Between the wars, the response of the British Labour Party and Trades Union Congress to the problem of the unemployed was extremely limited. Committed to gradualist philosophies, the leaders of the labour movement were unwilling to attempt genuine socialist remedies in office, and, in opposition, to provide a militant leadership for the protest movement. The National Unemployed Workers' Movement, begun in 1921 and not finally dissolved until after the outbreak of the Second World War, was the only body which attempted to mobilise unemployed discontent. After 1926, the Labour Party Executive and the General Council of the TUC consistently refused to have any contact with this organisation on the grounds that, like the National Minority Movement and the later Rank-and-File Movement, the NUWM was merely a subsidiary of the British Communist Party. This article is an attempt to show that by a process of induction the Labour leaders branded the unemployed movement as a whole on the basis of the known Communist allegiance of a number of its leaders, and to demonstrate that they allowed themselves to become so sidetracked by the issue of whether or not the NUWM was a Communist front that their own efforts on behalf of the unemployed suffered in consequence.

Little is known about the role played by the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks in the so-called Far Eastern Republic, an independent state, at least in name, in Eastern Siberia during the early ̓twenties. Based mainly on material in the archive of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, this note wants to shed some light on the events in the area at the time. Unfortunately the author did not have access to a sufficient amount of material from Menshevik archives to detail the Menshevik contribution to the Far Eastern Republic, but we shall see how the Bolsheviks adopted from the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks the idea to form this kind of state, and how they subsequently gained a hold upon the Far Eastern Republic.

Thomas T. Meadows, an experienced British diplomat in China during the nineteenth century and author of The Chinese and Their Rebellions, wrote: “Of all nations that have attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious.” Meadows had ample opportunity to make such a remark since he was witness to some of China's fiercest rebellions, those committed by the Taipings, the Nien and Moslem groups during the time of his tour. These revolts, although mass-based and widespread, were put down with particular ferocity by the Qing monarchy. Meadows's remark directs attention to the delicate question of when does a rebellion become a revolution? In the case of these movements, they did not become revolutions because there was no transformation either in the structure of Chinese society or in the system of political power. These incidents may have been “revolutionary situations”, but they did not have “revolutionary outcomes”.