Understanding the formation of the Communist Party of Britain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Parker
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Morning Star

This article deals with the foundation of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), a 1988 split from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was overseen by a group around Tony Chater, whom had earlier been involved with splitting the Morning Star newspaper away from the CPGB. The CPB was unsuccessful in uniting its preferred constituency, party trade unionists; and appears to have alienated many CPGB oppositionists due to its tactics and agitation for a split. It did manage to group together wider layers of people who had been oppositionists in the old CPGB as the 1990s wore on but, by the middle of the decade, this process had pushed initial leadership figures such as Mike Hicks, Mary Rosser and others into hostility towards those who were perceived to have been oppositional rivals in the 1980s. Thus, the divisions in the CPGB at the foundation of the CPB cast a long political shadow.

A miner cause?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daryl Leeworthy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
British State ◽  
Plaid Cymru

If twentieth century politics in Wales has largely been defined by class, and therefore along the typical cleavage of Labour versus Conservative; it is nevertheless true that for a significant proportion of Welsh activists and voters, the cleavage is between nation and union (identifiable with the British state). Closely identified with Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, a political manifestation of the Welsh nation was a direct inheritance from nineteenth-century liberalism and its persistence for much of the postwar period was a result of the persistence of that form of politics. But there was an alternative form of left nationalism that emerged through the Communist Party of Great Britain, which this chapter focuses its attention on. Beginning in the 1930s, and spanning almost the entire life of the party thereafter, communists engaged with and developed ideas about nationalism, nationhood and national liberation. This chapter considers the development of these ideas and argues that rather than Plaid Cymru, it was the Communist Party of Great Britain that enabled the persistence of left-nationalist thought and action after 1945 and that it was, to a large extent, communist activists who were the most consistently nationalist in that period.

The Volunteers

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-62
Author(s):  
Fraser Raeburn
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Popular Memory ◽  
The Many ◽  
New Evidence

Of the many ways that Scots responded to the war in Spain, those who joined the International Brigades have always been at the centre of historical and popular memory. This chapter seeks to establish exactly who these volunteers were and what connections they shared before coming to Spain, offering detailed new evidence and analysis regarding their collective identities. Instead of viewing them as a relatively small, disparate collection of individuals, it is shown that the Scottish volunteers were heavily clustered along the lines of geography, class and political affiliations. Rather than understanding these volunteers as the representatives of Scotland, or even the Scottish left, it is argued that they are best understood as a more concentrated mobilisation of quite narrow socio-political sphere, defined by formal and informal links to the Communist Party of Great Britain.

scholarly journals National Liberation for Whom? The Postcolonial Question, the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the Party’s African and Caribbean Membership

2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Smith
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Liberation ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Trade Relationship

AbstractThe Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) had a long tradition of anti-colonial activism since its foundation in 1920 and had been a champion of national liberation within the British Empire. However, the Party also adhered to the idea that Britain’s former colonies, once independent, would want to join a trade relationship with their former coloniser, believing that Britain required these forms of relationship to maintain supplies of food and raw materials. This position was maintained into the 1950s until challenged in 1956–1957 by the Party’s African and Caribbean membership, seizing the opportunity presented by the fallout of the political crises facing the CPGB in 1956. I argue in this article that this challenge was an important turning point for the Communist Party’s view on issues of imperialism and race, and also led to a burst of anti-colonial and anti-racist activism. But this victory by its African and Caribbean members was short-lived, as the political landscape and agenda of the CPGB shifted in the late 1960s.

scholarly journals Ukraine-Czechoslovakian and Ukraine-Romanian Relations in the Interpretation of the Magazine “Dilo” (Lviv)

2018 ◽  
pp. 198-207
Author(s):  
Mar’yan Zhytariuk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Interethnic Relations ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Us

The Lviv daily “Dilo”, as well as the Ukrainian press in Galicia, Bukovina, Volyn and Transcarpathia in the interwar period, could not keep a way from the numerous and systematic facts of Ukrainophobia and immediately responded to the form available to it, mainly as digest and translations of foreign publications about Ukrainians and Ukrainian ethnic land. Thirties of the Twentieth century entered the Ukrainian history under the sign of Polish “pacification” in Eastern Galicia (there were also the petitions of Ukrainian and British representations to the League of Nations), artificially created famine and genocide in Soviet Ukraine, the Bolshevik terror (not only against the national Ukrainian intellectuals, but also against the Ukrainian leadership of the Communist Party of the Bolsheviks), the German propaganda concerning the prospects of independent Ukraine and other significant phenomena, which formed together the basis of the "Ukrainian problem". All this in general was reflected by the European press (Great Britain, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Italy) and the US press, Canada, Japan. At the same time, from the standpoint of advocacy and sympathy, there was hardly any publication in the press of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania (except for Ukrainian-language editions), in the Soviet periodicals, however the governments of these countries were interested in further weakening and leveling of Ukrainian ethnic, mental, religious, historical and other factors that could cement Ukrainians nationally. Keywords: magazine “Dilo” (Lviv), interethnic relations, Bukovyna, Galychyna, interwar period

‘Third’ and Fringe Parties

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Party System ◽  
The Other ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Political Character

This chapter considers some of the varieties of the minor party from the origins of the modern party system in the mid-nineteenth century. It considers the wider effects which can sometimes be traced to even the also-rans among them and concludes by evaluating the issues raised by the extensive historical literatures devoted to Britain’s far-left and far-right parties. The histories of both may be regarded as instances of relative party failure, but both have occasioned much fruitful debate as to how far this demonstrated their alien and extrinsic political character and how far, conversely, these were movements anchored in British political culture. It argues that the Communist Party of Great Britain, in particular, encapsulates the paradox of the minor party phenomenon. Like the other parties considered, it offers both the confirmation of a sort of two-party electoral hegemony and a reminder of its limitations in everything except elections.

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