We should have intervened in Spain

Denis MacShane

26 July 2006

Three times in the last century, big power foreign governments connived in the transport back from exile of their enemies’ enemy. The Germans did it with Lenin to weaken the Russian army on Germany’s eastern front. The French did it with Khomeini to get rid of the Shiite preacher from Paris, to spite the Anglo-Saxons with their profitable support for the Shah, and to earn brownie points with the Muslim world. We did it with Franco because the supreme fear of the Baldwin–Chamberlain era was the arrival of a leftist European government.

Churchill, Beaverbrook, Rothermere and Baldwin formed a united front in the early 1930s in admiration of dictators like Mussolini whose bombast was pitiable but who posed no threat to Britain. Franco looked like a safe bet to keep Spain free from socialism, and if Britain offered him a lift back to his troops then surely Gibraltar and all our other Mediterranean interests would be safe.

That is why Churchill wrote vigorously in the late summer of 1936 in favour of Franco. ‘I am thankful the Spanish nationalists are making progress,’ he told London Evening Standard readers, and the Foreign Office was quick to thank Churchill for this support. Yet as with Lenin and Khomeini, the consequences of bringing Franco into play far outlasted the immediate tactical advantage as it appeared to the short-termists in London in 1936.

The civil war that began in Spain was not so much a general rehearsal for the wider European civil war that took off in 1939, as a direct advertisement to the Berlin–Moscow–Rome triangle of terror that all the democracies were good for was ‘jaw-jaw’ and when confronted with something harder would back away.

The undoubted heroism of men like Jack Jones and others in the International Brigade cannot disguise the failure of the Left to come together coherently against Franco. In this the Spanish Rightists were aided by the refusal of the British government, supported to begin with by the Labour and TUC leadership, to offer any aid to Republican Spain. Britain was gripped by the huge Peace Pledge Union movement, a forerunner of CND or the Stop the War campaign. In 1935, millions had signed a petition in favour of peace which the then Labour leader, George Lansbury, had taken to Berlin to hand to a grateful Führer.

The policy the Labour party and the government could agree on was one of non-intervention. As Franco’s troops advanced, murdering thousands in their path, including Europe’s greatest contemporary poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, Britain set up a ‘Non-Intervention Committee’ with France. Thus while the Germans tried out their latest weapons and tactics, the mightiest navy and army in the world twiddled their thumbs.