Ian Mikardo, leading left-wing opponent of founding NATO, third from left, with Harold Wilson, Aneurin Bevan, Tom Driberg and Barbara Castle
In 1949, when Parliament actually voted on signing the North Atlantic Treaty, six Labour MPs voted against. That was near the height of the Cold War, with the Berlin airlift and more. Three of the six were expelled - it seems for solid Stalinist affiliations, not just opposing NATO - and three weren’t. Of the three expelled, two drifted out of politics. The third, Konni Zilliacus, was readmitted in 1952 and was an MP again after 1955 for a very right-dominated Labour Party, while remaining a (now somewhat dissident) Stalinist.
Ian Mikardo — who vocally opposed NATO’s creation in the name not of “Communism”, but a social-democratic united Europe as a global third force — remained a prominent MP, with the same sort of politics he’d had in the 40s, until 1987.
Labour’s leaderships have always been pro-NATO, even when the party supported nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. But there have always been MPs, as well as many party units and activists, who opposed that stance.
Yet now there is talk that Keir Starmer may “purge” Labour MPs who signed a Stop the War Coalition statement critical of NATO.
TheTimes, which carried the story on 3 May, editorialised the day before calling for a purge.
“There should not be a place in Labour’s ranks”, loftily declared the paper, as if Rupert Murdoch should be the arbiter of who belongs in Labour and who doesn’t, “for a current of opinion that extenuates aggression and echoes the claim of the Kremlin.” Of course theTimes only means some aggression. Saudi aggression in Yemen or the US invasion of Iraq (etc, etc) is another matter.
Some in the Labour Party have soft-soaped Russian imperialism. But John McDonnell, mentioned most prominently in speculation about a purge, has been more vocal and active denouncing Russia’s war and supporting Ukraine than the Labour leaders!
Workers’ Liberty has no time for the Stop the War Coalition; we are fighting in the labour movement to overturn support for it. We believe NATO and its expansion are marginal to the causes of the current conflict, a war of Russian imperialist aggression. Still, the left must insist on our right to criticise and oppose NATO.
If Starmer does move to get rid of MPs for criticising NATO, this will in fact be unprecedented. John McDonnell entered Parliament in 1997, under Tony Blair. There was never any suggestion his attitude to NATO disqualified him. Even Blair never threatened expulsions for holding such views.