The Labour Party has always betrayed socialist hopes for a foreign policy that breaks with imperialist class interests, explains John Westmoreland 

The history of Labour’s foreign policy, rhetorically at least, has been a synthesis of the interests of class and nation. Out of office, the Labour left has often sounded the call for a more progressive foreign policy, but in government ‘nation’ has always been put before class. This wasn’t a uniquely Labour problem. Labour’s stance has been very similar to that of the Liberals whom they replaced as the electoral choice for the working class. 

Empire first 

The first Labour government headed by Ramsay McDonald in 1924 faced two foreign-policy challenges. First, what attitude should be adopted towards Communist Russia; and second, how should the call for Indian independence be met by Labour’s imperial stewardship? 

The Russian Revolution in 1917 had boosted the left in Labour, and the party had adopted socialism to the extent of including a socialist clause in its constitution. The socialist clause IV has never been more than socialist window dressing though. Once in office, Labour declared that there would be ‘no messing about with the British Empire’. McDonald sought to show his anti-Communist credentials, and resigned over the hoax ‘Zinoviev letter’. Labour turned a blind eye to British terror in India that had recently hit the headlines with the Amritsar Massacre, and that had intensified calls for democratic reform.  

In the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, the dictatorship of Mussolini in Italy, and the threat of war on the horizon, Labour’s foreign-policy stance was ‘collective security under the League of Nations’. It was a slogan detached from the reality of rapidly moving events. In 1932, Japan invaded Manchuria without provocation. This breech of international order was ignored by the League, which was led by Britain and France, both of whom were imperialist powers who decided that the threats to their own empires trumped the rights of Manchuria. 

Did the Labour Party protest over British desertion of ‘collective security’? Not a bit. On the eve of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, Labour passed a motion restating its belief in collective security aimed at ‘restraining the Italian government’. No mention of Mussolini’s stated racist motives for expanding the Italian empire, precisely because of Britain’s own bloody rule. The impotence of the League was displayed when they imposed some piddling sanctions on Italy, and this gave Hitler all the prompting he needed to lay claim to Austria and Czechoslovakia. 

Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1937 stirred some Labour consciences but produced no meaningful condemnation. It was left to the fascist-sympathising but empire-loving Winston Churchill to call out Chamberlain. Churchill did what Labour’s timidity stopped them from doing. He talked about Hitler feeding on the weakness of democratic countries and said explicitly that Hitler had to be stopped because he was an imminent danger. Labour gladly followed Churchill’s lead throughout the war years, raising little opposition to his brutal suppression of Indian Nationalists. 

When Labour was elected after the war ended, it was a chance to break with Britain’s imperial policy and turn to democratic solutions after the defeat of Nazism. The hopes of the Labour left were expressed at the 1945 Labour Party conference when Denis Healey demanded a clear break with the policies of the Tories and the National Government. He demanded that ‘the Labour Party should have a clear foreign policy of its own, which is completely distinct from that of the Tory Party’. 

Even so, on the day that the Labour victory was announced, Ernest Bevin said: ‘British foreign policy will not be altered in any way under the Labour Government.’ On becoming Foreign Secretary, he told the House of Commons: ‘The basis of our [foreign] policy is in keeping with that worked out by the Coalition Government’. He was cheered by the Tories, including his opposite number, Anthony Eden. 

It might appear that British attitudes to India were more magnanimous when India gained its independence during the Attlee administration. However, Britain was forced out by the threat of revolution after the Bombay Mutiny, which led to Attlee sending a cabinet mission to India to try to soothe India grievances. Even the editor of the Daily Mail admitted that to stay in India ‘would have needed an occupation force of 500,000 men’ – and no such force could have been made available, given Britain’s other commitments. Labour oversaw the division of India with the creation of Pakistan that led to a bloodbath as national boundaries were contested. 

As the British Empire’s disintegration gathered pace, Labour did all it could to defend Britain’s reputation and retain profitable links. Relations with apartheid South Africa were maintained without calling into question the white supremacist constitution, on the grounds that Britain could exercise a moderating effect on the government there. 

The story of South Africa was repeated time and again. In Malaysia, rebels fought in the Anti-British National Liberation War. Labour decided to sit back and let the military have a free hand. War was waged on the civilian population and, for the first time, chemicals and defoliants (agent orange) were used on rebel positions. Half a million civilians were placed in internment camps, entire villages were wiped out, and torture of prisoners was widespread. 

Bipartisanship – nation first 

In and out of office, Labour has always sought to prove itself fit to govern. On matters of key importance to the capitalist class, such as protecting their right to make profits, Labour has always stood alongside the Tories in defence of the nation and empire. To gain electoral advantage, Labour ministers have often gone beyond what the Tories might have done, and creating Britain’s atomic bomb is a telling example. 

It was Labour, under Attlee, that developed the atomic bomb in secret. This was after Attlee had a series of meetings with US President Truman, and without any cabinet involvement, nor debate in the House of Commons. Britain tested its first atomic bomb in 1952 in compliance with US foreign-policy aims, and only then did the public know about it. 

The Suez crisis briefly put bipartisanship under stress. At first, Labour opposed the British government’s use of force alongside France and Israel to reclaim the Suez Canal, after Nasser nationalised it on behalf of Egypt. Labour called a huge ‘Law not War’ demonstration in Trafalgar Square and the star speaker was the Labour left’s favourite son, Aneurin Bevan. However, Bevan’s argument was essentially patriotic. He denounced Nasser for ‘stealing private property’, and opposed the use of armed intervention because it might destroy Nato. 

Aden was the last outpost of empire and, in the 1960s, Arab nationalists rose against British rule. Under Harold Wilson’s government, there was the suggestion that decolonisation would become policy. The rebellious Arabs in Aden were suppressed with ‘tribal violence’ by the Sutherland Highlanders led by Lt. Colonel Colin ‘Mad Mitch’ Mitchell. Mitchell was celebrated for his war crimes in the British media, and Labour, shamefully, failed to hold him to account for random shootings, arrests and beatings. His intention to humiliate Arabs by making them kowtow to him, titillated the old imperial remnants in the British ruling class, and Labour let him get away with it. Mitchell was never tried and became a Tory MP. 

Bipartisanship has continued to this day, as we have seen in the British relationship to Israel following the US lead. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Labour and the Tories were in lockstep over repressing the aspirations for a united Ireland, supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa, and maintaining hostility to free migration from the British Commonwealth. Labour spokesmen in the Commons refused to offer any radical departure from the policy laid down by the Tories. 

Working-class militancy, in the years before Thatcher came to power, did maintain a Labour left. They marched against the bomb with CND, opposed the Vietnam War and condemned the racist anti-migrant rhetoric of the Labour leadership. The Labour left played an important role within humanitarian campaigns by giving a voice to the oppressed, but it was of limited effect within the Labour Party itself, which slavishly followed the lead of the USA in world affairs. 

Cold War warriors 

British foreign policy after World War II saw Western imperialism pivot in favour of the USA, which was now dominant economically and militarily. A bipolar world emerged in a ‘Cold War’ contested by the USA and the USSR. Imperialism east and west offered nothing to the working class and led to an arms race in concert with an attack on working-class internationalism. The Cold War also led to internal surveillance regimes that spied on socialists and trade unionists. In Britain, MI5 maintained a file on a suspected socialist traitor called Henry Worthington, a code name for the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. 

Wilson’s Labour government in the 1960s turned out to be the most loyal supporter of US imperialism. Britain’s declining imperial grandeur and subordination to US interests made Britain a US stooge. The US-British relationship was called a ‘special relationship’ by the British to disguise their subordination to the boss. 

The Vietnam War provided an acid test for Labour’s submission to the foreign policy of the USA. The mass bombing, use of chemical weapons on civilians and the wiping out of villagers who were suspected of supporting the North Vietnamese troops enraged the social conscience of millions across the globe. However, Wilson applauded bombing the North and ‘made absolutely plain our support for the American stand against Communist infiltration into South Vietnam.’ 

Wilson praised US President Johnson as progressive, and he revealed the economic hold that the USA had on Britain in 1966. Wilson explained that US ‘financial support is not unrelated to the way we behave in the Far East: any direct announcement of our withdrawal [of support], for example, could not fail to have a profound effect on my personal relations with LBJ and the way the Americans treat us.’ 

The Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan made plain their subservience to US demands and set the stage for Margaret Thatcher to take the so-called special relationship with her chum Ronald Reagan onto the world stage. It is worth saying in passing that Thatcher tried to reheat Britain’s imperial grandeur with a war against Argentina over the Falklands, just as Reagan tried to rebuild US prestige after defeat in Vietnam.  

Reagan and Thatcher are regarded as the champions of neoliberalism that broke the power of trade unions and started to drive a wedge between social-democratic politics and the working class. The climax of their influence on international relations came with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The undefended minds of some intellectuals thought this moment to be the ‘end of history’: the complete victory of capitalism. 

Western imperialist narratives were to become enriched with rhetoric about wars for freedom, democracy and human liberation that infected Labour Party thinking, dragging it away from socialist pretensions, and towards market-centred foreign-policy involvement.  

It is no coincidence that Tony Blair took Labour towards neoliberal pro-war interventions after getting rid of Labour’s ‘socialist’ clause IV from the constitution. It has often been said, including by Thatcher herself, that her greatest achievement was the destruction of Labour’s socialist pretensions and the inauguration of her adopted son as party leader. Blair’s first act as Prime Minister in 1997 was to invite Thatcher back to Downing Street for a chat. 

Poodles with attitude 

Labour’s adoption of neoliberal foreign policy gave leaders like Blair a chance to perform on the world stage. The old synthesis of class and nation was gone. Now there was just nation, but not a nasty nation, not a selfish imperialist nation, not an anything for capitalist interests nation, oh no. Now the national cause, and the wars that came with it, was at the same time a war for humanity! This stood arguments about war on their head. Anti-war protesters were castigated for impeding the inherent humanitarianism of bombers and tanks, by supporting the reactionary targets of US imperialism. 

Blair launched his campaign to be the darling of Western capitalism with a speech to the Chicago Economic Club in 1999, after having championed the war in Kosovo as a humanitarian intervention that left thousands dead and intensified ethnic conflict in the Balkans. 

The speech has been labelled the Blair Doctrine. Blair used his performative skills to say that capitalism was great and his role would be to make it greater. The speech pushes all the buttons available at a meeting of very rich conscienceless predators: globalisation, the overhaul of government relations with the people (tough decisions aplenty), and taking steps to ensure the hegemony of free-market capitalism through finance, the UN, Nato and technology. 

Blair set himself up as an articulate voice for US imperialism, and they took him at his word. He got feted by the capitalist media that encouraged him to go ever further. The euphoria reached a climax in wars in the Middle East. A ‘war for democracy’ gave way to the ‘war on terror’ and spawned an officially sanctioned anti-Muslim racism that has given succour to fascists and far-right demagogues ever since. 

However, the exclusion of working-class solidarity from his script cost Blair his reputation. The Stop the War Coalition in Britain produced the biggest demonstration Britain has ever seen. Blair was exposed as the hapless poodle to President George Bush. His posturing, lies to the British public and the death and destruction he gave his name to wrecked his cherished public persona and he fell from office disgraced. 

The problem for Labour leaders after Blair was how to unpick what he did, if they wanted to restore the battered reputation of the party. This has proved impossible. The bosses that benefited from war and the extension of the market into public life are unwilling to retreat, and Labour are unwilling and unfit to challenge them. The leadership of Jeremy Corbyn aimed to restore Labour’s relevance to the working class and make the case for an ethical foreign policy, but that was never going to be acceptable to the ruling class. 

Blair’s neoliberal take on Corbynism as ‘a brand of crazy revolutionary socialism, mixing far-left economic policy with deep hostility to Western foreign policy’ really sums up the establishment’s hostility to Jeremy, and their endorsement of the stuffed shirt that is Sir Keir Starmer today. 

Trotsky once remarked that reformist politicians, adept at the art of factional manoeuvring, intrigue and point scoring, once faced with ‘momentous contingencies’ reveal themselves as complete fools. And that sums up everything about Starmer and the current leadership of the Labour Party that goes forward reiterating the clapped out neoliberal nonsense of their fallen idol, Tony Blair. 

Starmer has done everything by the Blairite book. Complete support for US foreign policy in the Middle East and Ukraine was supposed to restore Labour’s credibility. But the old stage props for US wars – democracy, freedom and human rights – have lost their usefulness. The US and UK-backed genocide in Gaza is impossible to sanitise without massive and absurd media manipulation, and the millions who have marched for Palestine for more than a year bear this out. And in Ukraine, the war without end that has cost the US over $69 billion, is no longer supported by the Ukrainian people, and has prompted Trump to call a halt there. 

Labour’s time-honoured submission to US foreign policy has hamstrung Starmer. Without US leadership telling him what to do, he has no choice but to try to make himself relevant by doubling down on his commitment to weapons spending and has gone so far as to hint that British troops could be sent to defend Ukraine. Yet, all his high-sounding phrases about standing by Ukraine cannot conceal the fact that he has been left to clean up the mess Trump has dumped on him.  

Internationalism 

We shouldn’t feel one moment of sorrow for Starmer’s plight. The real victims are under the rubble of Gaza, and still fleeing Israeli bombs supplied by Uncle Sam. The foreign policy we need is rooted in internationalism. International solidarity against war and oppression. International cooperation to rescue the planet from the ravages of climate disaster and the poverty and misery it generates.  

Labour has abandoned any pretensions of international solidarity between working people. It is up to us to put it back on the agenda.