The British Left and support for the First World War

What is it about?

This book concerns the actions of the British Left during the First World War, concentrating on the majority of the labour movement which supported British involvement in and prosecution of the conflict. It encompases the attitudes of the British Left to nationalism and patriotism in the years immediately before outbreak of the war; the breadth and depth of support for the conflict on the Left; the minority who actively and consistently opposed the conflict; the efforts taken by the labour movement to protect the workers during the war; the effects of the conflict on the status development of the Labour party; and finally the importance of left-wing patriotism in ensuring that Labour remained united and emerged as a stronger, more coherent force in 1918.

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Why is it important?

This is the first volume to concentrate on left-wing patriotism in Britain during the First World War. It serves as a corrective to accounts that overstate left-wing opposition to the war, and to ahistorical, anachronistic analyses which see the Second World War as the 'good' war, and the 1914-1918 conflict as an imperialist blunder. It demonstrates the signficance of the First World War to the statist development of the Labour party after 1918 and in the run up to the 1945 general election, and argues that left-wing patriotism during 1914-1918 was crucial to labour unity and cohesion in the inter-war period.