In a packed hall, hundreds of worker delegates cheer as from the rostrum the chair declares the formation of “Councils of Workmen and Soldier’s Delegates” across the country. In the words of one attendee “the dictatorship of the Proletariat” had finally arrived. This is 1917. But it isn’t Petrograd: It’s Leeds.
On 3 June 1917, 1,150 representatives of trade unions and various socialist parties and groups from across Britain gathered in the city to organise the formation of Soviets, in conscious imitation of the Russian revolution.
Attendees aimed to form a new organisation, uniting all strands of the worker’s movement outside of Parliament and the Labour Party, capable of pushing for socialism in Britain.
With the left disillusioned with the contemporary Labour Party and with a new left political party in the process of being formed, the experience of the first British Soviets is worth revisiting.
The conference
The Leeds convention, as it became known, was organised primarily by the United Socialist Council (USC). This body had been established the year before to cohere an anti-war propaganda strategy between the two major socialist parties in the UK at the time: Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Marxist British Socialist Party (BSP).
The ILP, in contrast to the leadership of the Labour Party, was dominated by left wing figures in the labour movement who crucially opposed the continuation of the First World War. However, its leadership and members were politically of the same broadly non-Marxist Fabian socialist tradition as the wider Labour Party and indeed formed the majority of the activist base of the latter. At the time, the Labour Party lacked its own activist base or coordinated local party structure. It was a loose umbrella organisation uniting affiliated unions and different constituent socialist groups and the electoral candidates they supported, rather than the more coherent party it was to become. Meanwhile, the BSP was a more explicitly Marxist organisation. It would later go on to form the nucleus of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920.
The conference was not merely a party affair, however. The USC made a concerted effort to draw on and connect with all facets of the workers movement. This included inviting representatives from all major trade unions and trades councils, cooperative societies and the powerful shop stewards movement: an organisation of rank and file worker representatives which had emerged relatively spontaneously in British industry during the First World War to organise strike action to reduce exploitation and oppose conscription. This was necessitated by senior trade union leaders’ open support for conscription and opposition to strike action as part of the “war effort” – with the TUC having declared an “industrial truce” one month into the conflict.
Finally, broader campaign organisations from across the left were also invited to send delegates. This included socialist feminist groups that had split from the suffragettes over its anti-socialism like the Women’s Labour League, who were primarily aligned with the left of the Labour party, and Sylvia Pankhurst’s council communist Workers’ Suffrage Federation. These were joined by other left civil society organisations like the National Council for Civil Liberties (now known as Liberty) and pacifist groups like the Union of Democratic Control.
As one delegate highlighted, the congress represented the “very greatest that we have had in this country since the days of Chartism.”
Notable attendees included leading ILP MPs like future Prime Minister, Ramsay McDonald, and Chancellor Phillip Snowden; major trade unionists like future Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, Tom Mann and Bob Smillie; and leading lights like Sylvia Pankhurst and Bertrand Russell.
The conference was borne out of the wave of frenzied excitement that swept the workers’ movement in the wake of Russia’s victorious February revolution which had toppled the Tsar. Whilst knowledge of what had occurred was minimal in Britain, delegates were enthused by what they had heard of the Russian Soviets – by their promise of direct worker and soldier power over the country and their call for an end to the war “without annexations or indemnities.” Organisers were keen to follow its example and build a soviet movement in Britain.
The other major reason for the conference was the widespread desire for an end to the First World War amongst much of the British working class, which, despite broad and growing popularity, found no representation amongst the Labour party leadership or national government. The ILP and BSP thus felt they needed to turn to external means to pursue peace and push for socialism.
They were also conscious that, with much of the working class absorbed into the military and with women excluded from the franchise, they would only be able to succeed if they could find new ways of organising these groups into a common struggle for peace and socialism.
They felt they had found the medium for doing so in the institution of the Russian soviet.
This was partly because – unlike the union – the soviet as a structure was able to incorporate representatives of the working class outside the traditional workplace. Russian Soviets for example, accepted representatives from soldier‘s barracks and women’s groups, including organised housewives1. Many socialists in Britain were thereby convinced that it was the best method of ensuring representation of the whole working class in the context of the First World War.
The conference opened with a declaration of solidarity from the Russian Soviet Executive in Petrograd before initiating 4 major resolutions. The opening three were relatively uncontroversial and passed without major opposition. The first congratulated the Russian working class for overthrowing the Tsar, the second called for an end to the war and the third demanded Britain adopt democratic freedom of press, association and union organising.
It was the fourth and final one however which drew the most attention. This called for the British workers’ movement to “follow Russia” and found a national network of workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Opposition to this was more significant, both inside and outside the hall. The right-wing press had branded the anticipated soviet resolution as seditious, with the Morning Post saying it represented “a violation of the law” and declaring that those who supported it were “liable to severe penalties.” Inside, future Labour MP, Joseph Toole dismissed the idea as unnecessary, saying the goals of socialism and peace could best be pursued through the existing organisations of the Labour movement: the Labour Party and TUC.
Despite this, the resolution eventually also passed almost unanimously and without amendment. Subsequently, a 13-person provisional leadership was elected to organise the establishment of soviets across Britain.
A very British Soviet
Whilst the precise form and functions the soviets would take were not specified, the broad vision of them presented by the conference was genuinely transformative. It arguably represents one of the first attempts in British history to form a national government structure in which the entire working class – including propertyless workers and women – could participate and be represented. The councils would be founded in all towns and regions of the country and would accept delegates from all trade unions, socialist parties, feminist campaigning groups and soldiers’ barracks in their jurisdiction. Evoking Marx’s famous remarks on the Paris Commune, WC Anderson MP, the ILP initiator of the motion, declared that these councils would be the “necessary machinery for dealing with the complete emancipation of international labour.”2
Worker and soldier delegates would be able to direct the activities of the councils in all areas of working-class life and gain democratic control over them. Particular emphasis was put by speakers like Phillip Snowden and Sylvia Pankhurst on the fact that women workers would be able to fully participate in these structures, in ways not seen in the Labour Party, trade union movement, or wider parliamentary politics at the time. In this way the conference aimed to coordinate, unify and engage the grassroots of the whole workers’ movement in the struggle for peace and socialism and build the membership and engagement of all constituent groups. Local workers and campaigners were encouraged to, through the councils, provide material support for each other’s campaigns, strikes and actions.
Most notably, the councils would act as an institution through which workers and soldiers could govern their communities and provide mutual aid for one another in the present. Multiple speakers called for the councils to coordinate the work of reconstructing communities damaged by the First World War, to ”rebuild this country for the people” in the words of ILP delegate RC Wallhead. Particular emphasis was put on using them to defeat “food profiteers” by fixing local prices and providing support for demobilised soldiers returning from the war – in the form of jobs and health and social care. It is here that the conception of the councils most closely approaches the Marxian idea of the commune as a workers’ “shadow government” – a situation of “dual power” – through which workers can seize the functions of the state and directly administer their own affairs.
Indeed, many of the delegates clearly hoped and anticipated that this soviet structure would soon take control of the national government. Pankhurst declared, “‘I believe that this Provisional Committee will be the Provisional Government”, Robert Williams that it would soon inaugurate the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and Fred Shaw that it would aim to challenge the “capitalist state” and enable “the working classes to take things into their own hands.”
The newly elected provisional leadership made concrete efforts to establish and build this network. They divided the country into 13 districts and sent out application forms for all relevant groups within them to send delegates – one for every 5,000 members – to found regional councils. They also sent out circulars providing a draft structure for meetings and calling on these councils to agree to the resolutions of Leeds and elect delegates to the national executive, one per council3.
They promised that when the new national council assembled it would agree a draft programme for the whole pyramid to adopt and a plan of action.
The Right-wing Reaction
However, the councils faced significant obstacles as they tried to organise. There was considerable anxiety within the state about the potential that the soviet structures might challenge or undermine the existing government.
In the aftermath of the Leeds convention, War Secretary Lord Milner wrote to Prime Minister Lloyd George that the government would “have to take some strong steps to stop the ‘rot’ in this country, unless we wish to ‘follow Russia’ into impotence and dissolution”4. King George V was particularly concerned, nervously asking one MP if “any ill will come from this conference at Leeds”5.
The state, right wing press and organisations took concerted action to ensure it didn’t.
Attempts had already been made to prevent the original Leeds congress itself from assembling. A member of the British Empire League visited hotels and venues in Leeds to encourage them to refuse delegates bookings. This was partially successful as the congress was forced to move from Albert Hall to the Leeds Coliseum after the owners of the former cancelled the booking.
Now, coordinated action was taken to disrupt the regional soviet assemblies.
The government publicly declared that they “regarded the objects of such meetings as illegal, and would not permit them to be held.” In London, Newcastle, Southampton, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham local government officials and private venues cancelled bookings or barred delegates from entering6.
When meetings did occur, as in London, Swansea, Newcastle, Southport, right wing groups broke into them and attacked delegates.
For example, in London, after having been refused use of the Memorial Hall by its owners, attendees moved to the Brotherhood Church in Hackney. However, the Daily Express publicised the meeting place and right-wing activists distributed leaflets in the local area, specifically targeting areas bombed by the Germans, accusing the delegates of being German spies. Subsequently, three hundred men burst into the hall singing Rule Britannia and attacked delegates, demanding they adopt pro-war resolutions. Police present at the time refused to do anything apart from to arrest a trade unionist who was charged with “insulting words and behaviour”.
The intimidation experienced in London forced conferences in Swansea, Glasgow, London and Newcastle to hold ballots to elect representatives in secret, which undermined their mass democratic character as well as limiting their capacity for action as institutions.
Failures of Organisation
In turn, the council movement faced both apathy and outright opposition from certain sections of the unions, Labour Party and wider working class. Partly this was because key unionists and Labour Party officials opposed the idea of a new worker’s organisation outside of their control. Even prior to the conference certain union leaders like Alexander Walkden, General Secretary of the Railway Clerks Association (antecedent of the TSSA) had banned their branches sending delegates to the conference on the grounds that he did not want to waste resources on organisations outside the Labour party and TUC7. Likewise, the Railway Review, the publication of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (antecedent of the RMT), urged all attendees not to form an alternative organisation to the Labour Party but to continue to work within it, criticising the USC for creating ‘chaos and anarchy’8.
Others fundamentally rejected the anti-war goals of the conference. Whilst he attended, Ben Tillett, General Secretary of the large National Transport Workers Federation, accused the conference conveners of “pro-Germanism” and asserted that they “did not represent working class opinion”9. The official position of the Labour Party leadership was that the conventions resolutions should be disregarded.
Grassroots appetite for the councils was also mixed. In many places only a slim majority of TUC and ILP branches voted to send delegates to the original conference. For example, in Leeds itself the Trades Council only voted 37 to 30 to attend10. Afterwards many Trades councils, including that in London, refused to send delegates to the regional councils. Evidently, many weren’t convinced by the conference that founding soviets was worthwhile to actively support them.
Nonetheless, there was still significant interest from the organised working class. The widespread attendance at the conference from across the organised left and almost unanimous support for the motions, which even its opponents had to begrudgingly acknowledge, indicates this clearly11.
However, the provisional council leadership made several strategic errors which squandered this initial enthusiasm. They took a long time to make any concrete plans for regional elections by which time much of the initial energy of the Leeds convention had dissipated. When they did, the attempts to promote them were half hearted and folded under right wing pressure.
In addition, overcautiousness meant that attempts to encourage soldiers to join the new soviet movement were insufficient. This was partly because the ILP leadership in particular were keen to avoid accusations of undermining military discipline in wartime. Whilst there were some attempts at barracks in Kent, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells to organise local soldiers’ councils, elsewhere organisers focussed solely on mobilising existing labour organisations12.
Little attempt was made to promote a clear socialist programme, with the vague resolutions of the convention serving as the only unifying objective prior to the planned convening of the new executive. The only thing approaching this was that put forward by the ILP’s George Lansbury in his newspaper the Herald (the ancestor of the Sun) which called amongst other things, for the British soviets to replace the House of Lords as a second chamber of the country, with legislative powers13. However, this was by no means agreed by other ILP or trade union constituents of the council.
The model of how the councils were to be formed and the degree of worker and soldier participation in and control over them was also left unclear. Indeed, the basic structural principles of the soviet were not followed. It was not specified that the councils were to be based on delegates directly elected by factories and barracks. Little was said about when and how delegates were to be elected or held accountable. The soviet principle of delegate recallability at any time was not mentioned. Whilst there was a general suggestion that the councils ought to be largely based on the TUC’s local “trades councils”, the relationship between the functions and activities of the councils vis-a-vis the trade unions was not specified. This confused and put off many delegates. J F Hunter and WJ Baker of the Postal and Telegraph Clerks association for example, remarked in their report to their union on the conference that whilst broadly supporting the principles promoted in Leeds they could not support the soviet motion precisely because of this lack of clarity14. Noah Ablett of the South Wales Miners’ Federation complained afterwards about the failure of Leeds to agree “some sort of programme, some sort of practical suggestion of how we are to set up the Councils”15.
Ultimately, the Leeds leadership failed to express to workers what the new structure really was. Was it a workers’ government? A ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in waiting? or was it merely a pressure group? Was it a new workers organisation outside of the TUC, Labour Party or Parliament? or was it oriented to supporting the existing structures? Of course, failure to answer these questions need not have been fatal to this movement. They could have been resolved by workers and soldiers themselves within these hypothetical soviets.
However, alongside failing to elaborate a clear strategy the leadership also adopted a stubbornly top-down approach. Some workers had been concerned this might be the case from the beginning, with J Sanders for example commenting at the original Leeds Convention, “I do hope that the forming of these committees will not be left to those on the platform [the leadership] alone. We have men and women in the body of this hall who are anxious and willing to take part in this great struggle which has got to come.”
However, the leadership did not heed these warnings. They refused to allow local workers organisations like the shop stewards any autonomy or initiative in organising or setting the direction of the regional councils. Instead, the leadership insisted all councils follow a very narrow set agenda with no space for discussion and that all interested groups and individuals engage in a drawn out bureaucratic process to apply to them for the right to attend16. Nor did they encourage workers to take any immediate action. Instead, district council delegates were told to focus only on sending representatives to the future national council meeting at which they promised a plan would be formulated. Local action that may have injected purpose and energy into the councils was foreclosed.
This was demobilising and off putting for workers at the grassroots. The soviet structure was left largely dependent on the activity and interest of the leading groups of the socialist parties and union structures.
Indeed, the lack of strategic or political clarity of the British soviet movement and its top-down nature stemmed to a significant degree from the differing political priorities of the groups that organised the conference. Whilst the BSP was committed to a more radical image of the soviets as some form of working-class government, the ILP largely wished to limit its operations to building support for peace and a socialist programme within the existing labour movement and were keen not to tread on the toes of the TUC. They were desperate to ensure the movement remained under their control rather than allowing regional council delegates, activists and unionists to take it in different directions17.
The result was collapse. When the national council finally met in October (four months later) the energy had gone from the institution and it voluntarily curtailed its functions, declaring it would be “primarily a propagandist body”. Ramsay MacDonald concluded that there “did not appear to be much prospect of activity on the part of the council.”
Return to the Soviet
In July, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announced that they are finally making strides to form a new socialist party. Over 800,000 have signed up to be involved and a founding conference has been promised for November 2025. It has even been announced that regional deliberative public assemblies with echoes of the soviet will form to discuss and influence the political direction of the new party. The British left, as in 1917, seems set to take the decisive step of trying to organise and build support for socialism outside the Labour party. In this context what lessons and inspiration can the modern left take from the soviet project initiated in Leeds?
Strengths to imitate
In 1917, the British left laid out plans to build a national network of soviets as a way of uniting, coordinating and strengthening a working-class movement scattered across multiple organisations. The blueprint they set out, while unfulfilled, offers the same promise today.
At a time when the left is uncoordinated and often untethered from localised working-class communities, the soviet model could provide a route for meaningfully building a coherent left alternative to Reform. It offers a structure that could unite the various strands of the left; rank and file union activists, community organisations, campaign groups and political parties, coordinate their actions and connect them with the wider community. Were such public assemblies organised they could form the institutional nucleus through which a broad red-green left alliance could challenge Farage’s Reform in the electoral sphere. The assemblies could both propose and decide on commonly agreed unity candidates genuinely embedded in the local community and responsive to local issues to take on establishment parties. They could act as forums through which the local working class could develop manifestos and hold candidates to account to deliver on them. In this regard, the mooted regional public assemblies planned for the run up to the new Party conference this year could prove a positive step in this direction, providing they are permanent structures that have genuine power and influence over party policy and candidates.
Simultaneously, the emphasis of the Leeds convention on providing mutual aid and support to one another in the present is one we must imitate if we want to confront the crises facing us. Rather than rebuilding our communities from the damage of war, a contemporary soviet network could enable us to provide mutual aid and protection for one another from the impacts of ongoing austerity and accelerating climate change – taking on functions vacated by the state – and build self-confidence in and understanding of our collective capacity to govern our own communities.18 These could also organise the defence of our neighbourhoods from the immigration raids of the intensifying state-border regime and racist violence of the rising far right, so urgently needed last August in Southport. They could operate as community spaces to help reverse the erosion of public community life by Thatcherism and the disempowerment of the union movement. Such activities could also help connect the working class with the left organisations – parties, unions and community groups – operating in the soviets, and thereby build support. If we want to build support for and trust in a new left party or any other organisation, we have to show our capacity to meet people’s needs directly.
Failures to avoid
The ultimate failure of the Leeds project also contains important warnings about the dangers of left organisations that are undemocratic, unaccountable and overly dependent on their leadership. The Soviet network proposed in Leeds failed to a significant degree because soviet principles of direct democracy were not applied. Local workers and activists were not allowed to direct the activities of these bodies or build them as living institutions and they were unresponsive and unaccountable to them. This meant that the entire project depended on the whims of the leadership of the ILP. It was thereby hugely vulnerable to the careerism and prevarication of Macdonald and Snowden and meant their withdrawal of support killed the project.
Any new left party or structure must avoid this mistake by guaranteeing member democracy and genuinely empowering working class people. We must not allow it to become a mere adjunct to the whims or politicking of major left figures like Corbyn or Sultana. The recent farcical factional squabbling between the two camps on social media underlines this point very starkly. All leading officials must be elected and recallable at any point by members to ensure they are accountable and responsive to workers’ demands. The rank and file and their local bodies – be they soviets, local party branches or individual members – must have significant direct power to propose and influence soviet or party policy both at annual conferences and outside. Jeremy Corbyn has talked cryptically of creating a ‘new type of party’ distinct from the cloying bureaucratism and authoritarianism of Labour. Despite this, debates over the political direction of the party and internal structure have thus far been carried out solely by secretive committees and undeclared factions of self-selected activists with absolutely no accountability to anyone. The role, structure and powers of regional assemblies to influence party policy have been left undefined. Applying soviet principles would go some way towards remedying this situation and achieving Corbyn’s ostensible goal.
Finally, in this crucial moment we must avoid the prevarication, ambiguity and tentativeness shown by the leadership at Leeds. At key points, the Central Committee failed to take decisive action to build the soviets. This hobbled the project and allowed the energy of the activist base to diminish. As we seek to build power and coherence outside the Labour party, we cannot make the same error. The shambolic nature of the launch of the new party, the factional manoeuvring and legal threats from both Sultana and Corbyn’s camps, the delays around the founding conference and lack of clarity over its timing and structure is not encouraging in this regard. All involved in the project, from leadership right through to activist base must seize this opportunity now and commit to building an alternative.
References
- “Article Four: The Right to Vote of the Working People and the Disenfranchisement of the Bourgeoisie.” Constitution of the RSFSR (1918). Accessed May 28, 2025. https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/article4.htm; Judy Cox, The Women’s Revolution: Russia 1905–1917 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 62. ↩︎
- In Marx’s formulation ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.’ Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (Dodo Press, 2009), 41. ↩︎
- Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates, “Manifesto to district conferences (circular)” 1917. From Warwick Digital Collections. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/1721/rec/3 (accessed May. 28, 2025). ; Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates, “District Conference : agenda and information (circular)” 12 July 1917. From Warwick Digital Collections. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/1717/rec/21 (accessed May. 28, 2025). ↩︎
- Stephen White, “Soviets in Britain: The Leeds Convention of 1917,” International Review of Social History 19, no. 2 (1974): 184–85, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000004600. ↩︎
- Will Thorne, My Life’s Battles (1900), 195, https://archive.org/details/mylifesbattles00thoriala/mylifesbattles00thoriala.pdf. ↩︎
- White, “Soviets in Britain,” 188-90. ↩︎
- Railway Clerks’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland, “Russian Revolution Convention : Organised by the United Socialist Council (circular)” 30 May 1917. From Warwick Digital Collections. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/1728/rec/13 (accessed May. 28, 2025). ↩︎
- National Union of Railwaymen (Great Britain), “The Railway Review: Whither?” 8 June 1917. From Warwick Digital Collections. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/7978/rec/18 (accessed May. 28, 2025). ↩︎
- Ben Tillett, “Report on Leeds Conference, June 1917,” The Dockers’ Record: A Monthly Report of the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland, June 1917. From Warwick Digital Collections. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/1661/ (accessed May. 28, 2025). ↩︎
- White, “Soviets in Britain,” 172. ↩︎
- The Railway Review: Whither?, June 8, 1917. ↩︎
- White, “Soviets in Britain,” 183. ↩︎
- The Herald, “The call to the council ; Plans for the people’s party ; A. E. and the Irish Convention” 23 June, 1917. From Warwick Digital Collections. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/524/rec/19 (accessed May. 28, 2025). ↩︎
- Hunter, J. F., and W. J. Baker, “Executive Circular. 136, Leeds Convention,” Postal and Telegraph Clerks’ Association, June, 1917. From Warwick Digital Collections. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/591/rec/24 (accessed May. 28, 2025). ↩︎
- White, “Soviets in Britain,” 176. ↩︎
- Delegates were invited only to elect a chairman and national delegate and agree to the resolutions of the original convention. Council of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Delegates, “District Conference : agenda and information (circular)” 12 July 1917. From Warwick Digital Collections. https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/russian/id/1717/rec/21 (accessed May. 28, 2025). ↩︎
- White, “Soviets in Britain,” 179-81 ↩︎
