Subsequent Activity
At the end of the war, no thought was given to disbanding the Union and it continued to be active through the 1920s. In the first Labour government in 1924, fifteen Government ministers were members of the UDC.
As time went on, the UDC became more supportive of outright pacifism and Arthur Ponsonby published his pacifist statement Now is the Time in 1925 under UDC sponsorship. Ponsonby also started a petition of those who "refuse to support or render war service to any government which resorts to arms", and in 1928 published Falsehood in Wartime which claimed that public opinion was invariably peaceful unless roused by propaganda.
In the 1930s the UDC was led by Dorothy Woodman who reshaped it as an anti-fascist research and propaganda campaigning group. Membership was on a steep decline by this point. While the Union continued to exist in some form until the 1960s - Harold Wilson was briefly a UDC member in the 1950s - it had very little influence.
Read more about this topic: Union Of Democratic Control
Famous quotes containing the words subsequent and/or activity:
“Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“The superstition respecting power and office is going to the ground. The stream of human affairs flows its own way, and is very little affected by the activity of legislators. What great masses of men wish done, will be done; and they do not wish it for a freak, but because it is their state and natural end.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)