ABSTRACT
The opening of World War Two marked a watershed in the trajectory of both Allan Flanders and of the MSI. At the outbreak of the war Flanders was a leading member of a tiny and unknown revolutionary sect, but by the end of the war he was a familiar and infl uential fi gure in the upper echelons of the labor movement. Developments in the MSI were equally momentous: in 1940 it was still ‘offi cially’ a Leninist vanguard party dedicated to preparing for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but by the mid-1940s it was a tiny socialist group working inside the Labour Party and increasingly allied with ‘conservative’ social democrats such as Herbert Morrison.
