ABSTRACT
Ramsay MacDonald's advocacy of the reconstruction of the Labour Party was an outcome of his political isolation during the First World War. Socialism becomes impotent, Labour is split and is paralysed for a generation. MacDonald was not a pacifist and resented the charges that he was unpatriotic. MacDonald's pre-war flirtation with coalition politics apparently ended when he became the party's most prominent dissenter. The culmination of their passive attitude, he believed, was the acceptance of Asquith's offer to Arthur Henderson 'to associate' in a Coalition government in May 1915. Arthur Henderson came to advocate the reconstruction of the Labour Party in mid-1917 after his mission to Russia had been completed. The British and Russian working classes now had to work together and to redouble their efforts to defeat the common enemy and to bring a real peace, and not an armistice 'dictated by uncontrolled and unrepentant military despots'.
