By Steve Bell
Covering the period from 1954 to 1965, this work is an impressive feat of scholarship. It is not primarily a history of the Algerian revolution, although the main course is outlined. Instead, it is a retrieval of how nationalist forces worked with the labour movement in Britain and France.
The focus is on the minority in the British labour movement who took a supportive stance towards the national liberation struggle in Algeria. These included left Labour MPs, particularly Tony Benn, Fenner Brockway and Barbara Castle and to a lesser extent Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot. Liberation’s predecessor organisation – the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF) played a notable role. Outside of Labour, the Communist Party, New Left Review and Fourth Internationalist groups also contributed. Pacifist groups like Peace News were prominent, and CND played some role.
The study places this opposition within the wider framework of the Cold War, and the hesitant debate in British society on the end of the British Empire. The body of the labour movement maintained an allegiance to the idea of the Empire’s benign character – where the freedom of the colonies was seen as a process of guided development.
“In April 1958, Mboya(1) had already expressed his concerns to Eirene White in a private letter. Not only were African anticolonial leaders increasingly accused of being ‘too much influenced by what the Socialists say’ but they differed with the Labour Party on two major issues: ‘You believe,’ he told White, ‘that there should be a transitional stage before the introduction of universal adult suffrage, we do not,’ and ‘you would rely on the goodwill of European settlers. We do not.” (p.312-3)
This difference also permeated the French government’s Algerian policy. Up until 1958 it assumed the “first stage” would result in consent to continued union and French rule. It was only after Charles de Gaulle’s coup that the French government considered the alternatives to union with France. Self-determination and the right to choose independence was only accepted once the war had failed to break the Algerian resistance.
For the British left, it was easy to accept Algerian self-determination against the French government policy – the Labour left had done so well before the shift to negotiations by the French government. Indeed, in British society at large there was a critical attitude towards French policy, due to the supposedly exemplary decolonisation in cases such as India, Ghana, and Nigeria. The absence of large settler presence in these cases being overlooked. However, this national complacency further overlooked the fierce struggles in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, and Yemen. (2)
The atmosphere created by the Cold War also conditioned the response of the left. The French interventions were frequently posed as discrediting NATO and facilitating the rise of communism.
In November 1956, in Tribune, Michael Foot, in response to the intervention of the USSR in Hungary and the Suez debacle wrote:”…the advocates of Stalinist repression in the Kremlin were encouraged; obviously, they are using the guilt of the British and the French to hide their own in the eyes of the peoples of Asia and Africa, where the myth of Soviet benevolence still has some potency.” (p.144) So the experience of Algeria and Suez left the myth of imperialist benevolence intact?
In June 1960, at a “Stop the War” meeting organised by the MCF in Westminster one of the main concerns was:” …the danger that the war in Algeria posed to world peace, particularly with the growing involvement of China.” (p.386) Only western governments were allowed to aid the Algerians?
And in 1964, after visiting Algeria, Barbara Castle in examining options to assist the now independent state wrote:” …if it does not succeed in breaking the grip of poverty and unemployment, and discontent continues to rise, the regime will inevitably become more authoritarian and will turn more and more to the Eastern bloc for its friends. If that happens we in this country will share the blame.” (p.500) Which doesn’t explain why the Eastern bloc would not deserve to be praised for aiding Algeria.
More generally the debates around NATO’s connections to Algeria were posed as defending NATO from its own involvement. This included the decision of the French government to conduct nuclear bomb tests in the Algerian Sahara. “Many of the debates on the war in Algeria centred on its detrimental impact on NATO’s (and consequently Britain’s) reputation in the world, not on any need to pull out of NATO. As Gupta has noted, the debate on nuclear disarmament was largely Eurocentric and intended to preserve the global power of Britain.” (p.241)
Generally, the left seems to have been clear on what NATO’s actual contribution to the Algerian war was. As Tony Benn told the House of Commons in July 1958:”It is no good pretending that the British government, and NATO, and the United States, have not been supporting the French in Algeria, because, without that support, without the fact that British troops were in Germany replacing the French, without the fact that American equipment was made available, it would not have been possible for the French to carry on a major war in Algeria.” (p.270) Such clarity rings across the years and provides an uncanny echo of current US and allied governments stance on Gaza today.
It is evident in this period, although not explored, how Labour, including the left, was still completely supportive of the Israeli colonial-settler state. In 1958 the Palestinian national question was not debated at Labour Party Conference. The actual debate was around the problem of “Arab refugees” inside Israel.
Bevan argued “I cannot conceive, I cannot understand, how statesmen can imagine that peace in the Middle East can ever be conceded to be safe whilst we sit back and do so little about those refugees. They are not only sources of unrest: they are breeding grounds for discontent; they are also educable material for communist propaganda. They are restless and bitter and revengeful – and quite naturally so, because any of you who have had the opportunity of paying a visit there will realise that there does not exist in the world such a concentration of mass misery as is to be found in those camps.” (p.345)
And in an article published in 1960:” Brockway argued for Israel to recognize the Algerian Provisional Government and offer resettlement or compensation to the Arab refugees on its land. But he also contested the decision of the Permanent Committee of the Struggle Against Colonialism in the Mediterranean and the Middle East to exclude the Israeli delegate from the Cairo Conference of December 1959… development in the Middle East, he stressed, would only be secured through cooperation with Israel.” (p.389)
It took many years for the Labour left to disentangle itself from the legend of the progressive mission of the Israeli state in the region. It was not until the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that figures such as Benn, Eric Heffer and Ian Mikardo stopped defending the policy of Israeli governments. (3)
In a brief review the book’s rich material can hardly be covered. For Liberation members it is a joy to see how consistently the MCF worked to create a movement in solidarity with the Algerian people. For a better understanding of the evolution of the anti-imperialist movement in Britain Torrent’s book is a necessity.
Notes
- Thomas Joseph Odhiambo Mboya – one of key leaders of the Kenya African National Union.
- This selective blindness is brilliantly exposed by Patrick Anderson in “Rewriting the Troubles: War and Propaganda Ireland and Algeria,” Greenland Press, 2022. This contrasts the factual and critical coverage in the British media towards French policy in Algeria with the same media’s invented and censored coverage of Britain’s war in the north of Ireland.
- An important contribution to understanding this shift is “The British Left and Zionism: History of a divorce,” Paul Kelemen, Manchester University Press, 2012
Algerian Independence and the British Left by Melanie Torrent, Bloomsbury Academic
Steve Bell is a member of Liberation and Treasurer of Stop the War Coalition
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