23.04.2026
Style is everything
The CPB’s uniform ban, its craving for respectability, the purging of young rebels who object to its Zionism and its reactionary attacks on trans people - all are morbid symptoms of bureaucratic control-freakery. Eddie Ford tells the tale of two lives and two funerals
Founded in 1921, the Young Communist League has had two lives. The first was as the youth wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain - that until the Eurocommunist misleadership liquidated themselves in 1991 and established the ghastly and thankfully short-lived Democratic Left.
The YCL’s last general secretary was Mark Ashton of ‘Pride’ fame. Other former general secretaries include William Rust, Ted Willis, John Gollan and Jimmy Reid. True, the YCL never had a mass membership, perhaps around five or six thousand at its height. But it did provide something approaching a political education, including through intense faction fights against the Eurocommunists from the late 1960s onwards.
Fergus Nicholson ran his own YCL faction during the 1970s. It had a national leadership with representatives from London, Scotland, the North East, East Anglia, Wales, East Midland, Surrey, South East Midlands, etc. There were meetings each month at his 52 Tournay Road house. There was even an annual school in the Lake District.
We, too, had a YCL faction, with three members on its executive committee in the early 1980s. During the miners’ Great Strike our faction published East End Challenge in the name of Hackney YCL. The ‘official’ YCL, meanwhile, published absolutely nothing during the entire 12 months of the strike. This was at its nadir under the ‘leadership’ of Doug Chalmers.
Death was not long in coming.
Second life
The YCL’s second life came with the rebellion of the Morning Star’s colourless editor, Tony Chater, and the formation of the Communist Campaign Group and then the Communist Party of Britain. Having been ‘reborn’ under the uninspiring apparatchik, Kenny Coyle, the YCL had a desultory existence. That is, till the time of Johnny Hunter (2018-2023), when there was a sudden, and altogether strange, spurt in membership. Amongst a thin stratum of young people, Stalin had become chic: in part to identify with a historical figure loathed by mainstream liberalism, in part to provoke spluttering outrage amongst superannuated Trotskyists.
The YCL made quite a splash by marching in formation, faces covered in red bandanas, dressed in black and waving red flags. Adding to spectacle were the red flares and nostalgic r‑r‑revolutiponary chants: ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Stalin!’ being a particular favourite.
CPB tops, not least former general secretary Robert Griffiths and resident Zionist Mary Davis, were left fuming. And inevitably there followed a bureaucratic dictat banning anything openly pro-Stalin, anything that might attract the unwanted attention of PC Plod. Secretly CPB leaders might have a soft spot for Uncle Joe, but don’t go round in public shouting his goddamned name.
Today, the YCL barely exists - the last time there was a print publication of its journal, Challenge, was the “centenary edition” in August 2021, and we hear that the YCL now has fewer than 75 members.1 True, a lot of YCL members have been incorporated into the CPB’s apparatus. Johnny Hunter, is, for example, assistant general secretary no less. CPB contingents on demonstration have become noticeably younger too.
Of course, there is now a new CPB general secretary, Alex Gordon. True he is an ex-RMT union president and also sits on Stop the War Coalition’s steering committee, but he has no history, no background, no youthful schooling in the ‘official communist’ movement. All he knows is the Griffith-era CPB.
Maybe that explains why our Alex is determined to carry on in the tradition of Robert Griffiths - who showed an extraordinary sensitivity to the dangers of PC Plod, maybe because he had to stand trial for terrorism back in 1983 (he was a member of the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement2). Either way, comrade Griffiths swiftly junked his revolutionary past and adopted the safety-first outlook of the staid bureaucratic place holder. This saw him write to Iain McNicol, Labour’s witch-hunting general secretary, saying, ‘Give me the names of CPB members who joined the Labour Party in order to support Jeremy Corbyn and I’ll kick ’em out’. He also ordered CPBers not to join Your Party, supposedly because they would have to defend a political line - say on China, for example - that is not ours. Which is complete nonsense, of course. Could you really imagine YP imposing a strict political line, on China or anything else, on its membership?
Anyway, we learn that comrade Gordon has now banned YCL members from wearing what he calls “uniforms”. There is a certain historical irony here, of course, because it was the British state that was persecuting CPGB members for wearing “uniforms” after the introduction of the Public Order Act 1936 (contrary to some mythmakers, it was not just Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists that this legislation was aimed at).
So, in a letter on April 15 from Gordon to CPB members, there is a stern warning of a “concerted breach of democratic centralism” aimed at influencing YCL members “to adopt a so-called ‘dress code’ when attending public events and political demonstrations”. He goes on to state that “various purported instructions” to YCL members “have been circulated without authority, agreement or prior knowledge” of the YCL general secretary, or the chair of the central committee - and furthermore that these “unauthorised ‘instructions’ to YCL members” are in “clear defiance of our party’s policy against wearing uniforms when carrying out party activities”.
He finishes by saying that all “attempts to subvert our party’s policy prohibiting the wearing of uniforms or attempting to enforce the wearing of face coverings” on public demonstrations “must be treated as evidence of factional behaviour and dealt with accordingly”.
This suffocating message is reinforced by the CPB Party Line bulletin, issued on the same day, which says it has been “alerted by complaints” from members of “a faction seeking to influence members” of the YCL to adopt a so-called ‘dress code’ when attending public events and political demonstrations. It states that those wearing a uniform or face covering “will not be welcome to join party blocs or activities” on May Day, as it “is the workers’ day, not a day for paramilitary cosplay”.
Cracking the whip, the bulletin darkly reminds us that this “factional attempt to mandate YCL members” to wear a black uniform ‘dress code’ and face covering (red snoods) “breaches an agreement” reached in 2023 between the CPB and YCL, and is a violation of various rules.
Dramatic
But they are not actual uniforms, of course. When the CPGB ran the Workers’ Theatre Movement in the 1920s-30s, for instance, the comrades dressed in red shirts and dungarees emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, as they wanted to present themselves in a eye-catching manner. In the same way that the Black Panthers dressed in black leather jackets and black berets - not because there was any particular instruction - but as a political statement.
In reality each political subculture will tend to adopt some sort of style. For instance, you could easily spot a member of the International Socialists in the late 1960s, because they tended to look a bit like the Black Panthers - it was cool. A lot of young men would also wear their hair long. A rebellion against the drab 1950s, and in reality the drab early 1960s.
There are, of course, other subcultures - eg, mods and rockers: rockers rode powerful motorcycles, greased their hair and wore biker jackets; mods wore parkas and rode scooters. This was famously catalogued in the film Quadrophenia.
If you look at Karl Marx himself, he adopted the beard and long hair of his revolutionary generation (and kept it almost till the last days). Either way, there was a certain look. Young Bolsheviks also adopted a definite dress style during the civil war. Many wore black leather trenchcoats, or what the CPB would damningly call a ‘uniform’ - but in reality it expressed a particular, militarised, sort of politics.
The very idea of banning young comrades from displaying a certain fashion style shows, yet again, a morbid oversensitivity to any hint of factionalism and is, arguably, also part of a current left culture of boring conformity. In the name of keeping control, the CPB, under Robert Griffiths and now Alex Gordon, has certainly killed off the second YCL, to all intents and purposes.
At its peak, the second YCL reported some 500 members (doubtless a much exaggerated figure). Now general secretary Georgina Andrews presides over a corpse.
Red Britain
As a result of the crushingly bureaucratic culture imposed by the likes of Griffiths and Gordon, we recently saw a Red Wessex split - which you can read about on Lawrence Parker’s blog, where he interviews a comrade from that group.3 As the name suggests, Red Wessex covers the areas of Devon, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Avon and Somerset, in south-west England. There is also a linked group, Red Sussex, and some comrades in Manchester recently broke off from the national YCL - while there is a “developing situation” in Wales, where a lot have also seceded, and some comrades in Scotland appear to be ready for a split too.
The aim or intention seems to be the formation of a Red Britain network, which could be forthcoming fairly soon - there seems to be no ambition to create a party-type organisation at this stage. Of course, the CPB tops immediately moved against it with a Party Line bulletin on February 13, which deemed that membership of and/or support for Red Wessex or any of the groups associated with it “constitutes factional behaviour in breach of democratic centralism and incompatible with membership of the Communist Party”. As is often the case with these sorts of anti-democratic measures, they have provided unintended publicity, as this was the first time that many CPB members had even heard of Red Wessex - which issued a militant statement on Instagram.4
The comrades seem to be rebelling around worthwhile issues, even though most remain Stalinites of some description. For example, they took a good stand against the persecution of trans people, opposing the CPB’s biological determinism and its ‘three cheers’ welcome to the court judgment against trans people.
YCL comrades have also rebelled, quite rightly, against the ‘anti-Semitism awareness’ training courses run by Mary Davis. Looking at her reading list, we are clearly dealing with a Zionist doling out Zionist propaganda.5 The Israeli embassy would thoroughly approve. You can understand then why some YCL comrades are up in arms, because the CPB obviously has not got an anti-Semitism problem - just as the Labour left, or the left in general, hasn’t. What the CPB has got is a Zionist problem.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Socialist_Republican_Movement.↩︎
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communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2026/04/15/red-wessex-ycl-opposition-national-network.↩︎
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See T Greenstein, ‘Distracting from genocide’ Weekly Worker May 2 2024 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1489/distracting-from-genocide).↩︎