If so, this was courageous, given the Blackshirts’ propensity to violence. A more congenial environment for political debate was provided by the Fleet Street Parliament, a debating society modelled on the House of Commons. It met at the St Bride’s Institute in Fleet Street, Central London. By 1935 Titmuss was being described as ‘The Leader of the Liberal Party’, and in this capacity he wrote to the Liberal MP for Middlesbrough, and Herbert Samuel supporter, Ernest Young, about a debate the latter was to lead. Titmuss’s preference was that Young ‘attack the Socialists’ Programme. They are very strong in the [Fleet Street] Parliament and since last October we have had a succession of Bills nationalising the Banks, Industry, Transport and so on’.8 Young duly spoke in favour of a motion denouncing the ‘principles and policy of the Socialist Party’ as ‘incompatible with the needs of a progressive nation’. If enacted, they would result in a ‘condition of reaction’ gravely prejudicial to ‘the best interests of the British people’.9 Titmuss clearly thought this event successful, telling a colleague that ‘Liberalism was very much alive and fighting last night’.10 Titmuss evidently thought little of the Labour Party. Although Labour had suffered a traumatic defeat in 1931, it had won control of the London County Council (LCC) in 1934. Under Herbert Morrison’s leadership, it was pursuing policies on matters such as healthcare which were, by contemporary standards, radical.11 Titmuss would have been well aware of such developments but, nonetheless, saw Labour as spineless, even reactionary, with only the Liberals offering a progressive alternative to the National Government.
International affairs: ‘Crime and Tragedy’
Titmuss’s political interests were not only domestic. As we saw in the previous chapter, he and Kay attended peace conferences in Geneva and Birmingham in 1936. The international situation, and the National Government’s handling of foreign affairs, were of considerable concern to those on the liberal and progressive left, who, consequently, tended to support the League of Nations. The League, based in Geneva, had been set up after the First World War as an intergovernmental body aimed at resolving international disputes on a peaceful, cooperative, basis. It sought to prevent the sort of misunderstandings, and military alliances, which, it was widely believed, had resulted in the immensely destructive conflict which had broken out in 1914. By the mid-1930s, however, the League had suffered a number of blows. For example, the US had always stood apart, and shortly after coming to power the Nazi regime in Germany had quit. British supporters of the League were organised in the League of Nations Union, one of a number of bodies seeking stable and peaceful international relations. It conducted the so-called ‘Peace Ballot’, the result of which was announced in July 1935. This showed overwhelming support for, among other things, the use of economic sanctions by League members against any country pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, and continuing British membership of the League.12
Another organisation concerned with peaceful international relations, the Council for Action for Peace and Reconstruction, was set up in July 1935 at a convention held at London’s Caxton Hall. The driving force here was former Liberal leader and Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the founding meeting attracted over 2,500 delegates, including 82 MPs. Addressing the meeting on its first day, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, a leading figure in the creation of the League of Nations, told delegates that the ‘Abyssinian question’ – Abyssinia is now called Ethiopia – ‘was the most serious foreign complication … since the War’. The convention’s resolution supporting all moves towards a peaceful resolution of international disputes therefore had a particular sense of urgency.13 The following day Lloyd George, in what The Times described as his ‘Call to Arms’, proposed that efforts should be made to secure the return of MPs, irrespective of party affiliation, who supported the Council’s aims. He also suggested that the current international situation was worse than that of 1914 while, on the domestic front, there was an urgent need to tackle unemployment.14
Titmuss attended the Caxton Hall meeting, writing in its aftermath to the Council’s organising secretary. A special meeting of the Fleet Street Parliamentary Liberal Party had been held, had unanimously endorsed ‘the resolutions adopted by the Council of Action … in regard to Peace and Reconstruction’, and had pledged itself to ‘support the proposals and policy’ outlined in the manifesto issued by the council.15 Shortly afterwards, in the St Bride’s Institute’s journal The Bridean, Titmuss argued that the Liberal Party’s role was to ‘fight to lift from the hearts of the people the dread of war, and from their homes the anxiety and misery of want and destitution’.16 But soon after Titmuss’s article appeared, the Abyssinian situation took a further turn for the worse when that country was invaded by Italy, notwithstanding that both countries were League of Nations members. These events were blows from which the organisation did not recover. The European situation was to continue to deteriorate with, over the coming few years, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the consequences of the already aggressive foreign policy of Nazi Germany.
Titmuss was alive to these issues. In a further piece for The Bridean, in 1936, he wrote that Europe was ‘rattling back to barbarism’. So the ‘problem of organising peace is now – more than ever – of paramount importance. It is, in fact, the condition of survival’. The Fleet Street Parliament’s Liberals, were, therefore, ‘fully prepared to subordinate all party interests to supporting with all our energies’ any policy, whoever proposed it, which sought to rebuild and strengthen the League of Nations, and to organise ‘a worldwide non aggression, arbitration and mutual assistance treaty’ based on the League’s covenant, and open to all countries. A treaty of this sort, effectively an ‘International Popular Front’, would bring diplomatic, security, and economic benefits to all participants. Such a plan offered the British people, confronted by an ‘anarchic world’, the ‘only chance of removing the danger of another European conflagration’. War would not be avoided, on the other hand, by ‘an armaments race, isolation or negative pacifism’.17 Titmuss had clearly been impressed by the French and Spanish Popular Fronts, seeing them as a model for cross-party cooperation on an international scale. Calls for a British Popular Front were not confined to the Labour and Communist parties. There were those within the Liberal Party who advocated political alliances to combat fascism and appeasement. Titmuss was, as we shall see, close to one of the most fervent Liberal advocates of this position, Richard Acland, and his own pronouncements put him likewise in this camp.18 Titmuss’s rejection of ‘negative pacifism’ is similarly a rebuke to those, not a few in the 1930s, who argued that pacifism was, by itself, an acceptable moral, and political, position.
A few months later an official of the National Peace Council congratulated Titmuss on the setting up of a ‘Youth Peace Council’.19 It would be stretching the point to describe Titmuss as a ‘youth’ by this time, but this does, once more, illustrate his commitment to issues about which he felt strongly. These included the current state of British society, and, especially urgent as the 1930s drew to a close, the international situation. For those such as Titmuss these were not separate matters, but interlinked. Support for rearmament, and growing opposition to the appeasement of dictatorships, by both the Liberal and the Labour parties, have to be seen as part of a broader condemnation of a social order lacking in principles, unthinkingly devoted to free-market capitalism, and prepared
