie Gottlieb names: Mary Richardson, Norah Elam (Mrs Dacre Fox), and Mary Allen.

I think it is significant that Labour produces a PPB that actually mentions its pre-1994 past.

Its as if after fifteen years of carefully constructing a chasm between ‘New Labour’ and ‘Old Labour’, there is a sudden desire to look back and reconnect with this past.

They’re certainly “look[ing] back“, but I suspect it’s to a time when people voted for them, not the values that won them the votes.

The video does show a clip of the Battle of Cable Street, and I think it is disingenuous of Paskini to deny that the video is (wrongly) claiming that action for Labour just because there are no words saying that.

I find it very surprising that the Labour Party tries to claim any kudos at all for fighting fascism between the wars. This was not Labour’s shining hour. In 1933 George Lansbury, now leader of the Labour Party, reacted to German re-armament by sending this message to his constituency “I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world “do your worst”.

The Labour Party founded the NHS. That is its achievement, nothing more. Well done. Pity you couldn’t maintain it better.

That’s true.

But it’s also true that many lefties will find it hard to swallow the view that the party actually believes in those values.

Who will it appeal to? I think the PPB has emotional appeal and may appeal to a wider base… especially the demoralised base. it’s better than their output in the past definitely.