The political truce¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter dissects the Labour Party Conference vote on the political truce—the wartime electoral pact with the Tories—which was renewed by a crushing majority of 2,243,000 to 374,000. This outcome is presented as a stark inversion of the previous year’s narrow 66,000-vote margin, but the author insists the result does not reflect genuine working-class sentiment. The vote is instead a product of bureaucratic manipulation: the bulk of delegates are described as old men out of touch with the rank and file, and the leadership successfully exploited confusion by arguing that ending the truce would collapse the coalition. The “left” wing is excoriated for advocating an absurd and dishonest position—ending the truce while remaining in the government simultaneously. The only opposition came from Rhys Davies on a purely pacifist basis, dismissed as a sterile and utopian “Aunt Sally” trotted out by the bureaucracy to be easily knocked down.
The chapter’s core argument is that the truce’s fate will be decided not by conference votes but by the class struggle itself. Any major workers’ movement would strain the coalition beyond breaking point, and the author predicts it is unlikely to survive until the next conference. The real position of the Labour leaders is exposed through their record on promises: unanimous resolutions for increased service pay and old age pensions were passed, yet Attlee immediately blocked them in Parliament, granting only a paltry 6d a day rise after a long delay. The debate on the Beveridge report is used as the decisive illustration. An amendment demanding immediate legislation to implement the scheme was crushed by 1,715,000 to 955,000, with the Executive’s resolution merely calling for the scheme to be “ready to be put into operation at the end of hostilities.” The author argues that even these meagre reforms were not to be demanded as a condition of co-operation, and that Labour could win a general election on this issue alone if it revealed the government’s true character.
The rejection of Communist Party affiliation by 1,951,000 to 712,000 is handled with characteristic polemical sharpness. Morrison’s argument that the CP based itself on a revolutionary philosophy is dismissed as false—the CP is now far to the right of the Labour Party itself. Even if true, the author contends, a party claiming to be the political expression of organised workers should have room for all tendencies. The entry of the Stalinists would have facilitated the exposure of both Stalinists and Labour bureaucrats in the eyes of the workers. The chapter closes by asserting the basic need: Labour must break the coalition and wage a struggle for power on a socialist programme, with the Workers’ International League fighting alongside Labour workers to convince them through their own experience of the necessity of a revolutionary socialist organisation.