ABSTRACT
Bernard Shaw insisted that he had no time to concern himself with foreign policy before 1914 because he was too much preoccupied with the Fabian Society, working out a practical programme for English socialists and establishing a parliamentary Labour Party. The stamina of Labour members at Westminster was all but exhausted by two consuming interests: the substantive problems of domestic policy and the no less complex or intriguing procedural riddles posed by parliamentary custom and etiquette. The largest, most important of the fractions that made up the Labour whole was the Independent Labour Party. In 1912, an emergency meeting of the International Socialist Congress reminded the Labour Party that as members they were required to state whether they thought it worthwhile and practical to organise a general strike against war. Thus the problem of Labour possessing its own distinct policy on foreign affairs was at last, temporarily, solved.
