ABSTRACT
A Labour Party conference at Manchester, in January 1917, had ended with the resolution passed with a majority of more than five to one that Britain had to persevere in the war until Germany had been utterly defeated. The first step was to attempt, through Henderson, to kill the idea that the Stockholm conference should be a forum for peace. With all of the confusion, equivocation, stalling, and in-fighting orchestrated by Lloyd George, his collaborators and their allies, enthusiasm for the Stockholm experiment quickly began to decline. The trigger was the Bolshevik attempt to contact Western dissenters, initially through the soviets and then later through Russian state machinery following the October revolution, in order to end the war and start the revolution. The paper was popular, and Lloyd George considered that smashing it might do more harm than good. George Lansbury had concluded from this performance that the Labour Party was hopeless for the purpose of carrying dissent.
