During the course of this research I became inured to the comment that nothing new could be found to be said on this subject, yet in fact no detailed analysis of the response nationally of the labour movement to the Spanish Civil War has so far been published. This surprising lacuna in the literature of both the Civil War and the British labour movement is perhaps due in part to a lack of documentation, and I have been fortunate to have access to a number of previously unavailable sources (in particular the TUC archives) which have greatly informed my argument. However, the reason goes deeper than this and is, I would suggest, primarily historiographical. In the aftermath of the fall of the Spanish Republic, and in the absence of any sustained investigation into labour's role in the conflict, two conclusions became widely accepted. Firstly, that the response of the Labour Party and trade unions to the Civil War had been an unmitigated failure and, secondly, that this failure was due to a weakness in leadership, with the result that criticism was primarily directed at individuals rather than at institutions or bureaucratic procedures. Significantly, labour's leaders did little to counter this impression – after all, for most of them criticism of their role in the Civil War did not hinder their advance to grand and lengthy ministerial careers.