Whilst the mainstream of the labour movement supported the war effort throughout the four years of the First World War, this narrative is qualified by acute episodes of resistance to the state and battles against wartime deprivations. Further, especially in the final two years of the war, a radical anti-war movement began to gain momentum and, whilst remaining a minority within the Left as a whole, developed an internationalist and pacifistic ideology which would largely be adopted by Labour in the 1920s. This chapter will examine opposition to the war from the Left. It will first discuss the issue of conscription in 1915–16, the periodic strikes that threatened to cripple industries during the war, the soldiers’ strikes and mutinies after the Armistice, the anti-war movement and centres of supposed resistance to the patriotism of the war years, and finally the Leeds and Stockholm conferences of 1917, which seemed to herald a break from the government line and a demand for an early peace settlement.

Conscription, 1916–18

Contrary to the qualified support for the war effort across most of the labour movement, on the issue of conscription there was near unanimous opposition. This owed as much to traditional British opposition to ‘militarism’ and the constraint of individual liberties as it did to a tremendous and genuinely held fear that conscription might be used to curb hard-won trade union rights. In August 1915 the General Federation of Trade Unions declared that virtually every trades council in the land had issued resolutions against conscription, and a unanimous resolution was passed against the measure at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) annual meeting of the following month. In September 1915, Jimmy Thomas told the House of Commons that the railways would strike if conscription were introduced, and as late as January 1916 – when conscription was effectively a fait accompli – delegates representing 2,121,000 unionists voted against the measure at a special conference in Westminster. The TUC of that year called on the Parliamentary Labour Party to ‘lose no opportunity after the war to press for the repeal of all Acts of Parliament imposing economic, industrial, and military conscription upon the manhood of the nation’.