ABSTRACT
British politics in the 1930s were often disillusioning for the labour movement, starting with the defection of the Labour Party’s leadership and the Party’s electoral eclipse, and ending with the Second World War, which destroyed the party’s hope of peace through disarmament and the League of Nations. At no time in the intervening period was there any possibility of the Labour Party replacing the National, predominantly Conservative, government. The defections of MacDonald and Snowden were to harden an already present suspicion of powerful personalities in the Labour Party, and to confirm trade-union suspicion of ‘intellectuals’.1 Union leaders reacted by taking a more constructive role in the policy discussions of the party. The Left now completely rejected MacDonald’s concept of ‘gradualism’ which had not been subjected to searching criticism until some three or four years before he left the party.2 There was a tendency to radicalism in the labour movement.3
