Labour leaders fear conference¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter from Socialist Appeal (May 1944) argues that the cancellation of that year’s Labour Party conference was not a necessary wartime measure but a deliberate manoeuvre by the party leadership to avoid facing a rebellious rank and file. The Railway Executive Committee’s warning about troop movements is dismissed as a flimsy pretext, since other organisations continued to hold conferences. The real motive, the article contends, was to suppress debate at a moment when the opening of the second front would have lent immense political weight to a gathering of working-class representatives. The leadership, the author claims, preferred to leave the fate of the workers in capitalist hands rather than allow the grassroots to voice opposition.
The chapter draws on the immediate context of the wartime coalition government, in which Labour ministers served under Churchill. It identifies a growing revolt in the unions and local Labour parties against the leadership’s support for anti-labour legislation and its willingness to discipline left-wing MPs. The specific case of Aneurin Bevan is highlighted: the National Executive Committee and the Parliamentary Labour Party’s Administrative Committee had demanded a pledge of future loyalty from Bevan and recommended his expulsion if he refused. The article notes that this stiffening of discipline followed an earlier compromise in the Parliamentary Party, and it links the timing directly to the decision to cancel the conference. The leadership, it argues, feared that a conference would expose the depth of opposition to the coalition and the policy of class collaboration.
The polemical target is the Labour and trade union bureaucracy, accused of betraying working-class democracy and pursuing a policy of capitulation to the ruling class. The article invokes the historical precedent of Ramsay MacDonald’s betrayal in 1931—‘open MacDonaldism’—as the logical endpoint of the current trajectory. It calls for the rank and file to demand a conference, to democratise the movement, and to break the coalition both industrially and politically. The only alternative, it insists, is to drive the betrayers out of the movement altogether. The piece is a sharp, factional intervention, written in the heat of war, against the official Labour leadership’s suppression of internal dissent.