Bolshevik bogies: red scares in Britain, 1919-24

ABSTRACT

The establishment of an anti-socialist hegemony has been widely accepted as the pivot of the Conservative Party’s electoral dominance in the interwar period. Anti-communism as a component of anti-socialist discourse, though commonly alluded to, has not received systematic attention, and is known above all for its appearance during the 1924 election campaign by way of the Zinoviev letter. This article offers the first comprehensive account of British political anti-communism in the early 1920s and reinterprets its significance and reach by demonstrating the vast extent to which it saturated Conservative propaganda between 1919 and 1924, as well as the range of social groups it sought to appeal to by these methods. It explores the origins and development of political anti-communism from the ‘first red scare’ in 1919-21 to the infamous 1924 campaign, punctuated by a series of ‘little red scares’ by which the fear of communism was perpetuated among key demographics. The 1924 election, rather than being seen chiefly as a triumph of ‘progressive’ Baldwinite Conservatism, must be understood in this context of a developed and pervasive anti-communist discourse that could be effectively deployed to engender a red scare under certain conditions, which the first Labour government was not the first to provide.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-communism
• anti-socialism
• Conservative Party
• Labour party
• Soviet Union

The 1924 general election was a pivotal moment in modern British politics. The Conservatives’ landslide victory, as Maurice Cowling argued, laid the foundation of their interwar hegemony by allowing them to take up the leadership of resistance to Socialism.¹ But to fully understand the scale of Conservative success, there must be an understanding of what shaped and legitimised the political discourse that predominated it. The anti-communist message—typically embodied by the trinity of the Russian treaties, Campbell Case, and Zinoviev letter—that helped carry the Conservative Party into government has to be viewed in a broader context, for the sheer magnitude of the Conservative victory cannot be adequately explained only by longer-term structural or organisational factors nor by reference to one brief election cycle. Historians have recognised the centrality of political discourse to the Conservatives’ electoral hegemony in the interwar period, however the full extent to which this anti-socialist discourse was permeated with a secondary vocabulary of anti-communism in the early 1920s, and how integral it was not only in electoral contests throughout the immediate post-war years but also in laying the groundwork for the Conservatives’ 1924 campaign has not been properly appreciated.²

Anti-socialism, which is universally accepted by the historiography of interwar British politics as the chief tenet of the Conservative Party, can be traced as a political issue to the Edwardian period with the emergence of the Labour Party and New Liberalism, though it was not until the post-war years that it generated significant political capital for the Conservative Party, when Labour became a serious electoral contender, working-class militancy reached an all-time peak, and the Bolshevik Revolution loomed large over both.³ In this environment anti-socialism developed an ancillary form: anti-communism (or anti-bolshevism as it is sometimes described). Whilst anti-socialism as a whole was primarily negative in its appeal, anti-communism was entirely so, taking advantage of the widespread fears of Bolshevik intrigue in Britain.⁴ In common with its American counterpart, ‘rightwing anti-communism, lumped together all forms of radicalism, non-violent and violent, stating “that the aims and purposes of the Socialist Party [were] substantially identical with those of the Communists”’.⁵ Anti-communism was therefore the less rational and restrained subsidiary of anti-socialism, occupying a prominent place in the Conservative platform insofar as a conjuncture of labour-related fears arose, most notably during the 1924 election campaign.

British anti-communism is not a particularly well-explored concept, at least not in the realm of political history.⁶ Jennifer Luff in a recent work has described it as a ‘historiographical nonentity’.⁷ As far as dedicated studies are concerned, Luff is about right. However, one can find references to the manifestations of anti-communism littered throughout interwar political historiography, especially that of the Conservative Party. There is of course no paucity of accounts detailing the notorious 1924 election campaign in which red scare tactics were at the forefront. The antecedents of this campaign, necessary to fully explain why so many electors bought into the Conservatives’ anti-communist messaging enough to deliver them an unprecedented majority, are less understood. A number of influential works do touch upon the impact of anti-communism on Conservative perceptions of the labour movement and how these were put to use in an electoral and organisational capacity prior to the 1924 election, but the treatment is largely incidental.⁸ An insightful work that probes political anti-communism a little further is Laura Beers’ chapter on how Labour sought to counteract anti-socialist discourse, which additionally provides the best overview of Conservative anti-communist rhetoric, although it does not utilise Conservative Party sources and neglects the formative 1919–21 period during which this rhetoric was ingrained in political discourse.⁹

That political anti-communism has not yet been afforded systematic consideration owes something to the interpretive sway over the historiography of the mythos of Stanley Baldwin and his popular appeal. Geraint Thomas has noted how many historians see the 1924 election as a vindication of ‘Baldwinite Conservatism’ and his aptitude for communication with the masses, moderate anti-socialism that could accommodate Labour and social reform, and non-partisan rhetoric, such that they ‘have come to interpret the Conservative victory of 1924, so long considered a key moment in the realignment of British politics and the establishment of the modern two-party system, as something of a personal triumph for Baldwin’.¹⁰ Whilst a considerable role for Baldwin should not be denied, it must be remembered that Baldwinite anti-socialism, which did not incorporate too significant an element of anti-communism, was not representative of Conservative national propaganda nor most Conservatives in the constituencies, and this article rejects privileging it over more negative Conservative discourse.¹¹ The two complemented each other—as John Ramsden put it, ‘his image was vital to give the attack on Labour the stamp of moral authority’—but despite the declarations of proponents of the ‘Baldwin thesis’ it is difficult, if not impossible, to definitively say which was more impactful.¹² It is not beyond reason to suggest, however, that more voters were likely exposed to the vehement anti-communist discourse of Conservative candidates and propaganda than Baldwin’s conciliatory speeches, which for most would have been read in the regional and national conservative press whose contents otherwise largely reflected the former.¹³ This article, by its very focus on this type of anti-socialism, naturally makes the case for according it a greater significance than much of the historiography has done thus far.

It also places itself in the context of the growing recognition that a, or perhaps the Cold War existed from the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution and that Britain, as the only global power and primary antagonist of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, fulfiled a similar role to that of the United States in the post-1945 world.¹⁴ It therefore seeks to provide a fuller picture on how this Cold War manifested in domestic British politics as is being done with regard to the Cold War proper.¹⁵

It is argued that Conservative anti-communism took shape and established its fundamental characteristics and themes in the ‘first red scare’ of 1919–21. Fears occasioned by domestic circumstances, namely extensive strike action and the advance of the Labour Party, were linked by way of party-political propaganda and the press to the revolutionary situation unfolding in Russia. The anti-communism that rooted itself in Conservative political discourse during this period was, once the combativeness of organised labour had subsided by mid-1921, subsequently sustained and evolved by a series of ‘little red scares’ - a concept borrowed from American scholarship—until once more it regained pride of place in the leadup to the 1924 election campaign, whereby it hastened the Labour government’s downfall and contributed significantly to the Liberal collapse and Conservative landslide brought by the election.¹⁶ This course is charted throughout, beginning with an analysis of the first red scare and the ways in which it was tapped into—with mixed results—by party propaganda for a number of purposes, including as an appeal to the middle-classes, the working-class, and women. The little red scares, in which the Conservatives kept alive and honed their anti-communist appeal principally through the anti-Socialist Sunday schools campaign, are then delineated. Hereinafter is provided an account of the first Labour government’s downfall and the 1924 election campaign it precipitated. The campaign is surveyed through the novel lens of Conservative election literature, with a particular view to exploring the thematic continuities from the preceding red scares.

The article draws primarily upon underutilised Conservative Party leaflets and pamphlets, as well as local, regional and national newspaper sources. The party’s propaganda material, despite the exhortations of historians like David Jarvis, has remained relatively understudied, although it was the main channel for disseminating their message in this period and, regional variations notwithstanding, its themes were reproduced to a considerable degree by speakers and candidates.¹⁷ Given how prominently anti-communism features in this material, the reliance of the Conservatives on red scares and the diversity of voters they sought to attract through these methods prior to the 1924 election, and how much this election campaign itself owed to earlier red scares, has been rather overlooked—something this article seeks to correct.

The first red scare, 1919–21

The profound changes heaped upon the British political system in the late 1910s and early 1920s were greeted by most Conservatives, perhaps predictably, with feelings of anxiety and apprehension. The granting of the vote to most of the working-class, the meteoric rise of the Labour Party, and the militancy of an increasingly unionised workforce gave reason for Conservatives to be fearful of a working-class that they neither trusted nor understood. This proletarian dawn to many seemed to spell their political doomsday.¹⁸ That all of this was set against the backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution compounded Conservative fears a great deal; for them it served as a shining beacon of what might befall Britain if revolutionaries were permitted to spread their ideas unchecked among the newly-empowered industrial working-class. It is, as Ross McKibbin has noted, ‘plain that the British working class was never a revolutionary one’, nor did Conservatives ever necessarily look upon it as such.¹⁹ But their faith in the working-class only went so far, and the example set by Russia of a proletarian party sweeping to power with such alacrity in combination with strikes abound was enough to instil deep-seated fears of a potential revolution at home. Add to this the unrelenting media frenzy surrounding the Bolsheviks in Russia and their conspiracies in Britain, and Conservatives had all the ingredients necessary for a red scare to materialise. Tentative steps to exploit this were taken during the 1918 election, though it was a minor issue relative to post-war foreign policy and domestic social reform.²⁰ It was in the years 1919–21, when large-scale strikes became commonplace and Labour emerged as a worrying electoral challenger, that the red scare developed into a centrepiece of Conservative strategy, which attempted to bind these phenomena with the fear and uncertainty brought about by the Bolshevik Revolution.

The hysteria around ‘Bolshevism’ in Britain was not whipped up in purely cynical fashion as a bludgeon with which to beat the Labour Party. It was keenly and honestly felt by many politicians, civil servants and businessmen, and not least by Conservative ministers, who failed to comprehend the nature of the labour militancy they were confronted with. As a wave of strikes hit Britain from early 1919, including general strikes in Belfast and Glasgow and police strikes in London and Liverpool, ministers saw themselves as ‘up against a Bolshevist movement in London, Glasgow, and elsewhere’.²¹ Railway and electrical workers were not engaged in ‘bona fide strikes, but a Bolshevik attack upon the whole public’, and even the discharged soldiers’ societies ‘were in a dangerous mood and tainted with Bolshevism’.²² In reality, this militancy was concerned generally with pay and conditions—a 44 and 40-hour workweek were the respective demands in Belfast and Glasgow—but to members of a government that was greatly occupied by unprecedented labour action at home and the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution abroad, when it looked to them that ‘in a short time we might have three-quarters of Europe converted to Bolshevism’, panic was common and red agitators seemed to be pulling the strings of striking workers for purposes of revolution rather than reform.²³

In turn, the response to several strikes in the period laboured under this exaggeration; 10,000 troops and six tanks were put on standby around Glasgow for instance. The nascent intelligence complex was also geared almost in its entirety towards surveilling communists real and imagined ²⁴ The persecution of communists was not all cloak and dagger either, with many arrested and prosecuted, usually under one archaic law or another, for publicly expressing their beliefs.²⁵ The state’s response was complemented by an equally apprehensive element of the capitalist class, which invested large sums of money to establish a network of organisations to counter the red menace.²⁶ This ’crusade for capitalism’ as it was termed by one champion involved a volume of propaganda second only to the Conservative apparatus explored in this article—although the overlap in personnel was considerable—and the blacklisting from employment of so-called ’subversives’, loosely defined.²⁷

To be sure, Conservatives were not alone in either succumbing to or stirring up this red scare. It was after all the Liberal minister Robert Munro (Secretary for Scotland) who notoriously thought it ‘a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike—it was a Bolshevist rising’.²⁸ The Coalitionist faction of the Liberal Party under David Lloyd George’s leadership largely shared these fears and also contributed to their propagation; the Prime Minister’s rhetoric in this regard could rival that of any Tory backwoodsman. Their contribution was, however, of much less significance than the Conservatives. Besides the fact that the vigour of the Liberals was in steep decline, the party and its affiliated press, already bitterly divided along the lines of Lloyd George and Herbert Asquith, were never completely on board with the red scare brand of anti-communism. The Liberal split was reflected in the usage of political anti-communism. Lloyd George, perhaps more opportunistic than fearful of the red menace himself, discerned its utility not only as a cheap electoral point-scorer against Labour, but as the ground on which he could justify coalition to both his Liberal followers and Conservative collaborators, often evoking ‘Socialism, and the fear of Communism, Bolshevism, and red ruin … to keep the Liberal Coalitionists united to the Tories’.²⁹ Asquith on the other hand took the exact opposite line as a means of discrediting Liberal participation in the Coalition, which forced him and the section of the party under his control to come to Labour’s defence. He was adamant that ‘the rank and file of the Liberals were not going to be harnessed to the wheels of the Tory chariot in an insensate crusade against the imaginary peril of Bolshevism’, claiming that ‘there was no logical antithesis between Liberalism and Labour’.³⁰ Even after the Liberal reunion in 1923, the party was almost schizophrenic in its use of anti-communist rhetoric. Lloyd George and his acolytes mostly dropped it once their Coalition days came to an end, only to hastily revive it during the 1924 election campaign in what must have appeared to all as a blatant stunt after having previously supported the Labour government, whereas Asquith’s band stayed the course of eschewing such tactics throughout most of the campaign.³¹ All this prevented the Liberals from developing a coherent anti-communist discourse comparable to the Conservatives, allowing the latter to all but hold a monopoly on this potent electioneering tactic.³²

The Conservative anti-communist strategy initially began by appealing to a broad, presumably middle-class audience. Propaganda literature was in the main designed to offend the reader’s constitutional sensibilities, and Bolshevik rule was portrayed as the antithesis of the orderly and constitutional form of British government. Bolshevism was variously described as the ‘greatest enemy’ and ‘the death of’ democracy, under which popular elections were a farce and Lenin and Trotsky reigned as dictators.³³ The trade union leaders who advocated for extra-parliamentary ‘direct action’ were lined up against this example and charged with wanting to bring about a similar destruction of democratic government, as one leaflet explained: ‘A plot by a minority to destroy the House of Commons, to make the vote valueless, and to establish a dictatorship in this country as in Russia may seem to be a wild and impossible scheme. Nevertheless, it is being tried; and active persons throughout the country are preaching the gospel of revolution against representative government’.³⁴ This certainly lends credence to McKibbin’s contention that ‘the Conservative Party of the 1920s is best understood as the Party of the constitution’, and that in regard to their electoral appeal, ‘Socialism was not only about property or threats to property, it was about threats to the constitution’.³⁵

The setting up of the Council of Action in August 1920 only added fuel to this particular fire. The Council (and a network of local Councils) was convened—on the initiative of the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress leadership—to coordinate the labour movement’s industrial power in order to prevent British intervention against the Soviet Union over the issue of Poland.³⁶ It was presented by Conservatives as a Bolshevik-like challenge to Parliament and democracy—a prelude to revolution, civil war, and the abolition of constitutional government. The Councils, referred to as soviets by Conservative speakers and literature, were characterised as a simple imitation of Bolshevik methods: ‘Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolshevists in Russia began their revolution in exactly the same way’.³⁷ All of this tended to one conclusion—that the Labour Party, unable to control its ‘Bolshevik’ elements, was not fit to handle state power. It mattered not how moderate Labour’s leadership professed to be ‘to calm minds that may be disturbed by its Bolshevists and Revolutionaries’, for the co-existence in the labour movement of moderates and extremists meant that, as in Russia, ‘if you vote for the “Labour” Party’s Kerensky; you will soon have the Lenin and Trotsky’s’.³⁸

Over time the Conservatives honed this anti-communist appeal to the middle-classes and began to concentrate on that female half of it which had proved particularly receptive to tales of Bolshevik perversion. Adjusting to the post-war landscape of (limited) female suffrage, the Conservative Party took some time to recognise the significance that a female-oriented anti-communist strategy could have. As David Jarvis has observed:

For a while after 1918, Conservatives compromised by simultaneously addressing their appeal to women on moral grounds both as items of their husbands’ property and as reliable anti-socialists in their own right … Nonetheless, the party did gradually begin to direct its moral crusade directly towards women themselves.³⁹

This significance was not at all lost on the party’s women activists. At the 1920 party conference, Anne Chamberlain (wife of Neville Chamberlain) accorded women a privileged place in the anti-communist struggle. Observing that ‘if there was one subject which had been emphasised more than another during the conference, it had been the danger of Bolshevism and the necessity for meeting and counteracting it’, she intimated that ‘in her mind, in this fight, there was a very special field for women’. Lady Astor, the party’s first female MP, shared this view, boldly claiming that ‘we [women] are your great bulwark against Bolshevism’.⁴⁰

Thus from mid-1920 the Conservative Party increasingly turned its attention to this bulwark. Propaganda literature started to address women as subjects in their own right, and as those who would have the most to lose under a Bolshevik regime. All of the staples of womanly life were supposedly at risk, a notion backed up by reference to a lurid and largely imagined depiction of Russia. Most importantly, Christian worship and the Sunday sabbath would no longer be permitted in step with the Russian Bolsheviks who had ‘abolished the Almighty’.⁴¹ This emphasis on religion was particularly important for the party, since by linking the Labour Party with Bolshevism and painting it as anti-religious ‘it presented itself as the Christian party, uniting Methodists, Baptists and Congregationalists with Anglicans’, an effort helped by the de-emphasis of religious themes in Liberal propaganda following the war.⁴² Moreover, every custom of the British family would be replaced by the unconscionable reality that purportedly prevailed in Russia, where ‘the idea of the family is considered to be wrong’; ‘marriage is only a temporary union’; and ‘children are the property of the State, so they are liable to be taken away from their parents when quite young and brought up in State Institutions’.⁴³ The safety and dignity of women themselves was also endangered by the so-called ‘nationalisation of women’ and other barbarous acts committed by ‘Bolshevist devils in their bestial orgies’.⁴⁴

Although the threat of ubiquitous immorality was the most standard theme of anti-communist literature directed at women, it did not form the entirety of its appeal. Another common thread running through such propaganda was the renewed threat of wartime conditions, of conscription and mourning of loved ones, particularly as Conservatives tried to stoke fears of ‘civil war’ over the establishment of the Council of Action. Much of the literature seized upon the sombre and relatively recent memories held by women relating to their male family members being whisked away to fight in the Great War. As one leaflet put it: ‘Comrade Williams [at the time Robert Williams was president of the National Transport Workers’ Federation and a Communist Party member] is ready to ‘use force for the revolution’ here to set up a republic in this country on Bolshevist lines, which means compulsory military service again’, a premise that would inevitably lead to ‘sons and brothers killed in civil war’.⁴⁵ What united almost all of this propaganda was the identification of the source of the threats and how they could be neutralised. It was of course ‘members of the “Labour” Party’ - a vague phrase which in practice meant the three or four union leaders whose soundbites fuelled it—that were advocating for revolution and Bolshevism. Women were hence advised to ‘play for safety and vote against the socialist Labour Party’s candidates’ to preclude any possibility of Bolshevism’s many horrors unfolding at home.

Propaganda literature was not the only medium through which the Conservatives sought to dispense their anti-communist message to women. At the same time as the party was reorienting their printed propaganda strategy towards a more female audience, Central Office put together a team of individual women speakers to preach anti-communism in the constituencies. These speakers were tasked with travelling up and down the country to lecture local Women’s Unionist Associations and town hall meetings on the nature of Bolshevism and its implications for British women.⁴⁶

One such speaker, Mrs Gulliford, whose lectures tended to be ‘extremely well attended’, had been resident in Moscow during the Bolshevik Revolution.⁴⁷ Her modus operandi was to give ‘a thrilling account of her experiences in Russia’, whereupon ‘she described the horrors of the life the people lived, the shootings, the cruelties, the moral degradations and the sufferings of the children, who knew nothing of child joy in their lives’.⁴⁸ In accordance with the Conservative propaganda strategy, Mrs Gulliford’s speeches rarely ended without relating the foreign to the domestic: Bolshevik doctrines ‘were being preached in their midst today by the Socialist Labour Party’ and the trade unions were being ‘permeated with their influence’.⁴⁹ The objective was to help dispel the apathy that Conservatives believed to be widespread among their natural supporters, described by one WUA chairwoman as ‘a disease they wanted to get rid of in view of Bolshevism and the extremists working in their midst’, and motivate middle-class women to become more involved in local Conservative anti-socialist politics.⁵⁰ As Mrs Gulliford closed one of her lectures: ‘You must not close your eyes to the great danger of Bolshevism in this country; there was no doubt that the British people would meet with no better fate at the hands of their own Socialists than had the inhabitants of stricken Russia under the Bolshevists’.⁵¹

Notwithstanding these substantial efforts to capture respectable middle-class opinion, it would be a mistake to conclude that the Conservative Party restricted its anti-communist appeal to the well-to-do in the Home Counties. An inspection of the literature does give the impression that the Bolshevik menace was employed exclusively to attract middle-class support, but it is a misleading one. For example, in discussing the multiple identities of anti-socialism constructed by the Conservatives, David Thackeray suggests that the virulent discourse which sought to couple Labour with Bolshevik extremism was confined mainly to the middle-class strongholds of southern England, whereas the moderate local government reforms promoted by Labour in the industrial heartlands like Birmingham and Leeds forced the Conservatives to develop a more consensual form of politics there.⁵² There is an element of truth in this; sensationalist fearmongering was indeed deployed more widely and to greater effect within affluent localities. Yet it neglects that much of the Conservatives’ anti-communist propaganda in the red scare years was designed with another audience in mind—workers in general, and trade unionists in particular.

This propaganda offensive took place within a wider Conservative campaign to stimulate support among organised labour, epitomised by the establishment in 1919 of the National Unionist Association Labour Committee, whose aim was to fight ‘that small and determined body which dominated the present Labour Party … the men who would shake hands with Bolshevists and would upset the whole social fabric upon which the Constitution of the country had been built’.⁵³ It stemmed from the Conservative belief that despite the upsurge in political and industrial working-class action, the essential decency of the great majority of workers stood at odds with the ‘extremism’ exhibited by many of their leaders—that ‘commonsense still sways the rank and file’.⁵⁴ The Conservatives must have identified some constituency for this anti-communist propaganda with the seeming success of the National Democratic Party, an anti-pacifist breakaway from the Labour Party that secured ten seats in the 1918 election, and whose anti-communism was almost indistinguishable from the Conservatives.⁵⁵ Hence there developed a concerted, albeit short-lived, effort by the Conservative Party to carve out support in the unions’ membership which, in the absence of any substantive positive programme, was to be achieved by way of red-baiting their leadership, the Bolshevist views of which were represented as the ‘the enemy of Trade Unionism’.⁵⁶

The first function of Conservative propaganda was to depict Bolshevism in the terms most antithetical to the perceived interests and beliefs of the target group. For a female audience, the Bolshevik menace manifested itself as a moral danger that would destroy religion and the family and violate the dignity of women; for a trade unionist audience it threatened to bring an end to the favourable conditions of labour that British workers were said to enjoy, to be replaced by industrial ruin, worthless wages, and conditions akin to slavery.⁵⁷ Under Bolshevism, all of the liberties afforded to the British worker would be violently curtailed: in Russia the trade unions were suppressed, ‘and those which were allowed to exist have been forced to become the tools of the Soviet Government’;⁵⁸ there was no right to strike and any which did occur were met with heavy-handed repression;⁵⁹ and workers had no freedom to choose whether or where to work.⁶⁰ The status quo in Britain, where ‘Trade Unions are protected’ and ‘labour is free’, was portrayed as a veritable worker’s paradise in comparison.⁶¹

In order to bolster the credibility of such claims to a working-class audience, Conservatives often alluded to statements from prominent Labour figures denouncing Bolshevism, ironically using their own remarks as grist for the anti-Labour propaganda mill. The party could effectively present their own views of the red menace as the reflections of an ‘unprejudiced observer’ who normally ‘would sympathise with attempts towards socialism’ to attenuate the partisan character that anti-communism had assumed in political discourse, and urge workers to adopt the anti-communist belief system by telling them to ‘listen to Clynes’ and his scathing criticisms of Bolshevism and ‘the wild men of Labour’ who were set on enacting it.⁶²

As before, the wellspring of Communism was clearly identified, and anti-communism was again de facto translated into anti-Labourism. The Council of Action for instance was characterised as ‘a Bolshevist ramp’: ‘The master minds of the “Council of Action” are Bolshevists. They want a Revolution and a Red Republic here. Trade Unionism is no more than a useful weapon to help them gain their ends’.⁶³ Aside from the strikes and industrial unrest that could open the door for British Bolsheviks to seize state power, and which were in any case ‘often the result of the labours of Bolshevist agitators’, the mere act of voting for Labour Party candidates was construed as paving the way for Communism and the attendant misery it would inflict upon workers.⁶⁴ One leaflet elided the Labour policy of nationalisation with the industrial conscription that was said to be creating ‘labour slaves’ in Russia, telling readers that ‘if you kill nationalisation, you kill industrial conscription’, whilst many others made sure to remind them of Robert Williams’s comment that ‘Bolshevism was only Socialism with the courage of its convictions’.^65,66

Despite the intensity with which the Conservative Party waged their worker-focused anti-communist crusade, it soon became clear that trade unionists were not as easily galvanised by red scare rhetoric as were the suburban middle-classes. It did not win any significant support for the incipient Unionist Labour committees, which became moribund before long; by 1924 only 17% of English and Welsh constituencies had a labour committee and only a handful of these were active.⁶⁷ Support for the virulently anti-communist National Democratic Party also proved artificial, and it quickly became an irrelevance before losing all its seats at the 1922 election.⁶⁸ In retrospect, it is unsurprising that Conservative anti-communism failed to find a constituency among trade unionists, for most were at least vaguely sympathetic to the ‘world’s first workers’ state’. In one curious example, when it was revealed that the Daily Herald had received a Soviet subvention—which the Conservatives then tried to fashion propaganda out of—the reaction of the paper’s working-class readership ran contrary to expectations that a patriotic British labour movement would recoil from Russian interference. In reference to George Lansbury, who was at the centre of the revelation, one journalist noted that ‘cries of Bolshevik Gold and Chinese Bonds have only done him good’, and the paper’s readers, according to Kevin Morgan, subsequently ‘declared in favour of taking the Russian money’.⁶⁹ Consequently, this aspect of the Conservatives’ strategy was eventually abandoned after the first red scare, with little attempt made to attract trade unionist support by means of anti-communist propaganda in subsequent years.

Yet perhaps one should not make trade unionists too representative of the working-class in this regard. The Labour Party may have advocated for the better interests of the working-class, but there was truth to the common Conservative trope that they did not ‘speak exclusively for labour’.⁷⁰ Even at the height of trade union membership in 1920, the number of union workers amounted to less than half of the workforce; and the Conservative Party, in addition to its stranglehold on the middle-classes, required a considerable voter base among the working-class to sustain its majorities. It is difficult to estimate to what degree non-union workers were influenced by anti-communist propaganda, though what is certain is that many would have been exposed to it. National dailies such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express, which reproduced much the same themes as Conservative propaganda, enjoyed broad circulation among the working-class; regional and local newspapers, which were also read widely, were little better, owned as they were in large part by the same conservatives. The Conservative Party also created its own magazines with reasonable circulations targeted primarily at the working-class like Man in the Street and The Elector, which contained no shortage of anti-communist content and continued to do so long after the first red scare.⁷¹ An issue of one such magazine called Straight Forward which was distributed in Birmingham carried a leading article by the party’s resident social reformer Neville Chamberlain in which ‘the Bolshevik bogey’ was ‘waggled as lustily … as by Mr. Churchill himself’.⁷²

This is not to mention the female half of the working-class. Anti-communism could take on a more beguiling form to predominately unwaged and non-unionised women and must have won some converts to the Conservative cause among them. Women, particularly married women, faced unique hardship in times of industrial action and, in addition to their isolation from workplaces, were thus more susceptible to claims that reckless Bolsheviks rather than reformist union labourers were behind the strikes that seemed to deprive them.⁷³ The theme of working-class women having little sympathy for the Bolshevik-inspired strikes of their husbands, which were construed as being concerned more with revolutionary feeling than legitimate grievances, was indeed present in Conservative propaganda.⁷⁴

Moreover, female-targeted propaganda, whilst undeniably possessing greater potency in middle-class circles by virtue of these providing an environment wholly sheltered from the realities of working-class politics and the Bolshevism purportedly endemic within it, was never wrapped in explicit class terms, and could theoretically horrify working just as much middle-class women, especially in those constituencies which lacked a well-established Labour tradition.⁷⁵ This appeal could be buttressed by references to the well-known Socialist Ethel Snowden’s criticism of Bolshevik Russia, whose declarations that ‘it is not democratic, it is not Christianity’ and that the ‘Bolshevists have suppressed God’ echoed Conservative depictions.⁷⁶ Conservative grassroots activists for their part also saw value in this approach to working-class women. One advised Conservative women to ‘keep hammering away at the damage Communists do, particularly to the women and children in Communist countries, as I find that the working women, who are not very interested in politics as “Politics”, the moment you explain Communism to them, … make very determined anti-Communists’.⁷⁷

Contrary to previous accounts then, Conservative anti-communism may have had a greater appeal to the working-class than has previously been supposed.

As a final aside, it is worth mentioning that whilst the threat of the Soviet Union to the Empire was a concern of great significance to British politicians, this does not appear to have translated to the wider public if Conservative propaganda is any measure, either during the ‘crisis of empire’ concurrent with the first red scare or after, which may speak to the declining currency of the Empire in British political discourse following the war.⁷⁸

Little red scares and Labour’s downfall, 1921–24

The first red scare only lasted for as long as domestic conditions would permit. In particular, the post-war climate of working-class direct action, which Conservatives viewed as a handy backdoor for Bolshevism, had cooled considerably by mid-1921. But it had left an indelible mark on political discourse, and anti-communism did not simply lie dormant in the meantime, patiently waiting to be reawakened by the Conservatives over the first Labour government’s Russian treaties and handling of the Campbell Case. Instead it is more useful to conceptualise this intervening period as it relates to anti-communism in terms increasingly favoured by scholars of American anti-communism—as a series of ‘little red scares’. If we understand it in this way, then ‘the red scare never really ended during the entire period between the first and second great red scares’, but only varied in intensity due to political and industrial factors.⁷⁹

It can in fact be difficult to draw a straight line between labour power and militancy and anti-communist fears, as the example of contemporary Italy evinces; middle-class fears of Communism peaked in that country after the ‘two red years’ of land seizures and factory occupations in 1919–20 had passed.⁸⁰ Whilst Britain did not share the same trajectory as Italy in this respect, neither did the red scare diminish as much as might be expected. It is perhaps telling that the British Fascists, whose main purpose was to safeguard Britain from an imagined Bolshevik threat, were formed in this period (1923). Though their size and impact were insignificant, this was due in no small part to the fact that their anti-communism was not substantially different to that of the Conservative Party, which ‘virtually monopolized the ground on which any fascist movement might hope to base itself’.⁸¹

One of the key characteristics of the little red scares was a moral panic fomented chiefly among the women who the Conservative Party had worked so assiduously to appeal to by way of anti-communism; the issue that sustained it being the perceived proliferation of Socialist and Proletarian Sunday schools (hereafter abbreviated as SSS and PSS respectively), which existed in the Conservative mind ‘to deny Christianity and to promote revolution’.⁸²

The vigorous crusade against the SSS/PSS, which arose out of the embers of the first red scare, was not instigated by the Conservative Party. The impetus for it was provided by two anti-socialist organisations that had hitherto operated at the right-wing periphery of Conservative politics: the British Empire Union (BEU) and the National Citizens’ Union (NCU), founded in 1915 and 1919, respectively. Relatively little is known about these bodies, owing primarily to the disappearance of their records, and accordingly the literature has tended to treat them in a perfunctory manner.⁸³ They were, however, instrumental in sustaining an active anti-communist sentiment when anything that could reasonably be construed as a credible Communist threat had receded. The strength of their campaign was such that it elicited a robust response from the Conservative Party, which gladly dedicated resources in the form of speakers, propaganda and legislative lobbying to the effort. To once more draw a parallel between British anti-communism and its much more well-researched American cousin, the anti-SSS/PSS campaign exemplifies, similarly to the United States, ‘the breadth and depth of the conservative anti-communist coalitions that lay in wait or could be easily mobilised where allegedly seditious activity was afoot’.⁸⁴

The precursor to the mass campaign can be located in the activities of the BEU; from mid-1921 they produced literature, held meetings, and solicited support from the Anglican clergy on the issue of the PSS (although institutional backing from the Church of England was not forthcoming). In February 1922, the Conservative MP and BEU member John Butcher then introduced a private member’s bill with the intent of outlawing the PSS, however the bill fell prey to parliamentary procedure.⁸⁵ Following a year of grassroots agitation largely orchestrated by the BEU and NCU alongside generous press coverage of their activities, a greater effort was made by Conservative parliamentarians in the next session. February 1923 saw a meeting of Conservative MPs convened to consider what action could be taken against the ‘Communist schools’, and the eighty MPs that attended unanimously passed a resolution calling on the government to either introduce a bill with the purpose of suppressing seditious teaching to children under sixteen or give facilities for passing a private members’ bill.⁸⁶ Butcher again took on the mantle of introducing a bill the following month, but it received insufficient parliamentary time under both Conservative and Labour governments and failed to make its way through the 1923 or 1924 sessions.⁸⁷ At any rate, there was nothing, according to the government’s information, to warrant prosecution. It was doubted whether any PSS teaching fell within the legal definition of sedition or blasphemy; and its scale was minute, with seemingly less than 1,000 children attending the schools.⁸⁸

These endeavours at Westminster coincided with and were significantly influenced by a grassroots pressure campaign of enormous proportions. Betokening the continuing significance of anti-communism, the BEU claimed to have gathered slightly more than seven million signatures after launching a petition campaign in support of the bill.⁸⁹ A considerable number of Conservative MPs also presented their own petitions signed by constituents to the Commons.⁹⁰ The issue could rouse more than just Conservatives as well; for instance a Liberal MP received his loudest applause, ironically more than when he advocated against spending cuts to education and food for children, after condemning the schools at an election meeting.⁹¹ The most recent and comprehensive study of the conservative assault on the SSS/PSS, undertaken by Liam Ryan, downplays the extent of Conservative Party involvement, assigning the party and its activists a desultory role to which he points as perhaps the greatest obstacle to the passing of the ‘Seditious and Blasphemous Teachings’ bill. Ryan argues that whilst ‘some sections of Conservative opinion were undoubtedly sympathetic to the bill’s objectives … outright expressions of support were rare with most Conservatives preferring more positive forms of resistance to the socialist and communist schools’.⁹² It is certainly true that the Conservative Party devised a positive strategy to contend with the SSS/PSS ‘problem’, implemented by establishing the Young Britons League and expanding operations of the Junior Imperial League ‘as an effective method of counteracting the pernicious work of extremists among the younger members of the community’, but this in no way precluded it from engaging in the same negative anti-communist activity that was characteristic of the red scare years—and it did so freely.⁹³

Indeed, elements of the Conservative Party offered assistance to the anti-SSS/PSS campaign in its earlier stages. From the beginning of 1922 Conservative speakers were regularly lecturing Women’s Unionist Associations on the perils of Communist indoctrination in the schools and, in common with their BEU and NCU counterparts, significantly misrepresenting their scale and purpose. One speaker described as an authority on the Proletarian Sunday schools claimed that ‘over 10,000 children were being taught in these schools in London alone’, whilst another, imagining a fiction even more horrific, stated ‘there were 217 of those schools with 133,000 children’.⁹⁴ Moreover, party literature and propaganda also sought to exploit and further the fears that were rapidly spreading among the grassroots. A good deal of the Conservatives’ propaganda during the 1922 London County Council election campaign concerned the SSS/PSS menace, and several leaflets produced for the 1922 general election also made reference to the schools which were said to be growing apace and teaching ‘rebellion and blasphemy to the children’.⁹⁵

Unsurprisingly, there was little distinction made between the SSS and the significantly smaller and more radical Proletarian alternative as ‘their objects are the same—to teach Socialism to children and to accustom them to the Socialistic ideas of the destruction of private ownership, socialisation of industries, and the class war’.⁹⁶ In spite of the non-existent link between the Labour Party and the PSS, and the repeated attempts of SSS advocates in the party to disassociate them from one another, Conservative propaganda warned that ‘Socialism in power means more of these [Proletarian] schools’ and advised readers to ‘vote against those who would let schools for this purpose’.⁹⁷ Similar sentiments were extensively echoed by Conservative candidates throughout the country in the 1922 election campaign.⁹⁸

In view of all this—as well as the virtually unanimous support that the Seditious and Blasphemous Teaching bill commanded among the Conservative backbenches—it is clear that the Conservative Party was intimately involved in the anti-SSS/PSS campaign. It did not lead the charge, however it was evidently keen to foster and turn to its advantage the ‘little red scare’ transpiring within its base. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the hysteria surrounding the SSS/PSS arose, in the main, organically and from the bottom-up, in contradistinction to the first red scare during which the press and Conservative propaganda played a more involved role in stoking anti-communist fears (though even it should not be interpreted as emanating entirely from the top-down). Conservative parliamentarians and propagandists, whilst fiercely anti-communist in their own right and needing scarcely any push to engage in red scare tactics, were in the last analysis only reacting to and exacerbating a phenomenon that had taken root in the grassroots independent of coordinated party strategy.

The exploitation of topical fears during the 1922 election campaign represented only a fraction of the party’s anti-communist propaganda, however, of which a number of noteworthy observations can be made. At once it should be remarked that the middle-classes and women were elevated from being the primary audience of such rhetoric in the years prior to more or less its sole recipient, the party’s brief flirtation with the organised working-class along anti-communist lines rightly being recognised as a waste of time and resources. In regard to the middle-class appeal, there wasn’t much deviation from the core themes underlying the propaganda distributed amid the first red scare. Labour was once again depicted as a party that threatened the constitution. The Conservative ‘Constitutional Party’ which supported ‘the ordered development of our political institutions’ was juxtaposed with the Socialists who ‘tried to overthrow them—in 1917 by forming Workers’ Councils and by the Council of Action in August 1920’.⁹⁹ Women were again conceived as the most well-disposed towards anti-communist rhetoric, and the menace to family life, children, and religion was frequently emphasised—the continuity from the first red scare was so great that several earlier leaflets were effectively reprinted.¹⁰⁰

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Conservative propaganda this time around though was the linguistic shift away from ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘Bolshevism’. Whereas before these terms had reigned supreme in anti-communist literature as pre-eminent scare words—the Labour Party was infested with Bolshevists, they would become ascendant over the moderates were Labour ever to attain power etc.—they were now rarely found in propaganda. In its place was inserted the more familiar ‘Socialism’. Hence, the reprinted leaflets which originally warned of the unimaginable horrors wrought by ‘Bolshevism’ retained their contents and simply exchanged that word for ‘Socialism’ instead.

This was characteristic of the whole range of anti-communist propaganda produced for the 1922 election, as the Conservatives seemingly sought to draw a more explicit connection between the ideological precepts of Labour and Soviet Socialism. Rather than magnifying the statements of select Soviet sympathisers within Labour’s ranks and casting doubt on the party at large by association, as had been the favoured propaganda technique during the red scare years, the Conservatives increasingly opted to dye fundamental Labour ideology red. Thus religion, for example, was menaced not so much by Bolshevism as by plain old Socialism, although there was ‘little difference’ between the two;¹⁰¹ it would bring administrative chaos and economic ruin too, as ‘in practice, as the Russian example shows, it destroys everything’.¹⁰² Readers were also subjected to grisly images of starving and sullied families with the warning that Socialism was responsible for such misery in Russia, and implored to ‘keep it out of Britain by voting for the Conservative and Unionist candidate’.¹⁰³ One can only speculate on the precise reasons for this discoursal shift, though one plausible, or at least partial explanation, is that with the marginalisation of direct action and the re-establishment of ‘parliamentary Socialism’s’ supremacy in the Labour Party following the collapse of the Triple Alliance a year earlier—which also brought the first red scare to an end—there was no longer a great fear of the direct actionists who typically filled the role of ‘Bolshevik agitators’ that could usurp power from the Labour moderates. The more alluring strategy in these conditions therefore was to try to discredit parliamentary Socialism as a whole.

Anti-communism was not as significant an issue in the 1923 election, with Baldwin calling for and fighting the election single-mindedly on the issue of tariff reform. Regardless, linking Labour with the threat of Communism at this stage was by no means beyond the pale, even in the absence of any external stimuli—the anti-SSS/PSS campaign was at a low ebb;¹⁰⁴ there was ‘peace in industry’; and the Labour Party had repeatedly shunned Communism and its adherents.¹⁰⁵ Conservative candidates, who towards the end of the campaign began to sense the weakness of the Protection gambit and subsequently increased their negative attacks upon Labour could, and commonly did, still point to the ’terrible and horrifying example of Russia’ as a warning against ‘the suicidal proposals of the Labour-Socialist-Communist Party’.¹⁰⁶

The 1923 election ultimately ended in electoral disaster for the Conservative Party. Baldwin had gambled with his parliamentary majority and lost, the party losing 86 seats and finding itself in a hung Parliament, although it remained the largest party. Out of this quagmire arose Britain’s first Labour government, inaugurated shortly after the election and propped up by Liberal Party votes (with Baldwin’s tacit approval).¹⁰⁷ Contrary to the deluge of Conservative propaganda in the previous half decade that warned of a Soviet-style upheaval if Labour were to take office, the government charted a middle-of-the-road course, as prime minister Ramsay MacDonald sought ‘to display the essential moderation, respectability and patriotism of his party with a limited program of relatively uncontroversial reforms upon which most party members, the party in the constituencies, the TUC and the PLP could unite’.¹⁰⁸ There was in reality a great degree of continuity in policy from the preceding Conservative and Coalition administrations, owing both to MacDonald’s (and the rest of his Cabinet’s) ethos and the government’s minority position. This was particularly true with regard to domestic policy, in respect of which Philip Snowden’s Liberal-inspired stewardship of the economy and Arthur Henderson’s hardline approach to immigration and labour disputes would not look out of place in previous governments.¹⁰⁹

Foreign policy was, of course, a somewhat different matter. There was no real departure from the norm in imperial affairs, and MacDonald’s handling of the delicate issue of German reparations won him much praise. But the government’s determined attempts to repair relations with the Soviet Union dogged it throughout its brief lifespan and were to contribute considerably to its downfall and election defeat. The first act of the government in the realm of foreign affairs was to grant de jure recognition to the Soviet Union, followed several months after by the commencement of an Anglo-Soviet conference, which after protracted negotiations eventually resulted in two treaties—one that established a commercial agreement and another that promised further negotiations between bondholders (whose Tsarist-era claims had been abrogated by the Soviets) and the Soviet government, upon the conclusion of which the British government would guarantee a £30 million loan to the Soviet Union.¹¹⁰ When put before Parliament for ratification, they were subjected to broadsides and misrepresentations from the Conservative and Liberal benches before being roundly defeated.

If the Russian treaties had gravely undermined the Labour government, the Campbell Case put the final nail in its coffin; it was yet another issue founded on anti-communism. In essence, the Attorney General, upon consulting the Cabinet, withdrew the prosecution he had unilaterally initiated of a leading Communist on sedition charges, the explanation for which was subsequently bungled by MacDonald. This allowed the other parties to censure the government for political interference in a judicial matter (and portray it as in thrall to Labour’s ‘extremist’ elements), which MacDonald treated as a no-confidence vote, giving way to the 1924 election.¹¹¹ Best known for the drama of the Zinoviev letter that was revealed by the press four days before polling, purporting to show the Comintern exhorting British communists to agitate for the ratification of the Russian treaties and work towards the violent overthrow of existing institutions, the letter—almost certainly a forgery—was as Neville Kirk points out, ‘the culmination, rather than, as argued in parts of the historiography, the central feature, of a campaign already thoroughly swamped by the Red Scare’.¹¹²

We may go even further than this, for the little red scares began building up to the red scare proper shortly after the Labour government assumed power. As Chris Cook has noted with respect to the 1924 by-elections, ‘long before the Russian Treaty and the Zinoviev letter, turnout was increasing and the campaigns becoming increasingly centred on the “Bolshevist” nature of the Labour Party’.¹¹³ John Ramsden has also written of how ‘candidates in the by-elections of 1924 had discovered that the red card was extremely useful when played against a Labour government, that it brought out Unionists to vote and left the Liberal ranks in consternation’.¹¹⁴ The full strength of their anti-communist discourse was marshalled by Conservatives in several of these elections (with some Liberals attempting to mimic it in futility)—religion, revolution and all—to great success, with the party trouncing the Liberals almost across the board and managing to take a seat from Labour on such a platform, in a set of performances which heavily foreshadowed the general election to come.¹¹⁵

Return of the red scare: the general election of 1924

The anti-communist rhetoric employed by the Conservatives during the 1924 election has been recounted in great detail throughout the historiography of interwar British politics. Re-examining the election campaign in light of what has been discussed thus far, however, can illuminate the linkages between the anti-communism of the 1924 campaign and that which preceded it, and thereby illustrate the remarkable consistency and continuity of Conservative rhetoric, a fact which helped position them as the anti-communist party par excellence when this became an election-defining issue. Oddly, Conservative printed propaganda is conspicuously absent from most accounts of the 1924 election; sources such as speeches, election addresses, and newspapers are far more common. This represents something of an oversight. Leaflets could reach a larger audience than any other propaganda medium, with thirty-six million being distributed during the 1924 election campaign—as Leo Amery intimated to Baldwin, ‘our leaflets etc. matter much more than platform oratory’.¹¹⁶ Studying them systematically therefore also furnishes us with an image of the Conservative campaign as experienced by the broadest section of the population.

Much of the propaganda predictably capitalised on the Russian treaties. Strangely, little electoral value was extracted from the Campbell Case ‘scandal’ that had brought the Labour government down—only a few leaflets made fleeting references to it—although this makes slightly more sense in view of Baldwin’s original stance on the dissolution of Parliament, whereby he wanted to oust the government ‘not on the Campbell issue—but on the Russian treaties which the country generally condemn’.¹¹⁷ The obvious line of attack was to lambast the government for guaranteeing a tremendous loan to a state that would likely repudiate it, and which had ‘only been made under threats from the most extreme and unpatriotic section of our Socialist party’. The result of this, it was warned, was that ‘we shall be taxed to find this sum in the long run’.¹¹⁸

What is significant, however, is that a good deal of this anti-Russian treaties propaganda, particularly that targeted at women, came packaged in the exact same anti-communist framework as had been developed during the first red scare. So whilst women too were warned against countenancing a loan guarantee to the perfidious ‘Bolshies’, the reasons given were more so those related to the ‘horrors a loan would support’.¹¹⁹ The loan was presented as a means to help the Bolsheviks maintain themselves in power and preserve the attendant immorality supposedly prevailing in Russia: the Bolshevik government ‘founded on blasphemy’ had abolished God and Christianity, arrested and executed priests, and even erected a statue to Judas; they had destroyed home and family life; even the nationalisation of women myth was resurrected.¹²⁰

Furthermore, it bears stating that a considerable amount of propaganda made no reference to the Russian treaties whatsoever, instead falling back on the same red scare tactics utilised in past years. The spectre of the ‘Communist Sunday schools’, which were allegedly carried on by order of Moscow to attack religion and ‘obliterate all moral tendencies … amongst the children’, was revived in an attempt to send parents into the protective arms of the Conservative Party, for whilst ‘many Socialists here are religious men … they have no influence in the real Socialist movement. Behind the Socialist of this kind is the Communist pushing him on, and Communism means death to religion’.¹²¹ The tried-and-true method of appealing to parental instincts against Communist corruption was also retooled to accommodate more recent developments; the innocuous endeavour of the Labour government’s Education Minister to facilitate a student and teacher exchange with the Soviet Union in order to promote the study of the Russian language was twisted to fit such a narrative. The all-too familiar ‘unspeakable conditions’ of children in Russia were described and mothers were urged for their own children’s sake to put the Conservatives in office and ‘keep the Bolshie teachers out of Britain’.¹²²

The principle of constitutionality, so integral to the Conservative Party’s identity in the 1920s, was regularly raised too, with voters told to ‘remember that a Constitutional Party, such as the Conservative and Unionist Party, is the greatest obstacle to Communism’.¹²³ For Communism, and the Labour Party that seemed to be holding the door open for it, was portrayed not merely as a menace to religion and the family but also to fundamental British laws and liberties.¹²⁴ Hence along with saving her children and home from Communism, ‘Mrs. Worker’ – in yet another indication that the Conservatives saw working-class women as a worthwhile target for anti-communist rhetoric—was supplied one final reason to support the Conservatives: ‘You believe in freedom, Mrs. Worker. You hate the tyranny, slavery, and militarism of the Communists. Then help to fight them by voting and working for those who mean to preserve our ancient constitution from the attacks of foreign tyrants. JOIN THE UNIONIST PARTY’.¹²⁵

Yet another recurrent theme found in the election literature is the notion that Communism was only ‘Socialism under another name’.¹²⁶ This equation of ideologies had its origins in the first red scare and was put to particular use in the 1922 election, but it is somewhat surprising that it saw such widespread inclusion in Conservative propaganda by 1924, given that Labour finally had its chance to govern and prove that its version of ‘Socialism’ would effect little perceptible change to British life. Nevertheless, the electorate was flooded with accounts of the ‘results of Socialism in Russia’, said to have malnourished and starved the people; banned religious teaching; surged prices; ruined wages and jobs via nationalisation; introduced rationing for all goods and services; and destroyed agriculture.¹²⁷ All of this propaganda invariably concluded with a warning to the effect of: ‘this is what happens in Russia, do you want it here?’ It is clear that MacDonald’s painstaking moderation in government was scarce protection against the same crude anti-communist smears that had haunted his party since the end of the Great War.

In short, whilst the Russian treaties were a mainstay of the campaign, they were often presented to voters in terms corresponding with well-established anti-communist themes. In addition, much of the Conservatives’ propaganda made no mention of them at all, but rather reverted to the plain old red scare tactics that stressed the present threat to religion, family life, and the constitution, as well as the equivalence between Labour and Soviet Socialism. The Zinoviev letter only served to reinforce—though it certainly was strong reinforcement—the prevailing Conservative message that ‘Bolshevism was not a “bogey”’, but a revolutionary menace intent on ‘repeating in Britain the horrors that have taken place in Russia’.¹²⁸ Thus, the propaganda produced for the 1924 election blended together the anti-communist language developed in the first red scare and that which had evolved from it in subsequent years, simply slotting the same tropes into a different context. And whilst in the case of the United States ‘the first “great” red scare also left many traces and thus the emergence of the second red scare reflected decades of developing American anti-communism which never disappeared’, this lineage was all the starker in Britain where the interval between ‘great’ red scares was three years rather than three decades.¹²⁹ As for what all this means, it arguably suggests a need for a reconceptualisation of the 1924 election’s place in interwar British political history—just as the Zinoviev letter was the culmination of an election campaign already swamped by a red scare, it is perhaps best to think of the 1924 election campaign itself as the culmination of a Conservative-led political culture that sought persistently to demonise the Labour Party by association with the Bolsheviks for half a decade prior.

‘Neither Bolshevism nor Communism, but common sense and justice’: labour’s response to anti-communism¹³⁰

It would be remiss not to at least briefly discuss how Labour dealt with the barrage of red-baiting that it was routinely subjected to throughout this period. In an indirect fashion, the Labour Party promoted a positive message of moderate social democratic reform to counteract representations of ‘Bolshevik extremism’. To take the example of women, Labour was able to integrate the all-important themes of home and family life into this framework, preventing the Conservatives from holding a monopoly on such discourse. In contrast to Conservative rhetoric that, for instance, highlighted the ‘indoctrination’ of children with blasphemy and revolution in supposedly Labour-backed Sunday schools, Labour could point to the obviously more pressing issues of the ’80,000 babies who die in the first year of life’, the ‘2,500,000 children in our schools with physical or mental defects’, or the ‘damp, dark, overcrowded tenements’ where one could not bring up children to live healthy lives, with a plethora of ‘commonsense’ policies to remedy them and other problems facing millions of mothers.¹³¹

But Labour felt a great need for care and caution when framing its programme, not least because of, as Laura Beers has argued, Conservative characterisations of its extremity.¹³² Even the term Socialism, which practically all Labour members would have cited as their guiding doctrine, was offered up to the electorate with reluctance in the context of Conservative attempts to pair it with foreign ideologies like Bolshevism, as its inclusion (or lack thereof) in the party’s general election manifestos testifies.¹³³ When the concept was deployed, it was as a peculiarly British one. The constitutional, patriotic, and even conservative nature of British Socialism was continuously underlined and its native intellectual progenitors referred to so as to accord with the perceived essential instincts of the British people. Sidney Webb at the 1923 Labour conference spoke of ‘our practical British way’ to Socialism:

‘First, let me insist on what our opponents habitually ignore, and indeed, what they seem intellectually incapable of understanding, namely the inevitable gradualness of our scheme of change … we must always remember that the founder of British socialism was not Karl Marx but Robert Owen, and that Robert Owen preached not “class war” but the ancient doctrine of human fellowship’.¹³⁴

Labour’s philosophy was thus presented as a uniquely British (and Whiggish) one, imbued purely with the best of the nation’s storied traditions.

Other than constructing their own alternative discourse to put forward to electors, Labour also had to tackle anti-communist attacks head-on, given the direct damage they believed it caused to their party. One by-election candidate during the first red scare, for example, saw in the ‘Bolshevist bogey’ the most significant contributor to his defeat, claiming that it did ‘a great deal of mischief so far as the Labour vote was concerned’.¹³⁵ The Socialist newspaper Forward concurred, writing that ‘the Bolshevik is the bogey of Bye-Elections … and he is a formidable hindrance to the Labour candidates’.¹³⁶ Even in 1923, when the first red scare had long passed, Ramsay MacDonald was still of the conviction that ‘it was the weakness of the Labour Party that it represented a “Red Terror” to the minds of large masses of people who knew little about it’.¹³⁷ The party’s response was at times laced with dismissiveness and ridicule, such as MacDonald’s notable 1924 campaign speech when he declared Bolshevism a bogey dressed up by Conservatives and Liberals ‘to frighten all the old ladies of both sexes’;¹³⁸ at others it tacitly gave credence to anti-communist fears but claimed that its programme was the only one which could, in the words of Arthur Henderson, ‘save the country from either reaction or violent revolution’.¹³⁹ Moreover, it could also seriously contest the deployment of themes like constitutionality and religion that were exploited by Conservative propaganda.

Minnie Pallister, erstwhile secretary to MacDonald and one of the most prominent female Labour speakers in her own right, provides a good example of this.¹⁴⁰ At a meeting in the solidly middle-class Hastings constituency, after instructing her audience not to be afraid of imaginary troubles like Bolshevism, she conveyed Labour’s ethos of orderly and constitutional change by representing its desire for ‘social revolution’ as a natural and gradual progression of the country’s ‘wonderful Gladstonian traditions’ before infusing it with a religious character, claiming that ‘until they cleared away the social difficulties of the world they could not begin to sow the seeds of Christianity … the only way she could love her neighbour as herself was to support an economic system which gave the same privileges to everyone’.¹⁴¹ That being said, well-reasoned arguments do not necessarily, nor very often one could argue, translate into popularly accepted ones. Labour’s efforts to combat scaremongering rhetoric surely made at least some headway among the middle-classes, but against an overwhelmingly hostile national and regional press, as well as a better resourced Conservative propaganda apparatus, there was a limit to how far these inroads could go—as the Liberal exodus to the Conservatives in 1924 was to demonstrate.¹⁴²,¹⁴³

Conclusion

The 1924 election was undoubtedly the apogee of political anti-communism in interwar Britain, though as evidenced throughout this article, it was far from the only red scare that gripped the country during this era. Nor did Conservatives believe their parliamentary triumph to have exorcised the Bolshevik bogey. Indeed, it was to be the cause of considerable intra-party tension over the next several years: first in 1925 when the fear of Communist sedition became a foremost concern among the Conservative grassroots in the shadow of the General Strike, putting pressure on the leadership and culminating in the arrest and prosecution of 12 leading Communist Party members;¹⁴⁴and second in 1926–27 when a large backbench and grassroots coalition formed the ‘Clear out the Reds’ campaign in the wake of the strike and its perceived Soviet connections, which was to play a significant role in the eventual rupture of Anglo-Soviet relations against much of the leadership’s wishes.¹⁴⁵

Nevertheless, electoral fortunes were no longer determined to any meaningful extent by anti-communism after 1924, and the labour movement soon shed any association with Bolshevism it may have had for the broader public, consigning for the most part political anti-communism of the early 1920s variant to the far-right fringes for the remainder of the interwar years.¹⁴⁶ It would only re-emerge in mainstream Conservative discourse, though lacking the same conviction and appeal as before, in the early Cold War years.¹⁴⁷

For the period 1919–24, however, anti-communism was a potent force in British politics, more so than has been previously recognised, and its part in aiding the construction of the interwar Conservative Party’s electoral hegemony through consistent appeal to the middle-classes and women cannot be ignored. There has been a tendency to attribute the kind of crude anti-communism explored here exclusively to an unrepresentative and unpopular ‘die-hard’ or ‘radical Right’ section of the Conservative Party. Martin Pugh, for example, in his work on the Conservative-aligned Primrose League, claims that in the aftermath of the Great War ‘only a little mileage was to be derived from … attacks upon Bolshevik and anarchist inspired sabotage’, and portrays the League’s rabid anti-communism as merely another way of ‘slipping back into the old routine’ of a bygone political style.¹⁴⁸ In a similar vein, G.C. Webber has written that ‘though most Conservatives were determined to resist Socialism, the “anti-Bolshevik” crusades associated with the Right seemed quite out of place once the industrial militancy of the immediate post-war years had subsided’.¹⁴⁹

Yet as a closer examination of anti-communism and its relationship with the Conservative Party reveals, these anti-Bolshevik crusades were in fact integral to the Conservatives’ electoral identity not just during the underappreciated first red scare, or in the somewhat overfocused 1924 election campaign, but also throughout the interim when anti-communism retained mass appeal and steadily evolved towards its extraordinary culmination in 1924, at which point a mature anti-communist discourse was brought to bear to help deliver an emphatic Conservative victory. To measure just how broadly effective anti-communism was at winning votes for the party relative to other tactics and issues would be impossible, but the extent to which it was present in Conservative discourse throughout this period indicates, at the very least, that Conservatives themselves believed it to be of great value. The 1924 election, where anti-communism featured as, if not the only, then the single largest issue, would appear to vindicate them.

Ultimately, whilst the chief target of this anti-communism was the labour movement, its chief victim was the Liberal Party, whose outflanking on the anti-communist front by the Conservatives and eventual decision to put Labour into government left them unable to avail of the red scare atmosphere of the 1924 election in which they were condemned to electoral oblivion. And though it was natural that the Conservatives would have an advantage on this turf, their overwhelmingly successful exploitation of the Bolshevik bogey relative to the Liberals need not have been ineluctable, as James Nicholas Peters has alluded to:

This [anti-socialist] ideological and political hegemony was not inevitable; it was certainly possible to envisage the Liberal Party fighting a more tenacious and reactionary rearguard action to hold its middle class supporters, and to some extent it did up to the mid-1920s. However the Liberals were never prepared to take the high political risk of making a direct appeal to that strand of public opinion which was attracted to the Middle Classes Union [from 1921 the National Citizens Union] and the Anti-Waste League.¹⁵⁰

This [anti-socialist] ideological and political hegemony was not inevitable; it was certainly possible to envisage the Liberal Party fighting a more tenacious and reactionary rearguard action to hold its middle class supporters, and to some extent it did up to the mid-1920s. However the Liberals were never prepared to take the high political risk of making a direct appeal to that strand of public opinion which was attracted to the Middle Classes Union [from 1921 the National Citizens Union] and the Anti-Waste League

In sum, the electoral benefits that the Conservatives reaped from the bogey by appealing to the middle classes and a likely not insignificant portion of the working-class were as much due to the conscious construction of a robust anti-communist discourse as they were any other political or structural factor. This must be considered a significant reason behind the party’s success in the early interwar period.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Paul Corthorn for his valuable advice and feedback on several drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour 1920–1924: The Beginning of Modern British Politics (Cambridge, 1971), 1–2.

2. On the importance of discourse to the Conservatives’ success, see Ross McKibbin, “Class and Conventional Wisdom: The Conservative Party and the ‘Public’ in Inter-war Britain,” in ed. Ross McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), 259–94; and David Jarvis, “The shaping of Conservative electoral hegemony, 1918–39,” in eds. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), 131–52.

3. On Edwardian anti-socialism, see James Nicholas Peters, “Anti-Socialism in British Politics c. 1900–22: the Emergence of a Counter-Ideology” (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1992).

4. As Peters has argued, Bolshevism “only confirmed, in a more militant form, the anti-Utopian arguments deployed against Socialism in the pre-war period.” See Ibid., 337.

5. Jonathan Michaels, McCarthyism: The Realities, Delusions and Politics Behind the 1950s Red Scare (New York, 2017), 48. The passage refers to the infamous Lusk Committee, established by the New York State Legislature during the First Red Scare to ‘investigate seditious activities’.

6. This is not as true of other fields such as labour, intelligence and even cultural history, whose scattered contributions to our understanding of British anti-communism are too numerous to list here.

7. Jennifer Luff, “Labor Anticommunism in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, 1920–49,” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 1 (2016): 1–25, at 5.

8. Stuart Ball, Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918–1945 (Oxford, 2013), 52–58, 91–93; David Jarvis, “Mrs Maggs and Betty: The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s,” Twentieth Century British History 5, no. 2 (1994): 129–52, at 145–48; David Thackeray, “Home and Politics: Women and Conservative Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” Journal of British Studies 49, no. 4 (2010): 826–48, at 837–38; David Thackeray, Conservatism for the democratic age: Conservative cultures and the challenge of mass politics in early twentieth-century England (Manchester, 2013); Neal R. McCrillis, The British Conservative Party in the Age of Universal Suffrage: Popular Conservatism, 1918–1929 (Columbus, 1998).

9. Laura Beers, “Counter-Toryism: Labour’s Response to Anti-Socialist Propaganda, 1918–39,” in ed. Matthew Worley, The Foundations of the British Labour Party: Identities, Cultures and Perspectives, 1900–39 (Farnham, 2009), 231–55.

10. Geraint Thomas, Popular Conservatism and the Culture of National Government in Inter-War Britain (Cambridge, 2020), 25–26.

11. For the fullest account of Baldwin’s political discourse, see Philip Williamson, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative leadership and national values (Cambridge, 1999), 203–43.

12. John Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin 1902–1940: A History of the Conservative Party (London, 1978), 203.

13. For an account of the conservative press’s coverage of the 1924 election, which in many ways reflects this article’s analysis of the campaign via Conservative printed propaganda, see Laura Beers, Your Britain: Media and the Making of the Labour Party (London, 2010), 57–67.

14. See, for example, Antony Best, “’We are virtually at war with Russia’: Britain and the Cold War in East Asia, 1923–40,” Cold War History 12, no. 2 (2012): 205–225; Erik Goldstein, “Britain and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1925,” in eds. Michael F. Hopkins, Michael D. Kandiah and Gillian Staerck, Cold War Britain, 1945–1964: New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2003), 7–17.

15. See Matthew Gerth, “British McCarthyism: The Anti-Communist Politics of Lord Vansittart and Sir Waldron Smithers,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association 107, no. 378 (2022): 927–948.

16. See ed. Robert J. Goldstein, Little ‘Red Scares’: Anti-Communism and Political Repression in the United States, 1921–1946 (Burlington, 2014).

17. Jarvis, “The shaping of Conservative electoral hegemony,” 135.

18. Discussion of Conservative fears around the post-war working-class can be found in David Jarvis, “British Conservatives and Class Politics in the 1920s,” English Historical Review 111, no. 440 (1996): 59–84, at 68–75.

19. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class, 295.

20. What Bolshevist Socialism has done for Russia it would like to do for you, 1918, Bodleian Library, PUB 401/1(hereafter abbreviated to Bodl.); Election Notes, 1918, Bodl., PUB 224/7A, 44–45, 56–60.

21. War Cabinet Conclusions, 5 February 1919, TNA CAB 23/9. On the Belfast strike, see Olivier Coquelin, “A Strikers’ ‘Soviet’ in Belfast’? The Great Belfast Strike of 1919,” Labour History Review 87, no. 3 (2022): 255–75; on Glasgow, see Gordon J. Barclay, “’Duties In Aid of the Civil Power’: The Deployment of the Army to Glasgow, 31 January to 17 February 1919,” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (2018): 261–292; on the police strikes, see Ron Bean, “Police Unrest, Unionization and the 1919 Strike in Liverpool,” Journal of Contemporary History 15, no. 4 (1980): 633–653.

22. War Cabinet Conclusions, 4 February 1919, TNA CAB 23/9; War Cabinet Conclusions, 30 May 1919, TNA CAB 23/10.

23. War Cabinet Conclusions, 3 March 1919, TNA CAB 23/9. For a comprehensive survey of the British government’s handling of the Bolsheviks following the revolution, see Richard H. Ullman’s trilogy, Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1917–1921, Volumes I-III (Princeton, 1961–1972).

24. Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1985), 224–46.

25. There is not a great deal of research on overt political policing of communists, less so than on the activities of Special Branch and the Secret Service, but it appears to have been fairly widespread. See Jennifer Luff, “Covert and Overt Operations: Interwar Political Policing in the United States and the United Kingdom,” The American Historical Review 122, no. 3 (2017): 727–57, at 742–44.

26. For a survey of these organisations, see Stephen White, “Ideological Hegemony and Political Control: The Sociology of Anti-Bolshevism in Britain 1918–20,” The Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society 9 (1975): 3–20.

27. Arthur McIvor, “’A Crusade for Capitalism’: The Economic League, 1919–39,” Journal of Contemporary History 23, no. 4 (1988): 631–55.

28. War Cabinet Conclusions, 31 January 1919, TNA CAB 23/9.

29. Westminster Gazette, 19 March 1920.

30. The Scotsman, 25 March 1920.

31. On the Liberal’s muddled anti-socialist rhetoric, see Michael Bentley, “The Liberal Response to Socialism, 1918–29,” in ed. Kenneth D. Brown, Essays in Anti-Labour History: Responses to the Rise of Labour in Britain (London, 1974), 46–53.

32. There were of course a number of other reasons for the Liberal Party’s decline, including the increase in class-based voting and the impact of the Great War. For a survey of this topic, see G. R. Searle, The Liberal Party: Triumph and Disintegration, 1886–1929 (New York, 1992).

33. The Frozen Breath of Bolshevism, 1919, Bodl., PUB 37/1/2; Bolshevism is not Democracy, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

34. Shall the People Rule?, 1919, Bodl., PUB 37/1/2.

35. Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951 (Oxford, 2010), 62.

36. Stephen White, “Labour’s Council of Action 1920,” Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 4 (1974): 99–122, at 101.

37. The ‘Labour’ Party’s Challenge to the People, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; also see ‘Council of Action’ Plans: What Trade Union Leaders Say About The General Political Strike, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; The Dictators: Who’s Who in the ‘Council of Action’, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

38. Oil and Vinegar: What Does the ‘Labour’ Party Stand for?, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

39. Jarvis, “Mrs. Maggs and Betty,” 145.

40. National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations Annual Conference minutes, 1920, Bodl., NUA 2/1/36.

41. The Bolshevist War Against Christianity, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; Women! Don’t Touch Bolshevism, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2. Women were generally supposed to be more religious than men in interwar Britain, and this is reflected in Conservative propaganda.

42. Clarisse Berthezène, Training minds for the war of ideas: Ashridge College, the Conservative Party and the cultural politics of Britain, 1929–54 (Manchester, 2015), 37; Michael P. Perduniak, “Pamphlets and Politics: The British Liberal Party and the ‘Working Man’, c. 1867-c.1925” (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2013), 217–18.

43. What Bolshevism Means to Women, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; Ourselves Under the Socialists: A Word to Women by Mrs. F. H. Glanville, 1920, Bodl., PUB 402/3.

44. An Eye-Witness on the Bolshevist Terror, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

45. Hurrah for the Red Republic by Comrade Bob Williams, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; see also, Heavy Civil War, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; If, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; What Bolshevism Means to Women.

46. This author has identified, based off a survey of local and regional newspapers, at least two Central Office speakers whose full-time occupation appears to have been lecturing on the subject of Bolshevism, although evidence suggests that many more speakers regularly discussed it.

47. Chichester Observer, 15 June 1921.

48. Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 29 October 1920.

49. Dover Express, 27 August 1920.

50. Mid Sussex Times, 14 December 1920. For further insight into the Conservative preoccupation with middle-class apathy in the 1920s, see Jarvis, “British Conservatism and Class Politics in the 1920s,” 76–79.

51. North Wales Weekly News, 16 December 1920.

52. David Thackeray, Conservatism for the democratic age, 192–200.

53. Annual Conference of the National Unionist Association Labour Committee, 1920, Bodl., PUB 401/4. The best general account of the NUA Labour Committee is located in McCrillis, The British Conservative Party in the Age of Universal Suffrage, 110–145.

54. The Popular View, June 1921, Bodl., PUB 211.

55. e.g. The Times, 10 June 1919.

56. Diamonds for the Daily Herald, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

57. Life Under Lenin and Trotsky, 1919, Bodl., PUB 401/2.

58. The Frozen Breath of Bolshevism.

59. A ‘Striking’ Contrast: Bolshevist Joy and Bolshevist Bullets, 1919, Bodl., PUB 37/1/2.

60. The Worker Under Bolshevism, 1919, Bodl., PUB 37/1/2.

61. Bolshevism is not Democracy.

62. Bolshevism at First Hand: What Col. John Ward, the Labour M.P., Saw in Russia, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; Listen to Clynes, 1919, Bodl., PUB 37/1/2; Bolshevism As Labour Saw It, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2; Save those you love from Bolshevism, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

63. A Challenge to Trade Unionists, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

64. The Frozen Breath of Bolshevism.

65. Bludgeoned to Work: Labour Slaves in Nationalised Russia, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

66. A ‘Striking’ Contrast; What the ‘Labour’ Party Wants: Their Programme in Their Own Words, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2.

67. Andrew Taylor, “The Party and the Trade Unions,” in eds. Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball, Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), 477.

68. Roy Douglas, “The National Democratic Party and the British Workers’ League,” The Historical Journal 15, no. 3 (1972): 533–52, at 548–50.

69. Kevin Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left Part One: Labour Legends and Russian Gold (London, 2006), 196.

70. Annual Conference of the National Unionist Association Labour Committee, 1920.

71. For a particularly egregious example, see The Elector, September 1924, Bodl., PUB 146/2.

72. Birmingham Daily Gazette, 3 September 1920.

73. This was certainly not true of all, or probably even most, working-class women however, many of whom were just as class-conscious as their male counterparts, see Annmarie Hughes, Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919–1939 (Edinburgh, 2010), 34–36.

74. The Roly-Poly Revolution, 1925, Bodl., PUB 406.

75. For example, Conservative candidates in industrial Lancashire towns frequently made use of the same anti-communist themes as national propaganda literature when addressing women’s meetings, see James K. Dearling, “The Language of Conservatism in Lancashire Between the Wars: A Study of Ashton-Under-Lyne, Chorley, Clitheroe, Royton, and South Salford” (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2002), 147–50.

76. A Call to Women Against the Red Terror: By Mrs. Philip Snowden, 1920, Bodl., PUB 37/2. Unsurprisingly, Snowden’s assertion that ‘it is not socialism’ was left out.

77. Home and Politics, July 1925, Bodl., PUB 212/5.

78. The debate around the relevance of Empire to interwar British society and politics is too complex to discuss here. For works which acknowledge a decline, though not a terminal one, of popular imperialism between the wars, see Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London, 2005); Jim English, “Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 247–276. On the preoccupation of policymakers with the Soviet threat to the Empire, and India in particular, see John Fisher, ‘The Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest and British Responses to Bolshevik and Other Intrigues Against the Empire During the 1920s’, Journal of Asian History 34, no. 1 (2000): 1–34.

79. Goldstein, Little ‘Red Scares’, xiv. For another recent work in this tradition, see Nick Fischer, Spider Web: The Birth of American Anticommunism (Urbana, 2016).

80. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York, 2004), 105.

81. John Stevenson, “Conservatism and the failure of fascism in interwar Britain,” in ed. Martin Blinkhorn, Fascists and Conservatives: The radical right and the establishment in twentieth-century Europe (London, 1990), 275–76. The conception of early British fascism as ‘Conservativism with knobs on’ is a widely held one in the literature.

82. Despite the substantially different philosophies of the two types of Sunday schools, they were most often considered by Conservatives to be essentially the same. Quotation taken from The Campaign Guide: The Unique Political Reference Book, 1922, Bodl., PUB 224/8, 1002.

83. The only extended research carried out into the BEU and NCU is Ian Thomas, ‘Confronting the Challenge of Socialism: The British Empire Union and the National Citizens’ Union, 1917–1927’ (MPhil thesis, University of Wolverhampton, 2010).

84. Goldstein, Little ‘Red Scares’, xiv.

85. Thomas, “Confronting the Challenge of Socialism,” pp. 27–29.

86. The Times, 27 February 1923.

87. Jessica Gerrard, Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change (Manchester, 2014), 89. Several similar bills were introduced by different Conservative MPs later in the interwar period, although none attracted nearly as much attention.

88. “Socialist and Revolutionary Schools: Memorandum by the Home Secretary,” 25 April 1922, C.P. 3948, TNA CAB 24/136.

89. This figure if accurate would amount to nearly half the number of people that voted in the 1922 and 1923 elections. Although it can be called into question, particularly because repeat signatures may have been common, it is not beyond belief for the signatures to have totalled somewhere in the millions, given that the BEU enlisted the membership of several mass organisations such as the Mothers’ Union and the Primrose League in their campaign. See Liam Ryan, “The Political Culture of Anti-Socialism in Britain, 1900–1940” (PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 2018), 140–44.

90. The Times, 5 March 1923.

91. Fife Free Press & Kirkcaldy Guardian, 1 December 1923.

92. Liam Ryan, “The Political Culture of Anti-Socialism in Britain,” 141–42.

93. National Union Executive Committee minutes, February 1923, Bodl., NUA 4/1/4.

94. e.g. St. Pancras Gazette, 13 January 1922; Bucks Herald, 18 March 1922; Bromley and West Kent Mercury, 16 June 1922. The practice of having National Union and Central Office speakers lecture about the SSS/PSS ramped up as the campaign gained more momentum in early 1923.

95. Daily News, 27 February 1922; The Vote and How to Use it, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/1. The party’s journal of record, Gleanings and Memoranda, whose readership consisted of Conservative speakers and activists, also carried ample information regarding the PSS, e.g. Gleanings and Memoranda, May 1922, Bodl., PUB 220/55.

96. Vote Unionist and Stop Socialist Blasphemy, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/2.

97. Gerrard, Radical Childhoods, 91; Ibid.; The Vote and How to Use it.

98. e.g. The Scotsman, 13 November 1922; Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 14 November 1922; Kent and Sussex Courier, 10 November 1922.

99. Why You Should Be Unionist, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/1. Also see, Is It Fit To Govern? ‘Labour’ Party Judged By Its Actions, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/1; What Some ‘Labour’ Party Members Want, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/2; The Campaign Guide, 1922, 39–41.

100. What Socialism means to Women, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/1; Women! Learn the Lesson Russia Teaches, Don’t Touch Socialism, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/2.

101. Socialism and Religion, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/2.

102. Russia’s Object-Lesson in Socialism, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/1.

103. This shows what Socialism means in Russia, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/2; Socialism has reduced Russia to the Depths of Despair, 1922, Bodl., PUB 38/2.

104. Popular interest in the SSS/PSS declined from mid-1923 and waned significantly after 1924. See Ryan, “The Political Culture of Anti-Socialism,” 148–49.

105. For the Labour Party’s rule-tightening to exclude communists in these years, see David Howell, MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis, 1922–1931 (Oxford, 2002), 380–404.

106. Chris Cook, The Age of Alignment: Electoral Politics in Britain, 1922–1929 (London, 1975), 144–45. Also see Fighting Notes against Liberals and Socialists, 1923, Bodl., PUB 385, which consistently represents Soviet socialism as the natural endpoint of British socialism.

107. Williamson, Stanley Baldwin, pp. 29–31.

108. John Shepherd and Keith Laybourn, Britain’s First Labour Government (London, 2006), 40.

109. Ibid., 200–202.

110. Ibid., pp. 157–59; Andrew J. Williams, Labour and Russia: The Attitude of the Labour Party to the USSR, 1924–34 (Manchester, 1989), 13–15.

111. For a full account of the Campbell affair, see Shepherd and Laybourn, Britain’s First Labour Government, 163–69.

112. Neville Kirk, Labour and the politics of Empire: Britain and Australia 1900 to the present (Manchester, 2011), 116. For an authoritative account of the mystery surrounding the Zinoviev Letter, see Gil Bennett, The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy That Never Dies (Oxford, 2018).

113. Chris Cook, “By-elections of the first Labour government,” in eds. Chris Cook and John Ramsden, By-elections in British Politics (London, 1973), 57.

114. Ramsden, The Age of Balfour and Baldwin, 200.

115. Cook, “By-elections of the first Labour government,” 37–57.

116. Ball, Portrait of a Party, 292; Leo Amery to Stanley Baldwin, 14 November 1923, cited in Ibid., 99.

117. Stamfordham memorandum for the King, 7 October 1924, cited in Eds. Philip Williamson and Edward Baldwin, Baldwin Papers: A Conservative Statesman, 1908–1947 (Cambridge, 2004), 159.

118. Why the Bolshie Treaties must go, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; The Limit, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; Surrender to Red Russia!, 1924, Bodl., PUB 40.

119. Bolshevik Torture of Women, 1924, Bodl., PUB 40.

120. Government’s Bolshevik Friends: Christianity Abolished, 1924, Bodl., PUB 40; Women and the Election, 1924, Bodl., PUB 40; Bolshevik Torture of Women.

121. Communism and the Churches, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; To Parents: Communists Corrupt Children, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; To Women: Communism Destroys Marriage, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43.

122. Shall Bolshies Teach Our Boys and Girls? 1924, Bodl., PUB 40; The Kiddies’ Future, 1924, Bodl., PUB 40.

123. To Trade Unionists, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; A Message to Farm-workers, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43.

124. Freedom Gone in Socialist Russia, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; Don’ts for Citizens, 1924, Bodl., PUB 40.

125. Beware of False Friends! A Woman’s Warning to Mrs. Worker, 1924, Bodl., PUB 404/6.

126. What is Communism?, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43. This phrase or a variation of it appears in many different leaflets.

127. Russia’s Bitter Lesson, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; Religious Teaching Banned, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; Prices in Socialist Russia, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; The Socialist Government in Russia, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; Rations Under Socialism in Russia, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; Socialism Ruins Agriculture, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43.

128. At Last The Truth, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43; Official Warning, 1924, Bodl., PUB 43.

129. Goldstein, Little ‘Red Scares’, xiii.

130. Quotation taken from the 1922 Labour Party general election manifesto, see ed. Iain Dale, Labour Party General Election Manifestos, 1900–1997 (London, 2000), 22.

131. Women Electors, Labour Party leaflet, 1922, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, 36/L41/1/4; To the Woman in the Home, Labour Party leaflet, 1923, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, 36/L41/4/19.

132. Beers, “Counter-Toryism,” 233–34.

133. The term is not found in any of the Labour Party’s manifestos between the 1918 and 1924 elections, see Dale, Labour Party General Election Manifestos, 16–31.

134. Cited in Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924 (Woodbridge, 1998), 181–88.

135. Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser, 13 April 1921.

136. Forward, 15 May 1920.

137. Cited in F.S. Northedge and Audrey Wells, Britain and Soviet Communism: The Impact of a Revolution (London, 1982), 39.

138. The Scotsman, 27 October 1924.

139. Sheffield Independent, 18 October 1922

140. Jessie Stephen, Submission is for slaves, n.d., 93, Working Class Movement Library, PP/BIOG/16.

141. Hastings and St Leonard Observer, 11 October 1924.

142. The best illustration of Labour’s success in pushing back against Conservative propaganda is the case of the 1919 railway strike, during which their publicity machinery induced an antagonistic press to change its stance on the strike’s ‘unconstitutionality’, see Laura Beers, “’Is This Man an Anarchist?’ Industrial Action and the Battle for Public Opinion in Interwar Britain,” The Journal of Modern History 82, no. 1 (2010): 30–60.

143. For Labour’s significant disadvantage in the press and propaganda spheres during the 1920s, see Laura Beers, “Labour’s Britain, Fight For It Now!,” The Historical Journal 52, no. 3 (2009): 667–95, at 672–3.

144. On the Conservative panic over communist sedition and Baldwin’s uncharacteristic appeasement of it just a week before the arrests, see National Union Annual Conference minutes, 1925, Bodl., NUA 2/1/41.

145. Roger Schinness, “The Conservative Party and Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1925–7,” European Studies Review 7, no. 4 (1977): 393–407.

146. David Vessey, “Anti-Bolshevism and the periodical press in interwar Britain: the case of the Saturday Review, 1933–6,” Historical Research 96, no. 271 (2023): 103–123.

147. Matthew Gerth, Anti-Communism in Britain During the Early Cold War: A Very British Witch Hunt (London, 2023), 109–116.

148. Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985), 184.

149. G.C. Webber, The Ideology of the British Right, 1918–1939 (London, 1986), 138.

150. Peters, “Anti-Socialism in British Politics c. 1900–22,” 335.