Labour backs the Stockholm conference

On 10 August 1917 a special conference of the British Labour Party met in London. Delegates of the trade unions and socialist societies were to decide whether the party would accept the invitation to an international socialist conference in Stockholm, at which socialists from the Entente countries, the Central Powers and the neutral states were to discuss terms of peace. In the morning the party secretary, Arthur Henderson, a member of David Lloyd George’s five-man War Cabinet, spoke. To the government’s surprise he urged the delegates to vote for going. The motion was carried by 1,846,000 votes to 550,000 (in the Labour Party organisations voted according to the number of their members).

Where the conference came from

The idea of a gathering of socialists from all the belligerent countries had been put forward in the spring of 1917 by Dutch and Scandinavian socialists, grouped in a committee whose members included the Swede Hjalmar Branting and the secretary of the Second International, the Belgian Camille Huysmans. It was warmly supported by the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which demanded a peace without annexations or indemnities. The governments of the United States, France and Italy had already refused passports to their socialists in May and June. The British government hesitated for a time, because it did not want to offend its Russian allies. The Labour Party leadership at first rejected taking part in the conference.

It was Henderson who changed his mind. From June to the middle of July he had been in Russia on the War Cabinet’s instructions, to sustain the Russian will to fight. There he became convinced that the Provisional Government, headed since July by Alexander Kerensky, was weak, and that refusing to talk in Stockholm would leave the field to the far left. After returning to London, on 25 July he persuaded the party leadership to support attending the conference, on condition that its resolutions would bind nobody. Immediately afterwards he went to Paris with Ramsay MacDonald, an opponent of the war, and George Wardle for talks with the French socialists and a delegation of the Petrograd Soviet. The War Cabinet considered that a joint journey by a minister and MacDonald on the matter of a gathering attended by Germans compromised the government. On 1 August, when Henderson arrived for a Cabinet meeting, he was made to wait in the anteroom while the ministers discussed him without him for nearly an hour. The episode went down in history as the “doormat incident”.

The vote

The government hoped that the conference of 10 August would itself reject going. Ministers thought this would be more convenient for the Russian government and for relations with the labour movement than if they announced a ban themselves. They were also convinced that Henderson, in view of the changes in Russia, would come out against the conference. Instead Henderson, who had obtained the renewed support of the party leadership the day before, spoke for going, although he stipulated that the conference should be consultative rather than binding. MacDonald urged the delegates to go to Stockholm and come back “with the basis of peace in their pockets”. Two Labour members of the government spoke against: the Minister of Pensions, George Barnes, and George Roberts.

The greatest controversy was caused by something Henderson did not say. Just before the conference the Russian chargé d’affaires in London, Konstantin Nabokov, passed to the British government a note from the Foreign Minister, Mikhail Tereshchenko. The Russian government, it said, did not consider it possible to forbid Russians to travel to Stockholm, but regarded the conference as a party matter, and its resolutions would in no way bind it. Lloyd George asked Henderson to inform the delegates of this. Henderson did not read out the note. He later explained that he had conveyed its substance in general remarks about the change of mood in Russia. His opponents accused him of misleading his own party, which had voted in the belief that this was what Russia wanted. Tereshchenko afterwards gave assurances that the Provisional Government’s position had not changed and that the comment had been Nabokov’s personal interpretation.

Henderson’s resignation

After the conference there was a sharp exchange between the Prime Minister and Henderson. Lloyd George believed he had been deceived: Henderson had not warned the Cabinet that he would speak for Stockholm, and on the evening before the conference he had denied to newspaper offices reports that he would oppose going. Henderson replied that as party secretary he could not oppose the position of its leadership without giving up his post. On 11 August he resigned from the War Cabinet. The letters he exchanged with the Prime Minister appeared in the press two days later. His place in the Cabinet was taken by Barnes.

The victory of the Stockholm supporters proved short-lived. On 21 August, at the second session of the conference, after the miners changed their position, the majority shrank to about 3,000 votes out of nearly two and a half million cast. Henderson, free of his ministerial duties, now devoted himself to rebuilding the Labour Party as an independent force capable of taking power.