19.06.2025
Game, set and match
Ditching auto-Labourism results from strategic bankruptcy, not strategic reorientation. Eddie Ford turns his eyes onto the ‘official communists’ and their abrupt change of line
One group on the ‘official communist’ left that has always been distinguished by its opportunism is the Morning Star’s split, the Communist Party of Britain - its origins lying in the paper’s then editor, Tony Chater, and his unilateral declaration of independence from control by the ‘official’ CPGB, forming the Communist Campaign Group which ‘re-established’ itself as the CPB in 1988. Refusing to move with the times by sticking its head in the sand, it was actually based on defending all editions of the British road to socialism programme up to and including the fifth (1978) version against all attempts to ‘update’ it by the Eurocommunist mob with their Manifesto for new times, etc, etc.
Then it had a very slight brand change in 2000 by renaming it Britain’s road to socialism, leading to the 8th edition that was adopted by the executive committee in July 2011 - which “was updated after party-wide consultation” in January 2020”.1 But the outlook was always the same from the very first draft: it envisaged a road to socialism relying on a series of left governments with increasing communist participation. This would involve a change of personnel in terms of some civil servants and generals, but, according to the BRS, fundamentally the British army, civil service, the legal system, would all be left intact and what you do is enact ever more progressive legislation and eventually - bingo! - you arrive at socialism. True, they talked now and again about awkward things like the House of Lords and the monarchy - which varies from edition to edition - but the essential approach never changed.
Meanwhile, the Labour leadership supports policies which “in general protect the economic and political power base of the capitalist class as a whole” and promotes “polices that are virtually indistinguishable from those of other parties”.2 In other words, the Labour Party is a bourgeois workers’ party, its leadership acts as a second eleven for the capitalist class. Yet, in spite of that, the CPB has always automatically called for people to vote Labour, just as we have always been told that the “right wing have always dominated the Labour Party leadership”. This is simply incorrect, given that Ramsay MacDonald, George Lansbury, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, and, yes, most recently. Jeremy Corbyn were all elected leaders of the Labour Party on the basis of their left credentials. The CPB does not want to admit this for the obvious reason that to do so would mean owning up to the fact that the Labour left is in the last analysis joined at the hip with the Labour right. Yin and yang.
Hence yesterday’s left Labourite easily becomes today’s right Labourite. The Labour left fosters the illusion that the next Labour government will be radically different from the last Labour government. It will organise conference resolutions, support chosen candidates, win committee seats and commit a whole layer of activists and militants to the ‘long haul’. As for the Labour right it reassures the capitalist media, the bourgeois establishment, the American cousins, that they can easily handle the left and deliver yet another ‘responsible’ Labour government.
But we open the pages of the Morning Star on June 11 and discover that the perspective has appeared to change in an article entitled ‘The times they are-a-changin’ written by Andrew Murray.3
Our Andy
First, who is Andrew Murray? Well, we are not talking about the tennis player. Apart from his role as Unite chief-of-staff and being one of the founders of Stop the War Coalition, our Andy served as an advisor to Corbyn during his brief time as Labour leader. Long before that comrade Murray was a member of the Straight Left faction in the ‘official’ CPGB led by one Fergus Nicholson (pen name: ‘Harry Steel’).
The Straight Leftists distinguished themselves by their servile loyalty to whoever was general secretary in Moscow. But in the pages of their semi-secret journal, Communist, it is clear that the comrades longed for the imagined certainties provided by Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. This was combined, however, with opposition to standing CPGB election candidates. A sectarian diversion, not only because the votes were generally very low. No, the aim should have been securing affiliation to the Labour Party.
Gorbachev and the fall were, of course, profoundly disorientating. Straight Left, which presented itself as a left Labour publication, winked out of existence and produced a couple of splitlets, including Communist Liaison, amongst whom there was a certain comrade Murray. It was more a lifebelt than a viable political project. So having attempted to stay with the Eurocommunist ‘official’ CPGB till the bitter end, they eventually made their way, humbled, defeated and untrusted, into the ranks of the Morning Star’s CPB.
However, comrade Murray is not untalented. He can actually think. Hence he was soon writing a regular Morning Star parliamentary column. And after doing his Unite job and brief stint of Labour Party entry work, he is, of course, back in the Morning Star, this time with his ‘Eyes left’ column.
Back to his ‘The times they are-a-changin’ article. Here he tells us that “we have finally reached the end of Labour’s claim to be the political wing of the labour movement”, and rather “the diverse left forces challenging Starmer’s pro-austerity, pro-war government deserve our open support”. He then asks, “but what comes next?”
Mea culpa
In a sort of mea culpa - the comrade is honest enough to admit mistakes - Murray confesses that auto-Labourism - “vote Labour where no communist is standing” - has been “the default electoral policy of the Communist Party for the last 75 years”, but apparently “no more”! He then reports on a speech delivered to a recent meeting by general secretary Robert Griffiths, where he “indicates” that this long-standing position “no longer applies in the prevailing political situation”. As Murray himself points out, the CPB has not operated a blanket auto-Labourism, because it has had its own candidates and - for example - at the last election it urged anyone who bothered to listen to the CPB’s advice not to vote for members of the shadow cabinet in response to Keir Starmer’s purging of the left, the sharp turn to the right post-Jeremy Corbyn, and so on. OK, he writes, the party has yet to “elaborate on this change” in an article or document, but stresses that it is a significant development.
He then raises a number of issues about an opposition that “emerges from the recognition that today’s Labour Party is not a plausible vehicle for the attainment of socialism”, or “is not even a moderately decent government” (like the ones headed by Harold Wilson?). This opposition “draws on immense movements of solidarity with the Palestinians, 15 years of capitalist crisis, the legacy of Corbynism and anti-austerity mobilisation” - that is, “broad politics” - but the “form and focus” of any challenge remain moot, “with no guarantee of any common conclusion emerging”. From this outlook, Murray conjectures that it is possible, “although not desirable”, that there will be a “diversity of left and independent challenges” to Labour at the next election, “sharing a broadly common agenda”, but not a “brand” or national leadership.
There are other issues raised in the article, such as “much of the left remains within the Labour Party, with roots, but presently no real strategy” - hence “how will they be appealed to and collaborated with?” Then there is the electoral strength of the Greens “parked on at least a slice of the left-of-Labour vote”, which raises the question - “can there” or “should there” be “some form of pact”? Without it electoral results “will be more meagre than otherwise”. And must an alternative be “explicitly socialist?” or “how sharply should Labour be attacked?” and “how centralised should it be, given the successful pre-existing locally rooted initiatives?”
A lot of questions, admits Murray, and “some of them painful to address” if you are a CPB member or fellow traveller. Having made “the leap in principle”, as Murray puts it, the CPB’s “strategic capacity” will surely be helpful in “securing productive resolutions” and almost poetically concludes in a homage to Bob Dylan that “if ever there were a moment for shaking windows and rattling walls”, it is now.
Well, it is rather hard to imagine Robert Griffiths or other leading CPBers shaking windows and rattling walls. But what we really have represents the complete defeat of the BRS strategy. The whole pro-Soviet, Labourite, gradualist, peaceful, parliamentary, national road to a ‘socialism’ went down to comprehensive defeat in 1989-91. Tested by life itself it lost game, set and match, with perhaps its last gasp being the outside possibility of a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn (he had three Straight Leftist advisors, besides comrade Murray, there was Seumas Milne and Steve Howell).
Remote chance
Even with the remote chance of a Labour left government under Jeremy Corbyn, things did not even reach the stage of a parliamentary majority - there was, of course, pushback, with 172 of his own MPs stabbing him in the back.4 We even had Stockholm Syndrome on display, as Corbyn and his allies took upon themselves the task of witch-hunting their own friends in the name of rooting out ‘anti-Semitism’.
Of course, here you could ask about what comrade Murray was advising at the time? Maybe he thought the whole attempt to appease the Zionists, the Labour right and the bourgeois establishment was a disaster. If so why did he not rebel? Why did he keep his counsel private?
No less to the point. What was the result of Corbynism? Keir Starmer and an actual cabinet which comrades Murray, Griffiths and the CPB executive are now recoiling from in horror. But is it that different from previous Labour governments? The first Labour government happily ran the British empire, the second, again headed by Ramsay MacDonald, wanted to introduce a programme of austerity that was so savage that it split the cabinet. MacDonald and his National Labour Party joined the Tories and Liberals in a coalition that lasted throughout the 1930s.
Or how about 1945 and that ‘progressive’ Clement Attlee government with its pay freezes, bans on May Day marches, joining Nato, nuclear bombs, colonial adventures, racist treatment of Windrush arrivals, and so on?5
The thing that comrade Murray gets fundamentally wrong is that it is not a case of the Labour government being insupportably rightwing, but that the left is so weak - here is the rub, not that Keir Starmer has gone from Pabloism, to securocrat, to trusted statesman (a not uncommon journey). Therefore what we are seeing is a confused response to a very rightwing Labour government - true, the most rightwing in history. But why would anyone expect anything different? Global conditions play a role here, undoubtedly. But so too do the marginalised and disorientated forces of what passes for the left.
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communistparty.org.uk/publications/britains-road-to-socialism.↩︎
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All CPB quotes from Jack Conrad’s Which road? London 1991.↩︎
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morningstaronline.co.uk/article/times-they-are-changin-labour-no-longer-default-left-option.↩︎
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theconversation.com/unravelling-the-windrush-myth-the-confidential-government-communications-that-reveal-authorities-did-not-want-caribbean-migrants-to-come-to-britain-206225.↩︎