In his speech to the Labour Party Conference in 1962 Hugh Gaitskell put the party’s case for supporting the Commonwealth in preference to the European Economic Community in these terms: “It means something to us and to the world. Where would our influence be in the world without the Commonwealth? It would be very much less. And I believe with all my heart that the existence of this remarkable multi-racial association . . . can make a great contribution to the ending of the cold war.” And he went on “If I were a little younger today, and if I were looking around for a cause, I do not think I should be quite so certain that I would find it within the movement for greater unity in Europe. . . I would rather work for the Freedom From Hunger campaign; I would rather work for War on Want. I would rather do something to solve world problems. And if we look for examples here, we can find them, as a matter of fact, in the United States.”footnote¹ The speech is a fitting climax to a long history and contains the essence of the Labour dilemma: the appropriation of the Commonwealth as a significant aid to influence, the multi-racial community, the search for causes, reliance on charity, and a nervous approval of the United States. It is necessary to trace the development of this history if we are to understand the role that the Labour party might play in the future development of the Third World.

After 1904, when Joseph Chamberlain convinced the Webbs of social imperialism,footnote² three ideological groups co-existed on the Labour scene: the free-trade anti-imperialists, the protectionist social imperialists and the neoMarxists. Though all three groups continued to influence the Party through to the Second World War, the Marxists had little obvious influence: the important conflict was between the free-traders and the protectionists, and, within the free-trade camp, between the exponents of a humanitarian decolonization policy (led by Barnes, Wedgwood, Morel, Woolf and Olivier) and the “reluctant imperialists” (MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas). Prior to 1940 there is little evidence that the decolonizers got very far in the party hierarchy, though Lansbury was prominent. The Labour party never forced a division on the Colonial Office vote until 1936, and the Morel-Wedgwood attack on colonialism was never translated into policy. Some idea of political development was held by all parties, and as early as 1920 some Labour and Conservative MPs were talking about the “multi-racial Commonwealth”. Trusteeship was a widely-held concept, though exactly what it meant differed enormously. As far as the Labour party was concerned, little effort was made to develop a constructive policy for decolonization while in office: Richard Lymanfootnote³ notes that in 1924, in colonial affairs, Labour was willing to “sacrifice its radical heritage. It was original in being neither a routine Conservative policy nor a routine Liberal policy, but an amalgamation of the two” and upheld “the defence of the status-quo in India, in Egypt, Cyprus and the Mosul Oil fields.” In 1930 Lunn, under-secretary at the Dominions office, accepted that there was no substantial difference between Labour and Tory policy, thanked a former Conservative Colonial Secretary for explaining his own policy for him, and proclaimed that “the greatest instrument for peace in the world is the British Empire.”footnote⁴ Drummond Shiels, another of Webb’s assistants in the 1929–31 government, noted Webb’s inability to break out of the tradition of the Colonial administrators: Webb had “got into a civil service way of looking at things . . . a real old-time Fabian . . . He did not realize that many of the younger men, at least, in the colonial field, as well as in the Colonial Office itself, had already got a change of spirit and were expecting a vigorous lead in its application from a Labour government.”footnote⁵ There was some strong pressure from inside the party and from the ILP for a more positive colonial policy, particularly from Leonard Woolf, MacGregor Ross and Norman Leys on Kenya and labour conditions in East and South-Central Africa, and from a large India lobby on Indian independence, but in spite of some overtures to multi-racialism and labour conditions, Webb and his colleagues were barely influenced.

The most important debate was on the role of Empire in Britain’s trade policy: within the Labour Party (particularly during 1929–31) the issue became one of whether aid to colonies was exploitation or not. Josiah Wedgwood had always argued that any form of aid was exploitation because it could only be administered by the British capitalists. But in 1929 the party introduced a Colonial Development Act (taken straight out of the Conservatives’ election manifesto) and the issue became one of whether aid should be granted in the context of imperial preference or a free trade policy. The 1929 act (like most considerations of economic development in the colonies) was designed specifically to solve the British unemployment problem. Oswald Mosely and the TUC as well as the bulk of the Conservative party and the Federation of British Industries called for “a systematic planning organization . . . to rationalize the machinery of imperial trade, to put through a big merger, to unify a lot of small businesses into one great, highly centralized organization . . . to insulate these islands and this Commonwealth from the shocks of world conditions, and, in the area under our own control, to build, while there is time, a high standard of civilization which may absorb the production of our industrial machine”.footnote⁶ MacDonald and the party leadership opposed this argument and the simpler protectionist one on the grounds that such planning would jeopardize Britain’s standard of living: “If we let in our Dominions’ products free, what of our farmers? Are Hon. Members prepared to sacrifice the standard of life of our people in order to come to some sort of agreement with the Dominions on economic grounds? We are not going to improve the position of our 2,000,000 unemployed by reducing our standards of life.”footnote⁷ Ernest Bevin, supporting the TUC’s memorandum on planning the Empire, saw it as a safeguard against industrial competition: “I sit on a Colonial Development Committee under an act passed by the Labour Government and I see expenditure of millions of pounds going on for the development of areas where native races have not yet begun to be industrialized. You talk about the coal trade. Ought there not to be some control against the possible development of coal in Tanganyika which might come into competition with your coal here?”footnote⁸ Thus, although questions of decolonization periodically recurred, the main discussion was essentially in terms of the economic possibilities for Britain and methods of easing the depression. Until the late 1930’s few MPs saw the need for substantial aid to the colonies: if the aim of achieving a multi-racial Commonwealth with independent states was there, the need to use the colonies as a source for economic growth was the major preoccupation; and until the late 1930’s nobody accepted that this would involve a great deal of initial expense by the government.

The question of an active decolonization policy was raised. In 1928 the Party Conference passed a resolution committing the party to the “firm conviction that all the dependencies of the Crown ought, as soon as possible, to become self-governing states”. In his “Autobiography” Nehru noted ironically that George Lansbury was once elected president of a Congress of Oppressed Nationalities and of its sub-committee, the League Against Imperialism, but he soon “repented of his rash behaviour” for “future Cabinet Ministers cannot dabble in risky and revolutionary politics”. Lord Olivier (Coloured Labour and White Capital) and Leonard Woolf (Empire and Commerce in Africa and Economic Imperialism) produced major attacks on imperialism in Africa. Norman Angell was prominent in advocating an internationalist approach to colonial affairs, and most of the party leaders were, at some time or other, members of the Union for Democratic Control. The party had its own Imperial Advisory Committee under Woolf. None of this seems to have had much effect on policy while the party held office, and when MPs met nationalist leaders from India and the West Indies, Labour had very little point of contact. The early Commonwealth Labour Conferences show how little. Confronted by Indian delegates who attacked Labour’s colonial record, the Labour leaders refused to discuss policy and retreated behind the protection of constitutional formalities: Lansbury defended Labour’s part in the Simon Commission (1924–27), which recommended no changes in Indian representation, as “a matter of procedure that has never been departed from in any single instance”.footnote⁹ And though MacDonald pledged Dominion status for India in 1928, by 1929 as Prime Minister he was responsible for the imprisonment of 100,000 Indians who agitated for self-government.

There were, of course, several types of colonies: India, Ceylon, and the West Indies had been under British control for over 150 years, and, by the 1930’s had growing national movements and trade unions. Then there were the settler colonies of East and South-Central Africa. The greater part of Africa had little economic development and was controlled to a large extent through forms of indirect rule. The Arab emirates and “protectorates” were held more specifically for their economic and military value, but also controlled through local feudal lords. Finally there was the Malay group, Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine and assorted minor territories. Throughout the interwar years Labour had little to offer most of these: India and the East African plantations received a proportion of attention, and Palestine, because of its peculiar racial problems, was frequently discussed. But for most of Africa, Arabia and the Caribbean there was no policy that was not derivative from Britain’s own economic interests. Trusteeship was a concept now accepted by all parties, yet it involved no theory of political development and rested substantially on the ability of local governors and the static nature of tribal rule.

The Indian case was therefore crucial for Labour’s colonial thinking. But its history emphasized Labour’s inability to identify with the process of decolonization. The TUC fought against the development of socialism in Indian Trade Unionism: its mission to India in 1927–8 was accepted by the India Office as a “conciliation” tour (and accordingly praised by The Times). It was not long before the TUC found itself an adjunct of the colonial machinery (a role it was to develop later in Africa and the West Indies). The Labour Party, though pressed by Indian nationalists, the ILP and Marxists— indeed also by some of the colonial Governors—preferred in 1924 and again in 1929–31 to stall on all the main issues: though acknowledging India’s claim to independence, its practice was to support the Simon Commission, the Trades Disputes Act (which limited the right to strike and associate), and the Meerut Trial (when 32 trade union leaders were given long terms of imprisonment or exile). By 1933 the National Council of the TUC and the Labour Party managed to denounce the trial as a “judicial scandal”, but while the party held office Walter Citrine told the TUC that the offences were merely “political” and the trial one “which in the opinion of the General Council does not directly affect the Indian trade union movement as such”.footnote¹⁰ The Labour Party, while conceding the principle of independence, was too timid to take positive action: maintenance of “trusteeship” and “good government” were the first priorities. And a large section of the party believed in the importance of India as a political and economic factor in Britain’s imperial greatness.

If most of the Fabian intellectuals were kept out of office and away from official party posts, they did play an important part in trying to humanize colonial policy. Their most significant victory was probably the affirmation by Webb that Kenya was to be administered in the interests of Africans rather than settlers; this victory marked the beginning of change in Africa. But when the left interested itself in the economics of Empire, it was unable to present any effective alternative to the policies of Leopold Amery and Ormsby-Gore. In Africa, the fear of being exploiters on the one hand and the fear of a growing African industry on the other, produced little incentive to systematic economic development. Throughout the whole of this period, Josiah Wedgwood attacked not only “sweated labour” but also any form of colonial development, and for most Labour MPs the evil to be avoided was the plantation system and large-scale industry: the alternative was always the primitive peasant cultivator. Thus the laissez-faire policy of MacDonald, the negative imperialism of Bevin and the TUC, and the humanitarianism of the centre-left reinforced each other. The ideal remained the West African tribesman preached to by civilizing missionaries. If conditions were too advanced for such ideals the territories were ignored unless they forced themselves on the attention of MPs. In 1922 the Conservative MP, E. F. L. Wood (later Lord Halifax) painted a glowing picture of the Caribbean after a visit to Jamaica and Trinidad. No Labour MP seems to have been interested in questioning the report. As late as 1935 it was possible for Lansbury to say, “The West Indies have not, indeed, been granted full self-government, but most of them have at least partial self-government. The rule of the governors is generally reported to be mild and enlightened”.footnote¹¹ Yet in 1938 the Frome sugar workers in Jamaica, followed by the dock-workers, launched a general strike which was broken by the most brutal of repressions.footnote¹² W. M. MacMillan published his “Warning from the West Indies”, and the Labour party began to be “concerned”.