TONY BLAIR made a point on turning his back on the labour movement and rejecting Labour Party history. 

Despite having been MP for Sedgefield, in the north-east of England, he broke with tradition as leader and shunned the Durham Miners’ Gala. 

His main interest was in developing the future for New Labour, although, had he studied history, he might have grasped that there was nothing all that new, in most respects, about his project.

Keir Starmer, who certainly sees himself as a Blair for the 2020s, also makes a point of knowing little about Labour’s history. 

He is not, however, beyond selective references to it in order to enforce a current policy. 

In the case of support for militarism and war, Starmer has cast Labour as the pro-Nato party, and anyone who argues for peace and against war, is on a fast-track out of Labour. 

Hence Starmer demanded that Labour MPs remove their names from a Stop the War statement on Ukraine. It called out Russian aggression but was also critical of Nato. That is not allowed in Starmer’s Labour.

This is against anti-war and pacifist traditions in the party, which go back to its first leader Keir Hardie. Starmer is not trying to rewrite that history, rather he aims to erase it. 

Hardie’s opposition to war came from his religious convictions, and he opposed the Boer war at the start of the 20th century. 

As the first world war approached he spoke in the Commons on August 3 1914, opposing British involvement. 

He argued that Britain had no quarrel with any supposed enemies and that a war would simply make the poor poorer. He refused to back the war while Labour supported it. 

In what remains a reactionary tradition, jingoists claimed Hardie supported the Germans.

It wasn’t just at the level of leadership that socialists opposed war. As Ken Weller’s study of the north London anti-war movement from 1914-18, Don’t Be a Soldier, showed, many who were Labour supporters were actively opposed to the war, organising protests and meetings.

A main paper of the anti-war movement was the Daily Herald, edited by George Lansbury. Lansbury was a lifelong peace campaigner. 

Famous for his role in leading the Poplar rates revolt in east London in the early 1920s, he became Labour leader after some MPs split to back Ramsay MacDonald’s national government from 1931.

Lansbury continued to campaign for peace and his opposition to rearming in the face of the rise of fascism in Europe saw him resign in 1935.

Lansbury’s successor as leader Clement Attlee became deputy prime minister in the second world war cabinet and Labour PM from 1945-51. 

Nye Bevan, who was health secretary in that government, was a consistent opponent of capitalist wars in the 1930s and 1940s. 

He backed the fight against the Nazis, but was a persistent critic of Winston Churchill’s during the war, arguing that a war against fascism must also be a war for socialism.

In 1956 the Tory government, along with France and Israel, invaded Egypt in a bid to gain control of the Suez Canal. 

It was an illegal war and was opposed by Labour. Bevan spoke out against it in the strongest terms. 

At a rally against the war in Trafalgar Square on November 4 1956 Bevan attacked the Tories and said in claiming they were leading the way it was “the lead back to chaos, back to anarchy and back to universal destruction.” 

The following year at the Labour Party conference, however, Bevan attacked campaigners for unilateral nuclear disarmament by claiming that would send a foreign secretary “naked into the conference chamber.”

This set the tone for the next important anti-war challenge in Labour. Right-wing Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell backed the bomb but CND together with some unions such as the Transport Workers (now Unite) was determined to get Labour committed to a policy of “ban the bomb.” 

Michael Foot, who had taken Bevan’s parliamentary seat on his death in 1960, and Labour leader in the early 1980s, was a important figure in the campaign. However while critical of Nato, he did not advocate British withdrawal.

The 1960s was dominated by the Vietnam war. US president Lyndon B Johnson wanted some British involvement — even of a token kind. 

However, under pressure from a significant anti-war campaign, Harold Wilson, Labour prime minister from 1964, did not commit troops. 

He wanted to scale back military activity on cost grounds, but he did provide considerable support from British bases in the far east to the US, short of “boots on the ground.”

By 1982 and the Falklands war, Michael Foot was leader of the opposition and backed Margaret Thatcher’s war against Argentina. 

Like Bevan, Foot’s support or otherwise for military adventures was to some extent based on the context of events, beyond principle. 

The Argentinian warship, the Belgrano, was sunk by the British with the loss of over 300 lives, even though it was sailing away from conflict at the time. 

In 1985, leaked details by a civil servant, the Labour MP Tam Dalyell, pursued Thatcher on the matter, claiming that she had known the Belgrano was not a danger when the order to sink it was given.

In the modern era, particularly during the New Labour years between 1997 and 2010, Britain became involved in military operations, often without a legal basis, in  Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. 

Tony Benn, along with Jeremy Corbyn and others, were consistent in their opposition to the wars, and the Iraq war saw the biggest-ever demonstration in British history. 

Well over a million people marched against the war, organised by the Stop the War Coalition. Keir Starmer, then a human rights lawyer, supported the protest, but 20 years on he is keen to write it out of history. 

History suggests, however, that while imperialist wars continue, opposition to them will too and some of that will be found in the Labour Party, often among some of its leading figures of the day.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.