/media/bill/PROJECTS/Icebreaker/Casting the leadership/0_Casting the leadership.txt ****************************** 23Mar2018 search "Soviet influence over Labour Party support for Winston Churchill in 1940 that made him Prime minister" https://www.marxists.org/archive/pollitt/1940/08/communists-labour.htm Harry Pollitt 1940 The Communist Party and the Labour Party Source: International Press Correspondence, Volume 20, no 31, 3 August 1940. Scanned, prepared and annotated for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers. >> Interesting - may lead somewhere? Shows big separation between Labour & Communist Parties, but overlap as well. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Winston-Churchill In January 1919 he became secretary of war. As such he presided with surprising zeal over the cutting of military expenditure. The major preoccupation of his tenure in the War Office was, however, the Allied intervention in Russia. Churchill, passionately anti-Bolshevik, secured from a divided and loosely organized cabinet an intensification and prolongation of the British involvement beyond the wishes of any major group in Parliament or the nation—and in the face of the bitter hostility of labour. And in 1920, after the last British forces had been withdrawn, Churchill was instrumental in having arms sent to the Poles when they invaded the Ukraine. ... The German invasion of the Low Countries, on May 10, 1940, came like a hammer blow on top of the Norwegian fiasco. Chamberlain resigned. He wanted Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, to succeed him, but Halifax wisely declined. It was obvious that Churchill alone could unite and lead the nation, since the Labour Party, for all its old distrust of Churchill’s anti-Socialism, recognized the depth of his commitment to the defeat of Hitler. >> This could easdily be a [total, complete] misinterpretation, unsee-able to ANY [government, aqcademic] intellectuals to the present day. Socialists were pro-bolshevik in spite of the terrors in Russia, and likely had to toe Moscow's dictates. Moscow wanted the [UK,USA,France,etc] to attack Hitler as part of their "Icebreaker" plan. http://ww2today.com/10th-may-1940-churchill-becomes-prime-minister Chamberlain concluded that he would have to resign, even though he had won the vote. He recognised the need to allow a new Prime Minister to form a National Government, in which all the political Parties would be represented. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax was a strong contender but he ruled himself out because he sat in the Lords and it would be difficult to lead the Commons from there. He probably recognised that he was himself too closely associated with Chamberlain’s policies. The Labour Party leadership intimated to Chamberlain that they were only prepared to serve under Churchill. The matter was effectively decided by the afternoon of the 9th May. However it depended upon the Labour Party formally agreeing that they would serve under Churchill in a coalition government of national unity. Despite the events of the early hours of the morning in Europe, on the 10th May the most senior figures in the Labour Party took the 11.34am train from Waterloo station out of London. They travelled to Bournemouth on the south coast, where they were about to begin their Party Conference. They stuck rigidly to their procedural rules. It was not until 5pm that the Labour Leader telegrammed London to say that they would serve under Churchill. Chamberlain immediately went to too see the King and ‘offered’ his resignation. The King then called for Churchill and ‘invited’ him to become Prime Minister. He did not formally assume the role until 6pm. https://qa.history.com/this-day-in-history/churchill-becomes-prime-minister In 1938, Prime Minister Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, giving Czechoslovakia over to German conquest but bringing, as Chamberlain promised, “peace in our time.” In September 1939, that peace was shattered by Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Chamberlain declared war against Germany but during the next eight months showed himself to be ill-equipped for the daunting task of saving Europe from Nazi conquest. After British forces failed to prevent the German occupation of Norway in April 1940, Chamberlain lost the support of many members of his Conservative Party. On May 10, Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The same day, Chamberlain formally lost the confidence of the House of Commons. Churchill, who was known for his military leadership ability, was appointed British prime minister in his place. He formed an all-party coalition and quickly won the popular support of Britons. On May 13, in his first speech before the House of Commons, Prime Minister Churchill declared that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and offered an outline of his bold plans for British resistance. In the first year of his administration, Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany, but Churchill promised his country and the world that the British people would “never surrender.” They never did. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/pm_and_pol_tl_01.shtml Ramsay MacDonald, Labour, 1924 Ramsay MacDonald In 1924, MacDonald briefly became the first Labour prime minister, ending two centuries of Conservative - Liberal domination of British politics. It was the first party to gain power with the express purpose of representing the voice of the 'working class'. An MP since 1906, MacDonald was respected as a thinker, but criticised by many within his own party as insufficiently radical (despite appointing the first female cabinet minister, Margaret Bondfield, in 1929). His opposition to World War One had made him deeply unpopular and he continually suffered a torrid time at the hands of the press. The publication by two newspapers of the 'Zinoviev letter' did much to damage his chances in the run up to the 1924 election. The letter (which he had seen but decided to keep secret) purported to be from Soviet intelligence and urged British communists to commit acts of sedition. He lost by a wide margin. The letter is now widely accepted to be a fraud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee First elected to the House of Commons in 1922 as the MP for Limehouse, Attlee rose quickly to become a junior minister in the first Labour minority government led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, and then joined the Cabinet during MacDonald's second ministry of 1929–31. One of only a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain his seat in the landslide defeat of 1931, he became the party's Deputy Leader. After the resignation of George Lansbury in 1935, he was elected as Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition in the subsequent leadership election. At first advocating pacificism and opposing rearmament, he later reversed his position; by 1938, he became a strong critic of Neville Chamberlain's attempts to appease Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He took Labour into the Churchill war ministry in 1940. Initially serving as Lord Privy Seal, he was appointed as Deputy Prime Minister in 1942. Attlee and Churchill worked together very smoothly, with Attlee working backstage to handle much of the detail and organisational work in Parliament, as Churchill took centre stage with his attention on diplomacy, military policy, and broader issues. With victory in Europe in May 1945, the coalition government was dissolved. Attlee led Labour to win a huge majority in the ensuing 1945 general election two months later. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/12/ralph-raico/rethinking-churchill-2/ In 1940, Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough when the Chamberlain government resigned because of the Norwegian fiasco — which Churchill, more than anyone else, had helped to bring about.[75] As he had fought against a negotiated peace after the fall of Poland, so he continued to resist any suggestion of negotiations with Hitler. Many of the relevant documents are still sealed — after all these years[76] — but it is clear that a strong peace party existed in the country and the government. It included Lloyd George in the House of Commons, and Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in the Cabinet. Even after the fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler’s renewed peace overtures. This, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. The British historian John Charmley raised a storm of outraged protest when he suggested that a negotiated peace in 1940 might have been to the advantage of Britain and Europe.[77] A Yale historian, writing in the New York Times Book Review, referred to Charmley’s thesis as “morally sickening.”[78] Yet Charmley’s scholarly and detailed work makes the crucial point that Churchill’s adamant refusal even to listen to peace terms in 1940 doomed what he claimed was dearest to him — the Empire and a Britain that was non-socialist and independent in world affairs. One may add that it probably also doomed European Jewry.[79] It is amazing that half a century after the fact, there are critical theses concerning World War II that are off-limits to historical debate. Lloyd George, Halifax, and the others were open to a compromise peace because they understood that Britain and the Dominions alone could not defeat Germany.[80] After the fall of France, Churchill’s aim of total victory could be realized only under one condition: that the United States become embroiled in another world war. No wonder that Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring precisely that.