Leading from the Centre: The League of Nations Union, Foreign Policy and ‘Political Agreement’ in the 1930s

Abstract

This article locates the New Party in the wider context of centrist and cross-party groupings in the 1930s. By focusing on the work of one such group, the liberal-internationalist League of Nations Union (LNU), the article explores the manner in which Mosley's project both embraced and rejected the ‘political agreement’ of that decade. In common with other centrist bodies, the New Party pursued a ‘middle way’ between socialism and capitalism in response to the 1931 Crisis. It parted company, however, with those bodies by rejecting the collective League system as a solution to international anarchy and by abandoning parliamentary institutions at home. In so doing, Mosley greatly limited the New Party's electoral appeal, whilst liberally oriented centrists, such as those leading the LNU, won considerable popular support for their policies.

Keywords:

• Associations
• Centrism
• Foreign Policy
• Internationalism
• League of Nations
• Mosley

Notes

 [1] Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion’, 285–98.

 [2] Ritschel, Politics of Planning; Williamson, National Crisis; Toye offers a brief discussion in The Labour Party, Chapter 2.

 [3] Worley, ‘What Was the New Party?’, 39–63.

 [4] Birn, League of Nations Union ; Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists.

 [5] Corporate members paid a single minimum subscription of £1 and undertook to enrol all their followers in the LNU as individual members. In exchange, they received the movement's literature and were entitled to representation on local branches and the General Council.

 [6] Ceadel, ‘First British Referendum’, 810–39.

 [7] British Library of Political and Economic Science (BLPES), General Council Minutes, 27 June 1930, LNU/1/2, 75f.

 [8] BLPES, Draft letter attached to Executive Committee Minutes, 30 November 1933, LNU/2/12, 167f.

 [9] Bentley, ‘Liberal Politics and the Grey Conspiracy’, 461–78; Mosley, My Life, Chapter 7.

[10] Cited in Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 111.

[11] Cited in Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 93.

[12] Next Five Years. Other notable LNU names amongst the signatories included Gilbert Murray, Philip Noel-Baker, J. W. Hills, Walter Layton, Geoffrey Mander and Eleanor Rathbone. Arthur Salter and Will Arnold Foster sat on the drafting committee.

[13] Angell, After All.

[14] Angell, After All, 194.

[15] Angell and Wright, Can Governments Cure Unemployment?

[16] Allen, Britain's Political Future, 187.

[17] For People's Front Propaganda Committee, see Ritschel, Politics of Planning, Chapter 7.

[18] Koss, ‘Lloyd George’, 77–108.

[19] For text of the manifesto, see Rathbone, War Can Be Averted.

[20] Young et al., A National Policy, 6.

[21] Worley, ‘What was the New Party’; Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, Chapter 12; Ritschel, Politics of Planning, Chapter 2.

[22] Next Five Years , 12.

[23] Macmillan, Middle Way, 3.

[24] , ‘After the Nation-State’; idem, Free Trade Nation, Chapter 5.

[25] Headway, September 1931, 171; Headway, October 1931, i; Zimmern ‘Thoughts from Geneva’, 472–4.

[26] Bodleian Library Gilbert Murray Papers, Murray to Cecil, 16 September, 1931, MSS210, 153f.

[27] Action, 8 October 1931, 30 and 26 November 1931, 2.

[28] Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 94.

[29] Taylor, Beaverbrook, 413. For Amery, see Louis, In the Name of God, Go!

[30] Mosley, Greater Britain, 144.

[31] For example, Webb, ‘A Reform Bill’; Samuel, ‘Defects and Reforms’. For a useful overview, see Ritschel, Politics of Planning, Chapter 2.

[32] This is the tendency in Pugh's revisionist Hurrah for the Blackshirts!, which identifies economic conditions as the ‘underlying obstacle’ to fascist success combined with poor timing on Mosley's part. The explanation, Pugh states categorically, ‘does not lie primarily in British political culture’ (315).

[33] Thorpe, The Failure; Griffin, ‘British Fascism’; Skidelsky, ‘Great Britain’.

[34] Williams, ‘Proposals’; Woolf, International Government. Dickinson's ‘Proposals for Avoidance of War’ was the outcome of discussions held by the ‘Bryce Group’, a private committee chaired by Lord Bryce.

[35] Robbins, The Abolition of War; Egerton, Great Britain, Chapter 1.

[36] Cecil, ‘The League of Nations Union’. Murray later made a similar in his The League of Nations Movement, 10.

[37] Hayes, ‘British Foreign Policy;’ Martel, Imperial Diplomacy.

[38] Headway, July 1930, ii.

[39] McCarthy, ‘Parties’, 891–912.

[40] Home and Country, 6, 1924.

[41] Beckenham and Penge Advertiser, 15 April 1937.

[42] Thane, ‘What Difference Did the Vote Make?’; Beaumont, ‘Women and Citizenship’.

[43] Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries, 306–8.

[44] Noel-Baker Papers, ‘Suggestions for the Organisation of Representative Signatures to the Recent Manifesto, “Save the League: Save Peace”, Already Signed by Three Leaders of Each Party and by Cosmo Cantuar, Cecil, Gilbert Murray’, 14 January 1937 (NBKR/4/505).

[45] Bebbington, Nonconformist Conscience.

[46] Koss, ‘Lloyd George’, 77–108.

[47] Headway, December 1934, 224.

[48] Headway, July 1935, 130.

[49] Strachey and Joad, ‘Parliamentary Reform’, 319.

[50] Headway, July 1929, ii.

[51] See, for example, Austen Chamberlain's letter to The Times, 12 November 1934.

[52] Headway, December 1934, 224; Headway, February 1935, 22; LNU, Year Book 1935.

[53] Northern Echo, 12 March 1935.

[54] Cambray, Game of Politics, 123–4.

[55] Cannadine, ‘Parliament’, 3–25; Quinault, ‘Westminster’, 79–104. McKibbin points to the phenomenon of ‘local parliaments’, ‘which familiarised young men of the lower middle and working classes with parliamentary manners […] their role in legitimating parliament can hardly be overrated’ (Ideologies of Class, 21–2).

[56] Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society.

[57] The New Outlook, January 1936.

[58] Next Five Years, 4–5, and epilogue; Macmillan, Reconstruction, Chapter 9; Salter et al., The World's Economic Crisis, 26 and 97–8; Salter, Framework, 19–20.

[59] Ritschel, Politics of Planning, 95.