By the end of the twentieth century a marked shift had taken place in the rhetorical framing of the activities of the British civil liberties lobby. The National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) became Liberty, operating under the tagline ‘protecting civil liberties: promoting human rights’. Similarly, the Scottish Council for Civil Liberties had become the Scottish Human Rights Centre, while the British branch of the International Commission of Jurists, JUSTICE, now describes its first aim as the promotion of human rights. These shifts appeared to mark the emergence of a new Zeitgeist, in which a broader, inclusive language of human rights has replaced a more individualistic conceptualisation of civil liberties.Footnote ¹

Such a shift in the language of British civil liberties activism reflects the increased importance of human rights in twentieth-century politics. Historians have placed great emphasis on the Second World War as a key period in this transformation.Footnote ² Positivist and legal interpretations have identified this emergence within the United Nations Charter of 1945, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950.Footnote ³ These apparently marked an era in which the individual's rights had a place within the institutions of a new world order. As Paul Kennedy has made clear, this was ‘qualitatively different from anything else that had gone before’.Footnote ⁴

A number of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) played a significant role in this emergence.Footnote ⁵ Eleanor Roosevelt, leading the UDHR's drafting committee, explained that NGOs could provide a ‘curious grapevine’ to carry the Declaration to all peoples in all regimes.Footnote ⁶ Yet, NGOs working around the formation of the UN, and the UDHR's drafting, were largely American. Within Britain, the transition from national civil liberties politics into an international language of human rights did not occur in the immediate aftermath of the war.Footnote ⁷ A member of the NCCL's executive committee in the immediate post-war period would later reflect that the organisation was ‘very ambitious’ in trying to organise an international conference on human rights, but admitted that such a project ‘was ten years too early’.Footnote ⁸

In discussing the relationship between British civil liberties and rights organisations and the new frameworks for transnational human rights, this article focuses on the activities of those from the British Left who had been associated with civil liberties politics during the 1930s.Footnote ⁹ At the heart of this are a series of difficulties that organisations had in pursuing an effective politics of human rights. As will be demonstrated, there was a newfound interest in the idea of human rights from the British Left in the 1940s and 1950s, which expanded on civil and political rights and moved into the socio-economic sphere at both national and international level. Yet, this did not find effective organisational expression.

The article will consider four efforts to promote human rights organisations and movements that emerged during the 1940s and early 1950s. First, it will discuss a nationwide debate on the need for a new declaration of the rights of man, which was instigated by the writer H. G. Wells and the journalist Peter Ritchie-Calder and took place within the Daily Herald and New Statesman newspapers in February 1940. Second, it will consider the interest of the NCCL, an organisation which was formed in 1934 and was Britain's leading civil liberties group, in human rights. Its involvement in relation to the Daily Herald debate and at a series of national and international human rights conferences in the immediate post-war period will be covered. Third, it will examine the League for the Freedom and Dignity of Man, a short-lived organisation put together by the writers George Orwell and Arthur Koestler in 1946. Fourth, it will discuss an unnamed liberties and rights group associated with the publisher Victor Gollancz that met on numerous occasions in 1950 and 1951.

Of course, the emergence of human rights in the institutions of global governance had roots beyond leftist politics, the most obvious being ecumenical; nonetheless, strands of the Left that had been active campaigners on civil liberties were excited about mobilising around human rights in the post-war era.Footnote ¹⁰ During the 1930s, in the context of the ascent of the dictators, difficulties of liberal political systems, and rising political extremism in Britain, civil liberties carried a great resonance.Footnote ¹¹ Within this environment, civil liberties activism was one of a number of projects aiming to find ‘agreement’ between liberal and left-wing views.Footnote ¹² Civil liberties politics appeared to offer some obvious shared ground between socialist and liberal principles, potentially providing a unifying theme for adherents of such ideologies.Footnote ¹³ This activism was thus in keeping with the ‘progressive tradition’ that David Blaazer has depicted as a crucial component of forms of popular-front politics.Footnote ¹⁴ On one level, popular-front politics reflected specific shifts in the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) policy as it altered from a line of ‘class against class’ towards a ‘united front’ politics which fused anti-fascist impulses.Footnote ¹⁵ On another, as Blaazer and Martin Pugh have shown, popular-front politics founded on anti-fascism had a meaning beyond the policies of the CPGB.Footnote ¹⁶ In place of focusing on CPGB policy, this article will use the term ‘popular front’ to inspect the fate of the cross-party and ideological alliances that the various organisations under discussion attempted to articulate.

That these groups failed to mobilise effectively around the subject of human rights is perhaps not that surprising. However, it does not mean that they are irrelevant. Samuel Moyn suggests that the failure of human rights to take off in the 1940s is important as this allows scrutiny of the ideological frameworks which limited such developments. As he points out: ‘though the origins of the Universal Declaration are worth some attention, more important is to ask why so few people could muster enthusiasm for it’.Footnote ¹⁷ This article aims to answer this question in relation to NGOs emerging from sections of the British Left. Their failures provide some insights into political culture in the post-war era, as alliances forged during the 1930s and 1940s disintegrated, and tells us about the divisive international climate in which these groups sought to engage.

The British Left: Civil liberties and human rights

Certain common sentiments about rights were emerging from strands of the British Left during the 1930s and 1940s. While definitions of democracy were open for discussion within leftist circles in the 1930s, the necessity of combining socio-economic rights with civil and political rights was well recognised.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, the economic and social planning discussions that took place during the 1930s sought to maximise social advantage and economic expansion, while ensuring the protection of individual liberty.Footnote ¹⁹ As T. H. Marshall suggested, thinking about rights had been informed by a long-standing national debate about organising a society and government that accommodated socio-economic rights alongside political and civil ones. He argued that this was part of a 250-year evolution of British citizenship.Footnote ²⁰ Rhetorically speaking, these rights could be found in the activities of representatives of 1930s ‘middle opinion’ and the more radical Left that advocated popular-front politics founded on a shared commitment towards democracy.Footnote ²¹

British thinking on rights became expressed in a more international way during the Second World War. Linked to the discussion of war aims in late 1939 and early 1940, this occurred most obviously in the Daily Herald's month-long debate on a new declaration of the rights of man which inspired the Sankey Declaration of Rights (1940) and Wells's The Rights of Man (1940). Demonstrative of the mood for planning a new world order, the latter's publication was subtitled What are we fighting for? The Daily Herald dedicated one page every day throughout February 1940 to answering this question. Within this moment, the rights of man project was aligned with a utopian post-war mood.Footnote ²² In Ritchie-Calder's words, he and Wells were convinced of the need for a reflection on ‘the human liberties for which the war was supposed to be fought’ and a ‘world definition’ to reconstruct social and international relations.Footnote ²³ The translation of the Sankey Declaration into Russian, Italian, Chinese, Greek and Polish, and the responses gained from, among others, Ghandi, Nehru and Joseph Goebbels, were indicative of its protagonists’ global aspirations.Footnote ²⁴ Lord Sankey, who chaired the drafting committee of the Declaration, prepared by reading every declaration of rights and constitution available, to generate as cosmopolitan a document as possible.Footnote ²⁵

Ritchie-Calder and Wells suggested their work represented a middle ground between the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789), which emphasised civil and political rights, and the Soviet Declaration of the Rights of the Toiling and Exploited Peoples (1918), which stressed socio-economic rights.Footnote ²⁶ The first point made in Wells's publication was that all people had a right to resources, powers and inventions and were entitled to nourishment, shelter and medical care from birth to death.Footnote ²⁷ Alongside welfare rights such as education and housing, he included principles such as free speech, the protection of property, freedom from arbitrary detention, and political rights – for example, the right to vote and to freedom of assembly.Footnote ²⁸ The work was thus presented as a ‘liberal socialist’ project.Footnote ²⁹ Although Wells's view of humanity shifted between pessimism and optimism, his contributions to the debate placed him within an idealist tradition.Footnote ³⁰ They also placed him within a tradition of the British Left. Harold Laski, although less idealistic, asserted the need to establish a socialist state with a liberal ethos, and to some extent shared concerns with the protagonists of the Herald debate.Footnote ³¹ Laski, who was periodically a member of the NCCL's executive committee, responded to Wells's debate by suggesting that fighting for such rights was ‘a cause as high as there is in mankind’.Footnote ³²

The debate created interest across the Left. Readers from the New Statesman and the Daily Herald were asked to contribute and discuss the subject in local reading groups and meetings. A mass of correspondence was produced and the newspapers experienced a significant sales bump.Footnote ³³ With this, the drafting committee claimed to represent the co-operation of thousands of people.Footnote ³⁴ Indeed, individuals who offered critical but generally supportive opinions on the Declaration represented a large section of the Left. Intellectual input came from the likes of C. E. M. Joad, J. B. Priestley and George Bernard Shaw.Footnote ³⁵ Scientists such as J. B. S. Haldane chipped in, as did representatives of the major unions.Footnote ³⁶ Members of women's organisations, peace organisations and religious institutions commented.Footnote ³⁷ Contributions came in from 120 Federal Union groups.Footnote ³⁸ In addition, politicians such as Harold Nicolson, Richard Acland and the Labour leadership of Clement Attlee, Arthur Greenwood and Herbert Morrison commented.Footnote ³⁹

Clear links existed between those debating the rights of man in February 1940 and the defenders of civil liberties in the 1930s. Wells was an early supporter of the NCCL, acting as an observer at the Hunger Marches in 1934, and being a signatory to one of its early letters to the Manchester Guardian.Footnote ⁴⁰ Other notable contributors to the debate included Kingsley Martin, Priestley, Attlee, Acland and Joad, all of whom were involved in the NCCL in various capacities throughout the 1930s. Most clearly, the NCCL's President, the campaigning journalist Henry Nevinson, and its founder and secretary, Ronald Kidd, contributed, rewriting a couple of sections of what would become the Sankey Declaration.Footnote ⁴¹

A failure to mobilise

It is easy to condemn Wells's aspirations as a utopian dream or, as he put it, ‘another Wellsian fantasy’.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, the author was aware of this and was concerned to gather as many contributors as possible.Footnote ⁴³ While Wells's ideas on world government were more utopian than many in the 1930s, he was certainly not a solitary voice in seeking global answers to the problems of inter-war Britain.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Sankey Declaration, and the discussions surrounding it, suggested that a portion of the Left thought that the politics of rights could help create a global socialist world. Wells, the most articulate and convinced adherent of such sentiments, hoped this could be achieved in ‘a revolution that need not be an explosion or a coup d'état’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet, while there was broad interest in the discussion, and on the necessity of combining political and civil rights with socio-economic ones, the actual output of the discussion, particularly the publications produced by Wells, lacked a sharpness of focus.Footnote ⁴⁶

Furthermore, interest in the debate was not turned into a political movement. Ritchie-Calder complained that he had no machine for taking it further.Footnote ⁴⁷ Despite an overcrowded meeting held in Westminster to shore up backing for the Declaration, he was unsure that this could be channelled into an organisation. He thought that the audience, in the context of the war, was escapist rather than constructive, observing; ‘they didn't want peace so much as to be left in peace’ and ‘would have cheered as vigorously had the subject been not a new world order but seventh day Adventism or the second coming of Christ’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Sankey's ambitions for a nationwide campaign did not develop as Ritchie-Calder started a new job organising propaganda in the Political Warfare Executive.Footnote ⁴⁹ Wells also declined invitations to link up with the Federal Union or Acland's Commonwealth Party.Footnote ⁵⁰ Furthermore, attempts at spreading the debate across America reinforced it as an intellectual project, which a sympathetic New York Times journalist thought would ensure the greatest impact on American politics.Footnote ⁵¹

Significantly, the NCCL, the organisation best positioned to benefit from such discussions, preferred to continue monitoring the state of civil liberties during wartime.Footnote ⁵² Although the NCCL supported the debate within the Daily Herald, its secretary's response was lukewarm. Privately, Kidd considered it ‘too woolly to serve any useful purpose’.Footnote ⁵³ While many of the protagonists of the debate appeared alongside the NCCL through the 1930s, its attitude was that the subject was too academic and divorced from the work of protecting liberties.

This view shifted at the end of the war, as the organisation became enthusiastic about expanding its work internationally.Footnote ⁵⁴ In December 1947, the NCCL newsletter commented that ‘we do not apologise for devoting so much attention to Human Rights, as we believe it is a subject of the greatest importance to humanity’; importantly, and in contrast to 1940, it was now a question which ‘had ceased to be academic’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The NCCL supported the provisions of the UN Charter which referred to human rights, although it remained critical of the absence of references to colonial policy, and warned of the danger of leaving world peace to the UN.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet, it had become eager to embrace a ‘new dimension of civil liberties stretching beyond the rights of a citizen into a broader notion of human rights for humanity’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It offered to co-ordinate organisations interested in one or other aspects of human rights.Footnote ⁵⁸ To carry this out it organised an international conference in June 1947 and a National Conference in November 1947, and established a Committee for a World Conference on Human Rights, to provide a transnational umbrella organisation for co-ordinating and arranging further events.Footnote ⁵⁹ The conferences aimed to discuss the definition of human rights and the role of organisations in their promotion.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although the rights programmes of the NCCL's conferences focused on discrimination on the grounds of race, sex or faith, they also acknowledged the importance of socio-economic rights.

The end of the war also saw Orwell, Gollancz and Koestler create an international group.Footnote ⁶¹ This was tentatively named the League for the Freedom and Dignity of Man. Although Orwell was critical of Wells's Rights of Man debate there were similarities between their projects.Footnote ⁶² In writing that he sought a synthesis of political freedoms and economic planning, Orwell took up the same issues that Wells had discussed in 1940.Footnote ⁶³ Furthermore, the group attempted to gain an international echo through networks with organisations such as the Amis de la Liberté and Esprit in France, and the anti-fascist Giustizia e Libertà in Italy.Footnote ⁶⁴

In addition, a different collection of left-liberal political figures, led by Victor Gollancz, held various meetings between 1950 and 1951 to form an alternative human rights and civil liberties group. Gollancz arranged for leading figures of left-liberal thought to meet Roger Baldwin, former Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Director of the International League for the Rights of Man.Footnote ⁶⁵ At the request of the US State Department, Baldwin was visiting thirty-two countries to establish branches of the League and orchestrated, through Gollancz, to have meetings with interested parties.Footnote ⁶⁶

Yet these projects failed to gain momentum. The NCCL's attempts to organise national and international conferences failed. Material was sent to the UDHR drafting committee, and delegates from UNESCO attended; however, it planned for hundreds of delegates at its international conference, but only sixty-nine were present, representing just fifteen countries and four colonies.Footnote ⁶⁷ Indicative of the increasingly leftwards lean of the NCCL, delegates attended from Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and trade unions of the ‘liberated zones’ within China. Those from America represented the Chicago Council for Civil Liberties, a more radical organisation that had split from the prominent and established ACLU.Footnote ⁶⁸

On a national level, the NCCL failed to build up networks equivalent to those involved in the Daily Herald debate. At its National Conference, it only received delegates from eight Labour Party and two Liberal Party branches.Footnote ⁶⁹ Attempts to follow up these London conferences with further international meetings also failed. An effort to gather in Czechoslovakia in 1948 went nowhere. In response to this invitation, Roger Baldwin of the ACLU wrote to the NCCL in November 1948, suggesting it was absurd to hold a human rights conference in a country which had become a single party state.Footnote ⁷⁰ Apparently, this did not concern the NCCL, who were still eager to host a conference there in June and December 1948 and sent L. C. White, its chairman and member of the editorial committee of the Daily Worker, to discuss the project.Footnote ⁷¹ However, the NCCL lost touch with the Czech delegates, an attempt to move the event to Belgium failed and it was unable and unwilling to communicate with the American contacts.Footnote ⁷²

In fact, as will be discussed below, this period was a nadir for the NCCL more generally, as it faced consistent accusations of communist influence from the non-communist Left. Indeed, all the post-war non-NCCL mobilisations mentioned justified their activities by accusing the NCCL of being captured by the CPGB.Footnote ⁷³ Many of the individuals gathered together by Victor Gollancz were ex-members of the NCCL who had drifted out, or resigned in protest at its activities during the late 1930s and 1940s. Gollancz himself had been an early supporter of the NCCL and advertised its activities in Left News, the newsletter of his Left Book Club.Footnote ⁷⁴ By 1946, however, he wrote that the NCCL had ‘made nonsense of its name and objects’.Footnote ⁷⁵

In addition, Orwell and Koestler's project did not develop. Bertrand Russell pulled out, citing that intellectuals were more likely to rally against the atomic bomb.Footnote ⁷⁶ Indeed, there were similarities between the public figures involved throughout all of these groups and those campaigning in the early stages of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Ultimately, funding dried up and Koestler realised that both he and Orwell, living in North Wales and the Inner Hebrides respectively, were ill suited to the day-to-day tasks of running an organisation.Footnote ⁷⁷

Furthermore, Gollancz's attempts to form a new organisation in the 1950s ended up highlighting ideological differences between liberals and socialists. Gollancz complained, ‘it is a thousand pities that people cannot see that there are a hundred and one things on which everyone can unite—all they have to do is leave the hundred and second alone’. Divisions over members’ conceptualisations of human rights and concerns about the implications of ‘supra-national authority’ hindered the project.Footnote ⁷⁸ Organisational interest in human rights thus stagnated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Even within the United Nations Association (UNA), which had 80,000 members in the post-war period, there was little enthusiasm for basing activities on human rights.Footnote ⁷⁹ This attitude had shifted by 1968, when the UNA's Human Rights Year Campaign was supported by 170 different organisations, which led to the formation of a UNA Human Rights Committee.Footnote ⁸⁰

The question that then emerges is: what happened? British activists and thinkers had something to say about rights in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s but were unable to find an organisation able to express this. How can this failure be explained, and what were the implications of this? In attempting to answer these questions two interrelated themes emerge. The first is the ending of the popular-front-style alliances and the second is the recurring difficulty presented by the post-war universalism of human rights. Universalising human rights made them global issues. With this, the subject became an ideological weapon within the Cold War paradigm of international politics.Footnote ⁸¹ These themes were interrelated as the Cold War presented difficulties for those with historical and cultural links forged during the 1930s. As Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann has recently pointed out, the unifying consensus against Nazi Germany had brought human rights onto the political agenda, yet such a consensus rapidly disintegrated.Footnote ⁸² Attempting to forge a broad human rights movement proved impossible at this point of disintegration.

The end of popular-front alliances

The breakdown of popular-front networks is a theme that closely relates to the NCCL. Within this time period, it was placed under significant pressure. While formal popular-front policies, as advocated by the CPGB, had ended at the outbreak of the war, and although the Party continued to influence centre-left organisations in the post-war era, the alliances that had typified the civil liberties lobby in the 1930s proved difficult to sustain. Ultimately, the NCCL's post-war difficulties were ideological, political and tactical. It persisted in pursuing a model of politics which no longer seemed relevant or viable.Footnote ⁸³

Important here was the relationship between the CPGB and the NCCL. There were communists and communist sympathisers working in and around the NCCL from its formation in 1934. However, it appealed far beyond such a group. This proved a more difficult position to occupy during the 1940s. To those studying the CPGB, or concerned with the authorities’ approach to civil liberties, the NCCL has often appeared to conform, generally or entirely, to the communist line.Footnote ⁸⁴ On the other hand, such perceptions contrast with those who have conducted detailed archival investigations of the NCCL.Footnote ⁸⁵ A recent account of the NCCL's origins by Janet Clark concludes that the group was not subject to control by the CPGB's leaders.Footnote ⁸⁶ Those working closely with the NCCL through the 1930s strenuously denied links with the CPGB.Footnote ⁸⁷

Clark demonstrates the centrality of the NCCL's secretary, Ronald Kidd, to the organisation. Kidd, who had clear cross-party credentials, was largely responsible for his organisation's work. Furthermore, the broad appeal of the organisation, the political make-up of its executive committee, the lack of funding from the CPGB or any other communist body, and the ability of the organisation to take up issues that had little to do with the CPGB can be cited to indicate NCCL independence.Footnote ⁸⁸ There is also evidence that Kidd opposed various CPGB positions on certain issues. This was acknowledged by the security services from August 1938. From that point on, they were most concerned about a legal ‘faction’ within the organisation.Footnote ⁸⁹ A set of lawyers working around the NCCL, which included pro-Soviet legal figures such as Dudley Collard, G. H. C. Bing and John Platts-Mills, were highly suspect. However, there were limits to their influence during the 1930s. According to Platts-Mills, the radical solicitor W. H. Thompson halted these meetings, as they undermined the credibility of the organisation.Footnote ⁹⁰ While such individuals were not as important as Kidd, they were relied on for legal advice, commenting on publications and issues, and involved in policy discussions. There were thus elements within the NCCL that clearly belonged within a pro-Soviet tradition, and linked to communist politics.

This relationship was not straightforward. For their part, Special Branch and the Home Office, while consistent in outlining sections of the NCCL that resembled a communist front through the 1930s and 1940s, were inconsistent in ascertaining how this worked. At times, Ronald Kidd was depicted as an individual in thrall to the communists, whereas elsewhere he was the individual resisting the machinations of a group of lawyers associated with the CPGB.Footnote ⁹¹ This was further complicated by the view held by both the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the commander of Special Branch that anti-fascism was synonymous with communism.Footnote ⁹²

Nonetheless, communists were happy for the NCCL to represent their civil liberties interests. While the NCCL faced objections from the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party, at various points in the 1930s and 1940s, it was never criticised by the CPGB. The emergence of the NCCL has also contributed to the demise of the International Labour Defence, a civil liberties organisation of the earlier 1930s, which had been much more closely aligned with the CPGB.Footnote ⁹³ There were occasions when the two bodies’ policy lines deviated, but these were over minutiae rather than overall critique.Footnote ⁹⁴ There were also members of staff with more obvious links to the CPGB. The papers of Angela Tuckett, a CPGB member and NCCL Legal Secretary between 1940 and 1942, reveal she joined the organisation through contact with D. N. Pritt, and then left them to work for the Daily Worker. Footnote ⁹⁵

For all of this, it would be misleading entirely to characterise the NCCL as a ‘front’ group during the 1930s. The organisation was able to achieve broad support. This owed much to Kidd's independent reputation. Furthermore, the NCCL's work outside of areas of interest to the CPGB appeared to mark it out as having a broader function than solely acting as a communist stooge. The NCCL operated in a climate receptive of efforts to reach across party doctrines. The NCCL's line, which was that it was happy to work with communists if they sincerely supported the aims and constitution of the NCCL, was sustainable in its initial stages.Footnote ⁹⁶ Its positions on civil liberties, although aligned with CPGB policies, were never dissimilar to positions being taken by liberals and socialists.Footnote ⁹⁷ It also avoided more controversial aspects of communist policy, by focusing solely on national civil liberties issues. Individuals such as E. M. Forster, Kingsley Martin, Harold Laski and Dingle Foot were therefore willing to remain in the NCCL as long as it followed the aims of protecting freedom of speech, assembly and propaganda as outlined within its constitution. Even the security services conceded that the group could not be dismissed as simply being a communist front.Footnote ⁹⁸

Although the NCCL was not without its critics in the 1930s, it was actually much more stable than other popular-front projects before and at the start of the Second World War. While sections of the Left were traumatised by the Nazi–Soviet Pact, this was not initially destabilising to the NCCL. The Labour Party had advised constituency branches not to affiliate with the NCCL from 1939, but this was part of the Labour Party leadership's long-standing concerns over factionalism and preceded the Nazi-Soviet Pact.Footnote ⁹⁹ There is little evidence of membership disagreement with the NCCL's wartime policy positions until the middle of 1940. Certainly, its conferences at the outbreak of war attracted similar audiences and speakers to those involved during the 1930s. Indeed, the NCCL side-stepped some of the ideological fractures of the Left in 1939 and 1940 by focusing very closely on the civil liberties implications of the war. The organisation's membership grew in the initial phases of the war as the prospect of military mobilisation provoked understandable concerns about individual liberty.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Yet the NCCL's politics proved unsustainable. By 1941 it was increasingly harassed for its associations with Soviet apologists, in particular Pritt.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The NCCL's lack of clear support for the war effort was increasingly noted by its non-communist elements. In particular, a conference and subsequent policy statement on NCCL aims in wartime, issued in 1940, failed to mention the need successfully to prosecute the war. To some, this confirmed an unhelpful proximity to the CPGB's policies. The NCCL's association with communists and pacifists provoked further questioning of its reputation, which led first to a gradual drift of more moderate supporters, and then to a large movement away from the body.Footnote ¹⁰² The NCCL was also harmed by Labour politicians’ entry into the wartime government. Labour Ministers, some of whom had worked with the NCCL in the 1930s, were circulated with hostile Special Branch reports and no longer took an interest.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the summer of 1941 a former NCCL vice-president announced at the Labour Party conference that the organisation was ‘almost entirely under communist control’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This caused further inquiries, protests among the NCCL membership, and hostile media coverage. Such a position was exacerbated by the death of Kidd in 1942, which appeared to strengthen the communist influence within the organisation.

Most importantly though, a number of policy decisions during and after the war meant that the NCCL compromised its civil liberties credentials. This contributed towards a loss of support from members of the popular front that belonged within a progressive tradition. Both Laski and the New Statesman editor Kingsley Martin grew unwilling to co-operate during the 1940s.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Such a shift can be seen in considering the NCCL's line of domestic anti-fascism. Elizabeth Allen, Kidd's successor as general secretary, launched an anti-fascist campaign upon taking up leadership of the organisation, which had the full support of the CPGB.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Controversially, the organisation objected to the release of the interned Fascist leader Oswald Moseley. This marked an obvious cleavage between the NCCL's anti-Fascist and libertarian positions. Understandably, it lost credibility with various sections of its membership on this issue, having altered its earlier opposition to imprisonment without trial. The remaining Liberal Party elements within the group objected to the line. Although Liberal Party support had diminished through the 1930s, the NCCL continued to benefit from association with the likes of Dingle Foot, Wilfred Roberts and Richard Acland. However, Foot resigned following the NCCL's position on Mosley.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He was not alone. Between December 1943 and June 1944, the organisation lost thirty-nine members over the issue.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ To its critics, the NCCL appeared illegitimate. On the Labour side, Herbert Morrison, the home secretary, pointed out that this represented a colossal U-turn in policy.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The NCCL's long-standing insistence that civil liberties concerns were the principal motivations of the organisation looked dubious.Footnote ¹¹⁰ With this, the NCCL had an even closer association with British communism through the 1940s. At this point it had become unacceptable to the wider network it had worked around during the 1930s.

In the conclusion of an internal report on its international conference, the NCCL considered methods to broaden internationally and nationally. A main difficulty identified was how to develop such a politics at a national level. It suggested that the NCCL required a reorganisation to ‘win wide Labour support’ and to find ways to deal with the Labour Party through parliamentary work. Not only did such an observation demonstrate the NCCL's specific isolation from the Labour Party in the 1940s, but it is also suggestive of the organisation's inability to communicate to a broader constituency.Footnote ¹¹¹ Indeed, divisions within the NCCL had become so marked following a number of resignations, including that of the NCCL's long-term President E. M. Forster in 1948 (after the NCCL's opposition to the dismissal of communist sympathising civil servants), that the foreign office's information research department, who along with Special Branch monitored the organisation's activities closely, thought the NCCL was close to collapse.Footnote ¹¹²

All of this placed the NCCL firmly within a pro-Soviet tradition, which appeared particularly unacceptable in reference to civil liberties. NCCL support for the internment of Mosley was added to by further pro-Soviet politics such as glowing reports of liberties behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia and an unwillingness to criticise Soviet Union policies, particularly in relation to the movement of ‘Soviet Brides’ in 1948. These further undermined the organisation's credibility to sections of the non-communist Left.Footnote ¹¹³ In an age during which the Soviet Union was viewed more critically, and where criticisms of totalitarianism were directed as much at communism as fascism, the NCCL could no longer act in between the CPGB and wider sections of the Left.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Its unwillingness to criticise a Soviet model of ‘democracy’ did not conform to the growing assessments of communism as a system contravening recognised notions of freedom and democracy.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Tellingly, countries condemned at the NCCL's human rights conferences were either those with nationalist governments or those from the West. Nationalist (Kuomintang) China, Greece and Spain were attacked over press freedom. The USA, Britain and South Africa were criticised for having discriminatory legislation, while the USA, Greece, Canada, South Africa, Belgium and a host of colonial or mandated territories within the British Empire were chastised for limiting voting rights.Footnote ¹¹⁶

It is also worth noting that the collapse of popular-front-style alliances was not just about the division between supporters and critics of the Soviet Union within the NCCL. Ideological differences between liberals and socialists meant that Gollancz abandoned his project in April 1951. Violet Bonham Carter and Jo Grimond, both Liberals, were particularly difficult for Gollancz, as they held different conceptualisations of rights. The most contestable points related to the closed shop and the unions, attitudes towards property, and the direction of Labour.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Gollancz blamed ‘too much stupid militancy’ on the part of the Liberals, complaining that it was no good trying to get an organisation together if no one cared.Footnote ¹¹⁸

All of this demonstrated the collapse of these left-liberal alliances. This was not unique to the NCCL; other organisations such as the Haldane Society for Socialist Lawyers and the Socialist Medical Association were under greater scrutiny at this time.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Indeed, the divisions of the NCCL's membership from the late 1940s had been so marked that foreign office officials commented that it was ‘making such little fuss now compared with its prominence in the ’30s, that we may as well let sleeping dogs lie’.Footnote ¹²⁰ While there were attempts from within the Labour Party to undermine and split the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers in the immediate post-war period, the NCCL's importance had diminished to the extent that the group was largely ignored.

Such problems were not unique to the British politics of rights and liberties. The French League for the Rights of Man was dogged by infighting from those who had aligned during the 1930s.Footnote ¹²¹ And in Germany, various organisations split along similar lines in the late 1940s and early 1950s.Footnote ¹²² This demonstrates the cleavages in democracy in the post-war period. While ‘social democracy’ and ‘popular democracy’ appeared to have some unity in opposition to Fascism during the 1930s, by the late 1940s they were competing.Footnote ¹²³

Universalising rights

In order to understand the difficulties of British NGOs interested in human rights, the collapse of popular-front-style politics and the emergence of the Cold War were both important. Additionally, these related to the problems that the universalising of rights presented. Because human rights have transnational implications, the subject was caught up in the divisions of international politics.Footnote ¹²⁴ In the context of the Cold War, differences over conceptualisations of rights served to reinforce the ideological distinctions that would be part of the cultural Cold War, rather than transcend such divergences, as had been hoped by the drafters of the UDHR.Footnote ¹²⁵ Against such a context, individuals such as Koestler and Richard Crossman, who featured in Orwell's discussions, and certain participants in Gollancz's discussions, who had attempted to forge a ‘third force’ style social democratic vision of human rights, chose liberalism over socialism. As a result they aligned with organisations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom.Footnote ¹²⁶ Other pro-Soviet elements such as the lawyers D. N. Pritt and John Platts-Mills, members of the NCCL's executive committee, took to the other side by joining up with the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.Footnote ¹²⁷ The anti-totalitarianism of leftist advocates of a liberal socialism moved them to the liberal camp, whereas groups with historic connections to the Soviet Union sided with the communists. In this polarisation, thinking about global rights had to be accommodated within two sides, neither of which was ideally suited to members of the British Left.

Universalism presented a problem by forcing engagement in a binary Cold War, but it also presented a more conceptual challenge to British thinking about rights. For all the internationalism of these groups, more general leftist imagining of rights traced these through a peculiarly British heritage. Whether found in the popular-front politics of the 1930s, or in attempts to cultivate patriotism in the early phases of the Second World War, these became part of a radical national narrative.Footnote ¹²⁸ This could be found in contemporary works such as Christopher Hill's The English Revolution (1940), A. L. Morton's A People's History of England (1939), Jack Lindsay and Edgell Rickwords's A Handbook for Freedom (1939) and T. A. Jackson's Trials of British Freedom (1940). Later British Marxist historians’ works such as Rodney Hilton's Communism and Liberty (1950) and Christopher Hill's study of the ‘Norman Yoke’, which emphasised national traditions of liberty and freedom, reinforced such ideas. It was in relation to these constructions, not to the institutions of the UN, that rights were generally phrased. As Marshall suggested, rights of citizenship altered patterns of social inequality; these were best determined by community membership and asserted through a national welfare state.

Similarly, the NCCL explained its newfound human rights interests by presenting itself in reference to a radical British history. The NCCL framed its versions of human rights differently from that being projected on the international stage. Writing to the leader of the French League for the Rights of Man, Elizabeth Allen, Ronald Kidd's successor as NCCL general secretary, complained that ‘their [the ACLU and International League for the Rights of Man] ideas of democracy are very different from ours’ and stating her view that civil liberties were perhaps not ‘absolute rights but subject to the necessities of the democracy which is being built’.Footnote ¹²⁹ For all of its initial enthusiasm for human rights work, this relativism seemed out of step with the universalism of the UDHR. Aware that it had framed rights within a national history, such complexity was resolved through arguing that rights were relative.Footnote ¹³⁰ On one level, this was a slightly clumsy justification for an apparent open-mindedness about one-party states and state-controlled press in the newly forming Eastern bloc. But it also demonstrated the problem of universalism: as British rights were formed in a national context, why should these be imposed upon others?

Even Wells, the arch-cosmopolitan, discovered that the Sankey Declaration reflected a national conceptualisation of rights. Ghandi's and Nehru's critical responses to their debate forced Ritchie-Calder and Wells to conclude that a British expression of rights in the idiom of Western parliamentary democracy had been projected.Footnote ¹³¹ Orwell and Koestler realised this risk and rejected calling their body The Magna Carta League, through fear this would only have meaning within Britain (that said, they also rejected the more cosmopolitan sounding Renaissance).Footnote ¹³² Broadly speaking though, the British Left, in attempting to reimagine rights globally, was fighting against a history it had been inadvertently creating for much of the 1930s and the 1940s.

It may well also be that the subject of human rights was too broad to provide a coherent framework through which to mobilise. Rights are contestable, and these contests were too great for individuals in the post-war era. With this, it was to single issue politics that individuals such as Gollancz, Ritchie-Calder and others looked. Organisations such as War on Want, and OXFAM, which featured individuals concerned with discussions of rights in the 1940s, would extend ideas associated with economic and social rights (albeit in a form that did not utilise the rhetoric of human rights) beyond the nation state.Footnote ¹³³ Echoing Bertrand Russell's earlier critique of Orwell's organisations, many individuals who attended Gollancz's meeting were involved in CND. It seems that it was easier to mobilise on less controversial and focused problems, which transcended or critiqued Cold War disagreements, rather than broad and ideologically contentious rights politics.

Others would pursue these ideas away from the global and within the nation state. Individuals involved in the Daily Herald debate put forward similar ideas in a national context through the 1941 Committee, and the Commonwealth Party.Footnote ¹³⁴ John Boyd Orr, a member of Wells's drafting committee, considered the British Medical Council's Charter for Health (1943) a ‘concrete companion’ to the discussion and linked the climate of ideas to the popularity of the Beveridge Report.Footnote ¹³⁵ While the new social rights being framed in William Beveridge's Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942) were related to the inclusion of ‘freedom from want’ and the ‘advancement of social welfare’ within the Atlantic Charter, his report largely stressed that the new provisions stemmed fundamentally from a ‘British tradition’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Understandably, welfare rights, particularly for those on the Left, would be asserted within and through the state.Footnote ¹³⁷

Those writing about the UDHR's usefulness have stressed that it provided a framework through which NGOs could shape various political and social agendas.Footnote ¹³⁸ This has evidently been the case for parts of the latter half of the twentieth century. The NCCL described itself as belonging to a global human rights movement by 1968.Footnote ¹³⁹ However, the framing of rights within national narratives meant the universalism and rights doctrines of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, the UN Charter and the UDHR were not key reference points for British organisations, nor the architects of the welfare state. Of course, those debating human rights at the end of the war brought a set of assumptions based on domestic politics to international discussions.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ That the British Left's efforts at framing rights became less authoritative internationally, while an American vision of rights featuring strong civil and political rights with a relatively meagre commitment to social welfare would dominate thinking on this subject, was demonstrative of the new power structures developing in the post-war era.