CHAPTER XXI

THE SO-CALLED SPLIT

In the chapter “The Right Strikes Back," the separatist movements at both extreme wings of British labor were brought out. The June (1918) conference witnessed the first Labour Party election under the new constitution. The executive was to be composed of twenty-two persons, of whom thirteen were to be representative of the trade unions and other affiliated organizations, five of local organizations, four women, all to be elected by the conference as a whole. Less than four per cent of that whole were socialist party members. The election was absolutely in the hands of the union vote. Yet, although the I. L. P. had lost its right to separate representation, two of the members actually elected to the Labour Party executive were also members of the I. L. P. executive, one was an ex-member, one of the four women members was Mrs. Philip Snowden, and Ramsay MacDonald was reëlected treasurer. This made up a third of the executive, and with two or three other members holding much the same views the decisive swing toward the left was now registered by nearly one-half the executive.

Thus, the voting indicated that the policies held by the Independent Labour Party alone in the earlier years of the war had become the political expression of an increasing number of trade unionists. This represented a reaction against the knock-out policy as that was interpreted by its British spokesman, at a time when the mailed fist policy of the German General Staff was at its climax. The controlling trade union membership believed in the government's use of the military weapon and, therefore, continued the labor members in it. They distrusted the government's use of the diplomatic weapon and, therefore, set out to take over into their own hands the potentialities of working-class negotiations. They had adopted the ideology offered by their recognized radicals, brought them into their councils, but proposed to keep the execution of their alternative procedure in those same hands, rather than in those of any less inclusive body.

Meanwhile, with a general election in the offing, the extreme right had not been idle. In May, J. A. Seddon and Victor Fisher of the British Workers League, which attacked the Labour Party hip and thigh on war and domestic issues, and had put candidates in the field against it, gave out that it had

during the last 18 months, organized thousands of meetings among the working-classes throughout the country, at which the war aims of the country have been explained, and the iniquities of the enemy exposed. Hundreds of meetings, at which our speakers are enthusiastically applauded, are still being held every week. In addition to this, pamphlets and leaflets, exposing the devices of the pacifists, and explaining the objects of the war, and the scheme of national reconstruction put forward by our league for adoption after the war, are distributed by tens of thousands.

Early in the spring, J. B. Williams, head of the Amalgamated Musicians' Union (whose membership is 10,000), began issuing circulars advocating a Trade Union Party, to be run under the authority of the Trades Union Congress. One of the circulars was signed by twenty trade union officials and members, two of whom were members of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress. At a joint meeting of the Parliamentary Committee and the Executive Committee of the British Labour Party, the following resolution was adopted by a vote of thirteen to four:

That this Joint Meeting of the Parliamentary Committee and Labour Party Executive, having considered the circular issued by J. B. Williams and signed by certain trade union officials, wherein an appeal is made for the formation of a Trade Union Labour Party which, in our opinion, is calculated to disrupt a movement built up by years of sacrifice, calls upon those responsible to immediately discontinue such action, and trusts no further steps will be necessary to enforce what loyalty our movement has a right to expect from those holding such responsible positions.

The Executive Committee holds very strongly that no worse service could be rendered to the movement under present circumstances than that any attempt should be made to disrupt either the political or industrial forces of labor. ...

Henderson warned the Labour Party at its June conference that "it was up against a very sinister attempt to paralyze the whole labor movement by division, coming from those who had done nothing to build up its strength.” Immediately thereafter, W. J. Davis (Amalgamated Brass Workers), J. B. Williams and Havelock Wilson got up a meeting at Caxton Hall, Westminster, to "repudiate” the breaking of the party truce by the Labour Party, to promote the rival trade union body, and to advance the cause of the five

year boycott agitated by the sailors. This they proceeded to do." The Caxton Hall meeting was reported to have been attended by four hundred individuals. It was not a delegate conference which delegates, authorized by the vote of their unions, had been sent. Davis, who presided, said the meeting was to "oppose the tactics of a despicable section of the Labour Party who represented pacifist opinions,” and Williams, who acted as secretary, that “they did not want a peace such as the Bolshevists had obtained.” “Behind the intention to force a crisis” in the government, he saw the “sinister figure of Lord Lansdowne.” Clearly they were striking at the Labour Party in terms of the .I. L. P. Havelock Wilson assured them that there would be no sudden appearance of Kerensky with kisses for the chairman, but said that he had intended to introduce some representatives of a Russian committee which included a Cossack general, members of the Duma, and other representative bodies in Russia. They wanted an endorsement of the trade union movement in this country to assist the establishment of good government in Russia. The committee, he said, were of one opinion, that “Kerensky is a gas bag of the most dangerous type, and was responsible for the state of affairs in Russia." The incident is of significance only as throwing a sidelight on the international affiliations of some of the promoters of the meeting. They were for military intervention in Russia, for counter-revolution, and apparently were not unfriendly to the restoration of the Romanoffs. Wilson went into greater details about this Russian committee in the Morning Post, a reactionary paper:

They [the committee] simply ask that the Russian people be allowed to work out their own salvation, and they request that the

* The resolutions adopted, which were circulated among trade unionists in advance, follow :

“(1) This Congress declares in favor of a distinct political Labour Party for the trade union movement, based on the representation of and controlled by congress, and instructs the Parliamentary Committee to take the steps necessary to establish a Trade Union Labour Party.

“(2) That this Congress records its condemnation of the brutal murders and robbery of British and neutral seamen on the high seas by the commanders and crews of German U-boats. We further regret that such piracy has been justified by prominent leading trade unionists in Germany, members of the Central Council of the International Transport Workers' Federation, L. Brunner, J. Doring, Paul Muller, and Oswald Schumann. This meeting is, therefore, of opinion that there can be no peace by negotiation with a nation which attempts to justify such abominable crimes as those committed on the high seas. It, therefore, resolves that for a period of five years there shall be no intercourse with the German nation unless the people take full Parliamentary control over their Kaiser and Government and make full reparation for the crimes committed.”

Allied governments will give them a force of about 30,000 allied troops, representative of all nations on the Allies' side, to start from Vladivostok and help the Russian Cossacks and others to link up and formulate some government. The Siberians favor a republican form of government, others down South are in favor of a limited monarchy, but that is a matter they assure me can be adjusted among themselves.

Here was the famous labor split which misled one or two of the delegation from the American Federation of Labor into thinking they had started something that would disrupt the British Labour Party. Williams, Davis, Wilson and their unions were not affiliated with the British Labour Party, so that they could scarcely qualify as splitters from something to which they did not belong. The new party was the creation of a handful of men, in nearly all instances without the backing of their trade unions.

The Tory Morning Post was of the same way of thinking as the American labor delegates and hailed the Caxton Hall outfit as the "genuine trade union political party.” Responsible trade union opinion was to the contrary. Said J. W. Ogden, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee:

x There are two necessary parts to the labor movement-the industrial and the political. You will have the whole-hearted support of the Parliamentary Committee (the executive of the Trades Union Congress) in deprecating any attempt to hurt the Labour Party. We back Mr. Henderson. To go outside of the party is not the way to work any reform. I say on behalf of the industrial movement, anything that disrupts the political movement disrupts the industrial movement. If the matter of the new trade union political party comes before the Trades Union Congress, I hope it will meet the same unity of opposition as in this conference.

The Observer, a Sunday newspaper and review which is a semiofficial government organ in that its editor is an interpreter of the Lloyd George policy, had this to say:

Mr. Davis and his friends show wisdom in adopting a trade union basis for their venture and not merely starting a rival political party of the ordinary type, as the British Workers' League did in founding the National Democratic and Labour Party. Trade union feeling might conceivably be exploited and a fraction of the union membership be detached from the socialist alliance. But the attempt is made too late. The issue was decided when the new constitution of the (real) Labour Party was under discussion. This constitution, retaining as it does the block vote and the predominance of the unions, gives the most conservative among them the safeguards

they need against pacifism, revolution and all the other bogiesand they know it. The labor movement means to act as a unit for political purposes; the Labour Party is a very efficient instrument for this intention. The right wing will tolerate any slight failure in enthusiasm for the party's war aims on the part of the left wing, and will stay within the party itself even if it has not quite digested The New Social Order for which the left wing is mainly responsible.

On July 1, the Manchester Guardian said:

Far from splitting, the Labour Party is drawing closer together and bringing in fresh recruits at the same time that it is shifting politically towards the position of its left wing.

THE SAILORS AND THEIR BOYCOTT

Some of the attendants at the Caxton Hall meeting turned up that same evening at a meeting of the Merchant Seamen's League, the object of which, according to the indefatigable Havelock Wilson, was “to discover the true voice of labor regarding the war.” Here Commander Sir Edward Nichol presided and G. H. Roberts, Minister of Labour, expressed himself as ready to join with the merchant seamen and other sections of the community in determining that they would not enter into trade relationship with Germany until she had "after years of purging" proved her right to be admitted into the comity of civilized nations. The guest of the evening was none other than the prime minister of the commonwealth of Australia. Hughes said, among other things:

I am glad to have the opportunity to pay my tribute of respect and admiration for the part played by Mr. Havelock Wilson. (Cheers.) He has shown to the world what unionism, rightly directed, can do. He has shown the power of labor, and that a man may be a keen and resolute fighter for the rights of labor and yet be a patriot. Labor has great opportunities opened to it by the war. It has great responsibilities thrown upon it. It might take, if it liked, the path that has been blazed for it by the Bolshevists, it might sink into some bottomless morass, or it might turn resolutely and tread that steep and difficult path that patriotism and common sense alike dictate.

By the end of August, the League reported that it had distributed 1,500,000 copies of its manifesto and declaration form among trade unionists in and out of the service. Havelock Wilson gave out:

A letter from a brigade major, "written by direction and on behalf of Brigadier-General A. Ř. Harman, C.M.G., D.S.O.,” asks

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