Labour and the peace movement

Tribune columnist Paul Anderson has some sympathetic but critical words about my book, Anti-Totalitarianism. He believes I've "got too much of [my] history horribly wrong". In particular:

After [the chapter on the 1930s] he loses the plot, starting with his account of the British left in the 1940s. He’s right that some of the left was sympathetic with Stalin then. But he lazily elides the outlook of the tiny group of Labour Soviet fellow-travellers with that of the “third force” left, the dominant Labour left faction – grouped around Tribune – which from 1945 until 1947-48 argued for a united democratic socialist Europe independent of both Washington and Moscow (a position most famously articulated in the pamphlet Keep Left). Both the fellow-travellers and the Keep Leftists, were, in Kamm’s view, equally gullible useful idiots for Moscow.

Yet that simply wasn’t the case. The “third force” left was never of one mind, but it included some of the most consistent left critics of Soviet society and Soviet foreign policy (among them George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and Franz Borkenau). And nearly all the “third force” left was driven by events – in particular the seizure of power in east-central Europe by communists backed by Soviet occupiers – to accept that an anti-totalitarian western European alliance with the United States, as advocated by Ernest Bevin, the Labour foreign secretary, was the only option for democratic socialists. By 1948, the Labour left was emphatically pro-Nato. But you don’t get a hint of it from Kamm.

Actually, you get a lot more than a hint. (Nato of course was founded only in 1949, but there was a precursor in the Brussels Treaty of 1948, which is clearly what Paul means here.) Paul is a sensible chap and an informed commentator, and I must assume that I am at fault for lack of clarity. But I'm very surprised at his reading, because he has got my historical argument the wrong way round. So far from grouping the post-war Tribune Left with the pro-Soviet elements, I stress that the pro-Soviet elements were a minuscule minority, with almost the entire labour movement ranged against them. I say (p. 46):

While there was a body of opinion within the Labour Party that was unabashedly pro-Soviet, its numbers were small and the support for Bevin's approach [of robust anti-Communism] was surprisingly broad. Only later did the pro-Soviet and neutralist camps within the party become influential.

In one of his books (I can't recall offhand where I read it) the late Tony Cliff of the Socialist Workers' Party had sport with the notion that Keep Left was the shortest Labour rebellion in history, without mentioning the reason. The Crossman-Foot-Mikardo line was undermined almost as soon it was published, by Stalin’s opposition to Marshall Aid, Czechoslovakia and Berlin - and to their credit its authors understood this. So far from thinking Tribune left-wingers were useful idiots – a spurious phrase often attributed to Lenin and that I’ve never used – I praise them for realising that an independent socialist commonwealth of Europe was unattainable.

All in all, my discussion of the early Cold War is a strongly pro-Labour argument. I quote Attlee in 1937 saying that the foreign policy of a Labour Government would be a reflection of its domestic socialism, and note that in reality it came instead from Labour's commitment to democracy (p. 44):

In fact, Labour's foreign policy was derivative not of its home policy but of its ideology. Acknowledging that the Soviet Union posed the gravest threat to free trade unionism and social democracy, Labour adopted - in the words of the standard history [Kenneth O. Morgan's] of the Attlee Governments - an 'unrelenting hostility towards the Soviet Union [that] led in time to a new relationship between Britain and the United States'.

I quote George Orwell's polemic against the pro-Soviet Labour MP Konni Zilliacus. Orwell remarks that he knows where Michael Foot and Tribune stand, he just wishes they’d say it; and that analysis was right. (The great Sovietologist Leo Labedz wrote an influential essay in 1984 to mark the Orwell commentaries of that year, and notably got this point wrong; he had to make out that Orwell was bring too generous to Foot and Tribune, as I do not think was the case.)

During Labour’s finest hour, the party, excepting one or two MPs only, took a much more creditable line on foreign policy in the 1940s than it had in the 1930s. The romantic notion that before WWII the Left stood firm against a decadent appeasing Tory Party is a half-truth that neatly omits the influence of the absolute pacifist George Lansbury, and the outright sympathy for fascism found on some parts of the Left. (I discuss that pernicious phenomenon later in the book, drawing a parallel with the far-right Respect 'Coalition' of our own day.) In the 1940s the democratic Left was almost monolithic in its acknowledgement of the threat of Soviet totalitarianism.

As an indication of the temper of the times, I cite in the book a reassuring anecdote taken from John Callaghan’s biography of the Communist ideologue Rajani Palme Dutt. In 1949, when Dutt and A.J.P.Taylor debated at the Oxford University Labour Club, Dutt was greeted with loud, derisive laughter when he said that Communists were not afraid to admit their mistakes. (As Chairman of the same organisation 35 years later, I encountered a different mood. I was mandated to write to the Soviet Ambassador to express condolences on the death of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. I ought to have resigned over this, but instead - as I now disclose for the first time to anyone reading this who happened to be there - merely surreptitiously never carried out my mandate.)

Paul then goes on to discuss the peace movement of the 1980s. He says:

Apologists for the Soviet Union did play a bigger role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, at least in its 1980s manifestation, than in the Labour Party. But again they were not in the driving seat, contrary to Kamm’s suggestions. Throughout the 1980s, CND was dominated politically by supporters (mainly soft-left – Footite, Kinnnockite – Labour) of the European Nuclear Disarmament campaign, the group led by Edward Thompson that argued for disarmament by both superpowers in Europe and promoted dialogue with – and supported – dissidents in the Soviet bloc. I deputy-edited END’s magazine, and I can vouch for the fact that Vic Allen, the hardline Stalinist on the CND executive who, it recently emerged, spied for the Stasi, was as much our enemy as he was MI5’s.

This is mostly wrong. I certainly accept that END and Edward Thompson had no sympathies for the Soviet Union. But they were not, as Paul claims, the mainstream of the peace movement, let alone the dominant faction. Having been there, Paul will recall the debates within CND on whether to campaign against Nato membership, when John Cox of the Communist Party of Great Britain defeated the line argued by Thompson and Jonathan Dimbleby at CND’s annual conference in 1981. Moreover, Thompson’s argument that disarmament and human rights were inextricable causes clearly didn’t survive the collapse of Communism. Finally, the END call for a nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal had more alliterative appeal than political realism; the troops in Poland weren’t there by invitation. It is quite correct that Vic Allen and the Stalinists were far from the mainstream of the 1980s peace movement. But I do consider that those in CND, such as Paul, who reviled Allen’s support for the GDR had a responsibility to rupture the Popular Front, and they didn’t. How could they, when the dominant voice of the British peace movement was, in fact, affable, silly Bruce Kent glorying in the coalition of Communists and Quakers?