ABSTRACT
The 1930s have been remembered as a time when the arguments for socialism, for opposing fascism, for supporting the Soviet Union, in short for being ‘on the Left’, were almost self-evident.1 This was not how matters always appeared to those potentially most receptive, the working-class electorate, the trade unions and the Labour Party. Those who search for a ‘heroic age’ in working-class politics, are more likely to find it located somewhere between 1900 and 1926 than in the quiescent unions, factional squabbling and disappointed hopes of the 1930s. The one major, radical and unmistakably proletarian movement of the decade, the National Unemployed Workers Movement, was abandoned by its creator the Communist Party when Soviet foreign policy required the sympathy of the liberal middle classes. Apart from the street battles against Mosley, most of the concern with European Fascism was to be found in those middle classes, whose loyalty to the Labour movement was questionable until 1945. An approach to them from the Left often meant raking over the dying embers of the Liberal Party in search of a viable electoral alliance, an activity guaranteed to disillusion those who had fought for independent Labour since 1900.
