Did everyone support the war?

When war broke out thousands of young Scots joined up to ‘do their bit’. Not everyone supported the war effort. Not everybody believed the propaganda and anti-German feeling that was meant to create ‘war fever’. There were many people in Scotland who opposed the war, and did not wish to volunteer and then resisted conscription.

The strongest political group to oppose the war was the Independent Labour Party (ILP). They immediately attacked the official Labour Party for backing Kitchener’s recruitment campaign.

The ILP’s newspaper called Forward was often criticised and even closed down for its persistent attacks on government policy.

In the pro-war atmosphere of autumn 1914 any voice that asked for compromise and rational thought about how to stop the war was shouted down as unpatriotic and a threat to Britain’s safety.

Anti-war opinion was not popular! In the first two weeks of the war Britain suffered 20,000 casualties. Nevertheless the ILP and other socialists continued to protest against the war. By the end of 1914, ILP membership had fallen to 3,000 and the party was as a pacifist group that threatened to dampen the war enthusiasm of the nation.

What was the UDC? The Union of Democratic Control was another organisation that opposed conscription and wartime censorship along with other restrictions on civil liberties. The UDC was not linked to any one political party but as both the Liberal and Conservative parties actively supported the war, the UDC became dominated by left wing Liberal and Labour activists.

Scottish political figures such as Ramsay MacDonald, Tom Johnston and David Kirkwood were members of the UDC and became well known for their radical policies and actions during the war.

By 1915 the Union of Democratic Control had 300,000 members and was the most important of all the anti-war organisations in Britain. Members of the UDC were under constant threat from members of the public who believed the UDC was a cover organisation for supporters of Germany during the war in other words-traitors!

The Daily Express suggested that the UDC was working for the Germans government It published details of future UDC meetings and encouraged its readers to go and break them up. By the end of the war the UDC still had 10,000 members, showing that public opinion did not always support the war, despite what government propaganda would have liked the people to believe.

In 1924 several members of the UDC were in the new Labour government that was elected that year.

Why was conscription started in Britain?