The unemployed may not have been revolutionary, but they did not suffer in silence. Thousands of unemployed people, organized by the communist-led National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), participated in protests against the means test and the benefit cuts. The press portrayed the demonstrators as violent Bolshevik troublemakers who used bricks and stones in skirmishes with police. The police’s official policy was to ‘disperse’ any protesters who were ‘disorderly or about to become disorderly’ with baton charges on horseback. Some policemen even turned rifles on the protesters; many were wounded, and a few were killed. The police were granted greater powers by the National Government in 1934, when a Sedition Bill enabled them to stop and search anyone ‘suspected’ of ‘sedition’. Countless arrests followed the protests, but the NUWM was undeterred. It organized a number of ‘hunger marches’ from northern cities to London’s Hyde Park, the protesters sleeping in workhouses and hostels on the way. These marches attracted coverage in the press and were frequently mentioned in parliament by Labour MPs.
Yet Labour’s official attitude to the protests and hunger marches was ambivalent. Under the new leadership of Clement Attlee, the party refused to organize demonstrations with the communist NUWM, and condemned the violence that erupted during some of the protests. It was a classic Labour compromise: the party members expressed solidarity with a popular left-wing movement, while distancing themselves from its revolutionary programme. The communists accused Labour of lacking the boldness to make the most of the revolutionary moment, but the truth was that the Labour leadership wanted to postpone that moment indefinitely. Although Attlee and other leading Labour figures attempted to distance themselves from the conservatism of the MacDonald era with radical economic proposals, they were as committed as their former leader to gradualist socialism, achieved through parliamentary reform.
The march that inspired most sympathy among Labour MPs was the ‘Jarrow Crusade’ of 1936. During the late nineteenth century, Jarrow’s shipyard had flourished and its population had increased tenfold between 1850 and 1920. By 1932, however, there was no work for 80 per cent of its adult population, many of whom suffered from ill health, with deaths from tuberculosis higher than in the nineteenth century. The following year, the Labour candidate for Jarrow, ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, implored MacDonald to help the town. The erstwhile Labour leader and current coalition prime minister promised he would keep Jarrow in mind, yet MacDonald was now politically irrelevant; Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade, told the inhabitants of Jarrow to ‘work out their own salvation’.
In early 1936, Wilkinson, by now the town’s MP, set about organizing the Jarrow Crusade. Funded by a popular appeal, the hunger march was intended to protest against Runciman’s disregard and to publicize the plight of a ‘town that was murdered’. The organizers had no affiliation with the NUWM or with communism; it was a Labour initiative. In the autumn, 200 unemployed male inhabitants of the town marched over 250 miles to London, taking just over a month to complete the journey. When they eventually arrived in the capital, the marchers declined to join a Communist party rally and instead organized a meeting attended by as many as 15,000 sympathizers at which speeches were given, songs sung and banners waved. The marchers wanted to carry a petition to the government asking for assistance, but coalition representatives refused to receive their deputation. In parliament Labour MPs condemned this decision, describing the government’s ‘complacency’ as ‘an affront to the national conscience’; Runciman, however, defended the coalition’s record and pointed out that unemployment in Jarrow had improved in recent months. No central government assistance would be offered to the town. As for Jarrow’s local government, its Unemployment Assistance Board stopped the marchers’ benefits while they were away, on the grounds that the men would not have been able to work had employment become available.
Many of the marchers believed their efforts had been a waste of time, yet other protesters took a more positive view. They argued that their demonstrations had ‘highlighted the situation that people were in’ and had ‘shown the authorities we are not prepared to take things lying down’. Besides, even though the campaign may not have produced immediate results, the memory of the protests remained with those who had grown up in ‘the devil’s decade’ and who would come of voting age in the Forties. That ‘depression generation’ would use its vote to demand the nationalization of Britain’s ailing industries and the creation of a welfare state in which hunger marches would no longer be necessary.
25
The Fasci
The course of Britain’s continental foreign policy had been set by Lloyd George at the peace conference in 1919. Its central aim was the reintegration of a peaceful Germany into the international community. A contented and economically flourishing Germany was, Britain believed, necessary for European stability; it was also vital to the balance of continental power, especially now that the ‘threat’ of communism had emerged in Russia. British and French suspicion of Soviet Russia deprived them of their former ally on Germany’s eastern border. No one in Britain believed a successful war could be fought against Germany without Russian aid; therefore Germany had to be mollified.
Britain remained at a remove from European affairs throughout the Twenties. Some observers detected the revival of an age-old isolationist instinct, typical of an island people. We do not have to look very far back in history for the main cause of English aloofness: a terror of becoming embroiled in another European conflict, after the horrors of the Great War. Another factor was the country’s perception of itself as an imperial, rather than as a European, power. Pre-eminent politicians of the age, including Baldwin and Chamberlain, regarded continental affairs as a sideshow to the empire and the ailing domestic economy. The main object of foreign policy was not central Europe but the Mediterranean and the East, where Japan was perceived as a growing menace. In the Twenties, government officials even regarded American ambitions as a bigger concern than the prospect of a resurgent Germany. These worries were partially allayed when a naval treaty was signed in 1922 between Britain, the United States and Japan, but they did not disappear entirely.
In any case, Britain believed it was unnecessary to intervene extensively in continental affairs, since the prospect of European war was remote. In the view of British politicians, previous European conflicts had been caused by the aggression of an overambitious continental power, such as Napoleon’s France or Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. In the Twenties, no power was capable of conducting a war beyond its frontiers. Following the Versailles Treaty, Germany had no army and no armaments, and Russia had been economically and militarily enfeebled by revolution; France, meanwhile, had neither the desire nor the military capacity to embark on a campaign of conquest. Successive British governments of the Twenties confidently told their military commanders that no major European war was likely for ‘at least ten years’.
From 1918 to 1931, every British government pursued the country’s key goals – reintegrating Germany within the international order, while promoting the League of Nations and disarmament. In 1923 France had been in dangerous confrontation with Germany when the latter had defaulted on reparation payments. In response French troops had occupied the Ruhr area of Germany. MacDonald, who assumed the role of foreign secretary as well as prime minister in the Labour government of 1923, helped to resolve the situation by facilitating the first negotiated post-war agreement, the Dawes Plan. The accord ended the French occupation and attempted to set reparation payments at a level that was both fair and feasible for Germany, which was then in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis. MacDonald energetically promoted the League of Nations, and attempted to draw the ‘selfish and unscrupulous’ French further into its orbit, in order to moderate their hostility towards Germany.