Colonel John Ward (1866-1934) – Anti-Bolshevik Labour MP

The British Labour Party has a long history of betraying the working class, with perhaps the example of ‘Colonel John Ward’ being indicative of how the Labour Party – even during the last years of WWI – its bourgeois leaders had no intention whatsoever of aligning itself with the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, or the ideology of Marxist-Leninism. This is doubly perplexing when it is understood that the Labour Party had been founded by the ‘British Socialist Party’, which was ‘expelled’ and ‘proscribed’ by the Labour Party when it changed its name to the ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ (CPGB) in 1920. John Ward (who was a professional soldier) was otherwise known as a ‘trade unionist’, and in 1886 joined the Social Democratic Federation (factions of which would eventually breakaway and merge with the Labour Party in 1900 and the British Socialist Party in 1911, etc. As a SDF political candidate, John Ward achieved electoral success in 1888 and 1892, going on to stand in Stoke-on-Trent as the ‘Liberal-Labour’ MP, a position he won (although much is made about his refusal to formally ‘sign’ the required Labour Party Representation document).  

In Roy Jenkins’ 2001 book entitled ‘Churchill’ (Page 351), Winston Churchill is portrayed as pursuing yet another impractical and unwinnable war objective (following as it did in the wake of Churchill’s humiliation at Antwerp and the Dardanelles), with his equally disastrous ‘invasion’ of Revolutionary Russia in early 1918. The UK had already lost over 750,000 men in the trenches of France and Belgium, and no one in the government (or country) wanted yet another costly war with Russia – an ally of Britain in WWI – a country which had lost over 1 million men fighting on the side of the UK! Churchill misused his authority as Minister for Munitions (1917-1919) and Secretary of State for War (1919-1921) by mustering relatively small and obscure British military units posted throughout the British empire for redeployment within Revolutionary Russia on the side of the reactionary (and fascistic) ‘White’ forces. Churchill could do this as a personal ‘aside’ to the demands of WWI, and without having to seek cross-party approval. By this time he was adamantly ‘anti-Socialist’ and sought at every juncture to oppose its ideology at home and abroad. Roy Jenkins states: 

‘They had a sort of control over the trans-Siberian railway, but the forces available to the Admiral were somewhat heterogeneous, There were some French, some Americans and some Japanese, as well as two British battalions, that had somehow or other got there from Hong Kong (still more bizarrely, one of them was under the command of Colonel John Ward, Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent). Kalchek’s main military resources, however, were 70,000 Czech troops who were vaguely on their way home to Prague from Vladivostok. It was not, in retrospect at any rate, a formidable array with which to overcome Leon Trotsky’s revolutionary army, particularly as the latter was operating on interior lines of communication against a scattered opposition. But Churchill determined to put his faith and some considerable part of his reputation in backing these disparate elements.’  (Page 351)

The fact that Labour MP John Ward was willing and able to carry out this hateful task of anti-Socialist imperialism probably exposes the extent to which both he (and the Labour Party) had lurched to the right. John Ward became the Vice President of the rightwing (and anti-Socialist) British Legion following WWI, and gravitated ever further to the political right until his death in 1934. The British Army in Russia murdered 26 Communist Commissars held in their custody as POWs in Baku during late 1918 – and I suspect (reading between the lines) Colonel John Ward was responsible for this either directly (he formulated the idea) or indirectly (he was carryout Churchill’s order). Whatever the case, despite the UK joining 14 other countries in an illegal invasion of Revolutionary Russia in 1918, assisted by Imperial Germany and her allies until late 1918, when pressed years later to justify his actions in Russia, John Ward only replied that he had witnessed the Bolshevik Red Army committing atrocities, an allegation not supported by any other eye witnesses that matter, or any material evidence. John Ward is typical of a type of right-leaning ‘leftist’ that infest the political leftwing in the UK. These are the people that now run the Labour Party and who have been encouraged and strengthened by the poat-1929 development of the Trotskyite cause.