A critical examination of the labour government and trades Union Congress in the immediate postwar period, this book argues that the Cold War was not just a traditional conflict between states but also an attempt to contain the growth of radical working-class movements at home and abroad. These radical movements, stimulated by the Second World War and its aftermath, seemed to policymakers within the Labour Party and the TUC to threaten British interests. The author contends that the Labour government never seriously considered following a socialist foreign policy, but instead sought to shape political developments throughout the world in ways most conductive to maintaining Britain's traditional economic and imperial interests. The government was able to follow established policies abroad and increasingly at home at least in part because British trade union leaders supported its attempts to prevent radicals and communists from coming to power in trade union movements inside Britain and throughout the world. In so doing, the trade union movement significantly extended its links with the state, in particular by cooperating with it in the sphere of foreign and colonial labour policy.

This is the first major study of trade unions in the launch of the Cold War in the 1940s. Using unpublished archival material from Europe and the United States, MacShane challenges existing interpretations of international labor's role in the Cold War. He argues that European traditions and olitical differences were more important than American interventions in determining labor's attitudes to international problems after the Second World War.

Drawing on substantial new research, Saville focuses on the role of Ernest Bevin and his differences with Clement Attlee, particularly with regard to the Middle East. Countering the widely held view that Bevin sought accommodation with the Soviet Union, he reveals Labour's Foreign Secretary as a fervent ideologue, wholly in agreement with the deep-seated anti-Sovietism of his permanent officials.

Who were the British MPs sympathetic to the Soviets - the 'crypto-communists' 'left-wing gadflys', the 'neo-Stalinist left' so derided by fellow politicians, journalists, historians and the public? These Labour MPs, fingered as 'Soviet spies' who developed links with post-war Russia, were seen as potentially anti-Western actors in the Cold War. Against the Cold War examines the careers and motives of MPs like Tom Driberg and Ian Mikardo who developed ideological links with the Soviet Union and whose ideas influenced Labour's left-wing. Although radical and sympathetic to Communist ideals, they remained principled socialists, and were ready to exercise Trotsky's 'right to alight'- to oppose and even abandon Soviet links for democratic socialism.

Review: "Harold Wilson's Cold War analyses the Labour government's efforts to promote East-West detente and to improve Anglo-Soviet relations from 1964 to 1970." "Geraint Hughes challenges the caricature of Harold Wilson's rigid subservience to America, and shows how, as Prime Minister, he proposed to develop closer contacts with the Soviet leadership, and to foster co-operation on arms control, conflict resolution in Vietnam, and East-West trade."--Jacket.

This book provides a penetrating new study of the Labour Party’s thinking on international relations, which probes the past, present and future of the party’s approach to the international stage. The foreign policy of the Labour Party is not only neglected in most histories of the party, it is also often considered in isolation from the party’s origins, evolution and major domestic preoccupations. Yet nothing has been more divisive and more controversial in Labour’s history than the party’s foreign and defence policies and their relationship to its domestic programme. Much more has turned on this than the generation of tempestuous conference debates. Labour’s credentials as a credible prospect for Governmental office were thought to depend on a responsible approach to foreign and defence policy. Its exclusion from office was often said to stem from a failure to meet this test, as in the 1950s. The composition of Labour Cabinets was powerfully influenced by foreign and defence considerations, as was the centralization of power and decision-making within Labour Governments. The domestic achievements and failures of these periods in office were inextricably connected to international questions. The Labour Party and Foreign Policy is recommended for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in British politics and European history.