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Three conclusions may be drawn from examining the failure of Stanton and the right to mobilize 'patriotic' labour in the south Wales coalfield. The first is that Stanton's original success owed much to the political situation created by the war. Stanton and the National Democratic Party depended upon the wartime sense of political emergency continuing, which bound the Conservatives to Lloyd George and allowed dissidents to be branded as extremist or Bolshevik. By 1922 these conditions no longer held good and Stanton's fate at Aberdare was shared by all his colleagues in the NDp.65 The second is that 'patriotism' was not a constant or reliable guide to the responses of the mining community. Furthermore, the patriotism that Stanton hoped to build upon was a diminishing asset, even amongst the ex- servicemen. It was not a stable platform from which to secure his long- term political future. The third conclusion is that Stanton was also struggling against a structural dynamic that frustrated all his endeavours. He was undermined by the growing militancy of the mining community which was a product of the deteriorating industrial relations of the south Wales coal industry. This industrial dynamic ensured that those people who were at the centre of the complex and encompassing matrix of social relations and responsibilities, mediated through the miners' union and the wider labour movement, were largely immune to Stanton's rhetoric. Stanton's failure to make the breakthrough at this level of social reality condemned his political project to defeat. It is in this respect that we can detect the structural limits to 'patriotic' labour in the South Wales coalfield. EDWARD MAY Leicester 65 K. O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government 1918-1922 (Oxford, 1979).