ABSTRACT
Anyone looking at the international outlook of a socialist party during the twentieth century might expect to find evidence of foreign and defence policy being guided by working-class solidarity, an aversion to power politics, a deep commitment to disarmament, opposition to imperialism, a desire to establish strong international institutions, a dislike of co-operation with capitalist powers and a readiness to establish democratic control over external policy-making. And it certainly is possible, from time to time, to see such factors influencing Labour since its foundation. As early as 1911 the Party organised its own disarmament conference; in August 1914 some Labour MPs, led by Ramsay MacDonald, opposed war; and in 1919-20 many Labour members and trades unionists actively opposed Allied intervention against the Bolsheviks in Russia. With the advent of Bolshevism it was tempting for Conservatives to tar the Labour Party with the brush of revolutionary extremism, a task made easier when MacDonald’s Government, in 1924, established diplomatic relations with the USSR. The result was the defection of the Liberals from supporting this, the first minority Labour administration. In the ensuing election campaign the Conservatives and the right-wing press, with the probable connivance of the intelligence services, exploited the ‘Zinoviev letter’ and the fear of Communist subversion in Britain against Labour. Labour’s opposition to rearmament in the 1930s, its nominal rejection of Polaris nuclear missiles in the early 1960s and its sympathy for unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1983 election suggested a Party which was averse to defence spending, uncomfortable with realpolitik and unwilling to accept the logic of deterrence, allowing the Conservatives to continue posing as the party of patriotism, realism and strong defence.
