Passports refused for the Stockholm conference

On 13 August 1917 Andrew Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons, announced that the government would not issue passports to British delegates to the international socialist conference in Stockholm. He added that the governments of the United States, France and Italy had decided likewise. This came only three days after a special Labour Party conference had decided that the party would send its representatives to Stockholm. The War Cabinet had settled the matter on 11 August, the day on which the party secretary, Arthur Henderson, resigned his seat in it.

The government had prepared the ground earlier. At the request of Edward Carson, a minister opposed to Stockholm, the War Cabinet sought the opinion of the Attorney General, Sir Frederick Edwin Smith. On 6 August Smith ruled that taking part in a peace conference together with subjects of enemy states would constitute trading with the enemy, forbidden in wartime. The British, however, wanted the decision to look like a joint decision of the Allies. On Saturday 11 August the British ambassador in Rome informed the Italians that on Monday London would announce its refusal, and asked whether Italy would do the same, as this would greatly ease matters for his government. The Italian Minister of the Interior, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, observed that the Italian government had decided not to issue passports as early as the end of June, and that nobody had in fact asked him for passports to Stockholm. Washington had announced its refusal in May and France in June, and when the French socialists finally decided on 11 and 12 August to go, the French government upheld the ban.

That same day in the House of Commons Henderson made a statement on his resignation, followed by a long debate. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, accused the former minister of having concealed from the Labour delegates a note from the Russian government stating that Petrograd regarded the conference as a party matter and did not intend to treat its resolutions as binding. The Russians, who had supported Stockholm most strongly, did not hide their disappointment. On 15 August the Provisional Government declared in a communiqué that it had never opposed the issuing of passports and had urged the Allies to remove the obstacles. Even the British ambassador in Petrograd, George Buchanan, advised his government to issue the passports, so that the Russians would not be left alone in Stockholm with socialists from enemy and neutral states.

The refusal settled the matter. Even had the government changed its mind, the delegates would have had difficulty travelling, as the seamen’s union declared that its members would not carry any “peace delegates”. In June they had in this way already stopped Ramsay MacDonald at Aberdeen when he was setting out for Russia. The general conference in Stockholm, convened by the Dutch and Scandinavian socialists and the Petrograd Soviet, was postponed several more times and never met. In September only a much smaller gathering was held there, the third conference of the left-wing movement begun at Zimmerwald. A meeting of the socialists of the Entente countries in London at the end of August ended in a quarrel.

For the Labour Party the Stockholm affair proved a turning point. Henderson, humiliated by his Cabinet colleagues, stopped believing that the party could influence war policy from within the coalition government. Together with Sidney Webb he began to prepare a programme of war aims of its own and a reform of the party, which in 1918 received a new constitution and became an independent force capable of fighting for power.