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 to neglect or obfuscate problems both at home and abroad. As David Edgerton points out, it was liberal and socialist internationalists who were, in reality, most alert to the threat of, especially, Nazism, rather than the supposed pragmatists engaging in appeasement.20
Titmuss’s concerns about international politics were forcefully articulated in his unpublished mid-1930s book ‘Crime and Tragedy’ (alternative titles: ‘Government by Betrayal’ and ‘Creation of Anarchy’). It dealt with the culpability, as Titmuss saw it, of the National Government for the state of international affairs. This was an angry text, dedicated to ‘Those Who Laid Down Their Lives That Others Might Uphold the Divine Right to Use Bombing Planes’. Titmuss praised those, including Lord Cecil, ‘who have worked unremittingly for the strengthening of World Government’. His book sought to show how ‘the Government by their supine handling of Foreign Policy since 1931’ had ‘allowed the Nation to drift far along the path that leads inexorably to international insanity’. While Britain was not solely responsible for the deteriorating situation, nonetheless, given the country’s world role, it was ‘chiefly to blame’. Discussing the constructive ends to which the League of Nations might be employed, Titmuss melodramatically suggested that it was ‘for this belief and a passionate conviction in the power of the British Empire to lead the Nations towards the banishment of anarchy from the earth that I am prepared to lay down my life’.21
Titmuss then cited numerous examples of Britain’s failure to support the League, for instance over Abyssinia. This had resulted in messages from across the world expressing ‘astonishment at the part played by the British Government in a shameless and callous betrayal of the League’. The ‘name of England, and all that it means to us’ was thus ‘splashed with mud and abuse from every corner of the globe’. Britain’s actions were a betrayal of those, suffering under oppression and dictatorship, who had looked to it for hope. Equally betrayed had been those who thought the League of Nations ‘the one good thing born of 1918’, and who remembered ‘our glorious heritage of freedom and democracy’. Again showing a talent for melodrama, Titmuss then suggested that ‘Generations unborn will rise one day and curse these flag-bedecked Conservative leaders’ for seeking to reward aggression, and their failure to exert British leadership. The Abyssinian and other foreign policy setbacks were unreservedly attributed to the National Government. Conservatism refused ‘to allow Great Britain to take its rightful place at Geneva. We must not take the initiative’. Its ‘creed’ asserted that Britain ‘must be one of a crowd in the League. We must be indistinguishable in the comity of nations [and so] must not take one step in advance of the most turbulent and backward South American or Balkan State’. Consequently, disarmament talks had gone nowhere (hence, in part, the rise of Hitler), and British society itself was, as fears of war grew, becoming militarised. Such fears had ‘spread over the country like a noisome cloud of poison gas’, and were being used to suppress protest.22
A further impact of the National Government’s approach to foreign policy could be seen in its dealings with the empire. In 1932 the Ottawa Conference, responding to the 1929 economic crisis, had set up a tariff system whereby the British economy was ‘protected’ by a series of barriers to foreign imports, while also setting up purportedly favourable arrangements with the British Dominions – ‘imperial preference’. But this did not result in a form of ‘empire free trade’. Leaders of the Dominions also sought to protect their own economies. More broadly, this was an important step in ending Britain’s historic, if by now somewhat tattered, commitment to international free trade. For Titmuss this was highly unwelcome. The conference had allowed the ‘appearance of economic nationalism in some of its worst aspects’, and had had a disruptive effect on the global economy. Because of the horse-trading over preferences between Britain and the Dominions, furthermore, the National Government had come ‘nearer than any previous administration has ever done to shattering the British Empire into small pieces’. Outside the empire, British policy was, on the one hand, to advocate collective security (whether it actually did anything about this was another matter, at least by Titmuss’s account in the rest of his book), while simultaneously supporting ‘economic policies which can only lead to impoverishment and unemployment in Europe, to the spread of hunger and fear, and to the rise of despotic governments with huge armaments and supported by neurotic and desperate peoples’. At Ottawa the British government had ‘presented to the world an imperialistic example of naked uneconomic [sic] nationalism. Mussolini and Hitler soaked it all in’.23
Titmuss’s political concerns were, in the 1930s, as much with the international as with the domestic situation. He was clearly incensed at what he saw as the betrayal of the League of Nations, and British foreign policy’s ‘supine’