Labour’s Foreign Policy¶
Core Argument¶
Ernest Bevin’s August 20 speech on foreign policy, delivered to the House of Commons, is the immediate occasion for this polemic, but the target is far broader: the wholesale betrayal of working-class expectations by the Labour leadership. The chapter’s core argument is that the Labour government, far from representing a break with Tory imperialism, is cynically maintaining its predecessor’s foreign policy in every essential respect. The general election, which the masses understood as a decisive rejection of capitalist reaction at home and abroad, is treated by Bevin and his colleagues as though it never occurred.
The evidence marshalled is damning and drawn from the parliamentary record itself. The chapter quotes the Daily Express reporting Bevin’s own admission that he “always agreed” with former Foreign Secretary Eden, and Eden’s reciprocal claim that no important issue of foreign policy divided them during four years in the War Cabinet. Churchill’s wholehearted approval is noted as confirmation. The argument is not that Bevin’s criticisms of Stalin’s puppet regimes in the Balkans are factually wrong—the farce of GPU-supervised “democratic elections” is acknowledged—but that his indignation is entirely selective and hypocritical. It is not love of democracy that motivates him, but the interests of British imperialism: the objection is that these elections were dominated by Moscow rather than London. The chapter drives this home by contrasting Bevin’s Balkan zeal with his silence on India and the colonies, and with his blunt statement on Hong Kong: “What we have, we hold.” The Soviet bureaucrats, for their part, are equally hypocritical, having discovered India’s lack of independence only when it suited them at San Francisco.
Bevin’s condemnation of Polish annexations in Eastern Germany is similarly exposed as a function of imperialist rivalry—an attempt to curtail Russia’s sphere of influence—rather than any principled opposition to annexation. The most devastating contrast is drawn between Bevin’s attitude toward Greece and toward Spain. He retrospectively supports British imperialism’s criminal intervention against the Greek people and openly backs the counter-revolutionary Vulgaris government. Yet on Franco’s fascist regime, he demurs, declaring that Spain’s fate is for the Spanish people alone and that foreign intervention would only strengthen Franco. Both positions, the chapter notes, coincide neatly with British imperial interests.
The chapter draws on the theoretical context of Marxist analysis of the state and class rule: foreign policy is the continuation of domestic policy, and a reactionary policy abroad rests on reaction at home. The polemic is directed squarely against the Labour leadership—Bevin personally and the Attlee government collectively—but also against the illusions of the working class, who rejoiced at Labour’s victory expecting a change in policy. Reports of discontent among Labour MPs and in the trade union branches are cited as evidence that the betrayal is already generating resistance. The conclusion is a call to action: the working-class organisations must repudiate this policy and bring pressure against it.