17.04.1997

Representative of the Communist International

Revolutionary candidates: Walton Newbold

Shapurji Saklatvala was not the only communist candidate elected in the British general election of November 1922 (see ‘Tribune of the people’ Weekly Worker April 3 1997 for Saklatvala’s role).

However, while Saklatvala was standing as a Labour Party candidate, John Walton Newbold had the honour of being the first MP elected for the Communist Party of Great Britain, standing purely as a communist.

Like Saklatvala, Walton Newbold came from a wealthy bourgeois family. Born in 1888 in Lancashire, he became attracted to the ideas of socialism while a student at Manchester University. As was the case with so many others, including Saklatvala, it was the Independent Labour Party that first won his allegiance in 1910. Again like Saklatvala, he subsequently had dual membership of the British Socialist Party along with the ILP.

It was in the ILP that he met his wife, Marjorie Neilson, a leading activist who was later to become a delegate to the 2nd Congress of the Third International in 1920. They settled in Scotland after Walton Newbold took up a tutor’s post at the Labour College in Glasgow. In 1916 he was asked to seek the Labour Party nomination for the Motherwell constituency against a rightwinger backed by the Labour leadership. The Motherwell ILP was dominated by the left and made up the most influential element in the local Labour Party.

Newbold later described how he came to win the nomination:

“The right wing in Wishaw would vote for ‘Madge Neilson’s man’ and the left in Motherwell was already secured” (quoted in C Fox Motherwell is won for Moscow Glasgow 1992, p13).

In the 1918 general election Newbold gained 4,135 votes for the Labour Party, finishing third with 23.2%.

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the LP left began to organise for affiliation to the Communist International, forming the Left Wing Committee in 1919 and for a short time in 1920 and 1921 publishing a journal called The International. Already in 1919 Newbold had said: “I am lined up with Lenin and can only go into politics as a communist” (ibid, p17), but that did not prevent him winning the unanimous nomination of the Motherwell Labour Party in April 1920.

When asked to confirm his acceptance the following year, he replied: “Yes, but only as a candidate of uncompromising industrial unionism and Soviet socialism” (ibid, p17). Like Saklatvala, R Palme Dutt and Helen Crawfurd, he had left the ILP to join the Communist Party of Great Britain earlier in 1921.

So Walton Newbold fought the Motherwell seat in 1922 without the endorsement of the national Labour Party, but with the full backing of Motherwell Trades and Labour Council - the only working class candidate. His election slogan was “Let’s carry Motherwell for communism”.

His election manifesto ended with this uncompromising call:

“I call upon workers to rally together with the workers of all lands marshalled under the red banner of the Communist International and to give notice to the capitalists, in this constituency, county and country, that they have got to quit.

“Working men and working women of Motherwell and Wishaw - Rally to the call of the Communist Party! Rally to the cause of a Labour government! Let your vote be - All power to the working class!”

Not surprisingly the bourgeois press was not enamoured with Newbold’s campaign. The Scotsman (November 2 1922) carried this comment:

“Newbold is out for the complete and unconditional surrender of capital and all power to the working class. His extreme views are repugnant to the average elector and he has no chance of winning” (quoted in Fox, p22).

The Scotsman was sadly (for the bourgeoisie) mistaken. In a four-way fight against an independent Conservative, Independent Liberal and National Liberal, Walton Newbold gained 8,262 votes (33.3%), beating his nearest rival by just over a thousand votes.

Fox describes how the special session of the Third International, meeting in Moscow at the time, reacted to the news of the victory. Newbold had sent a telegram to its chair, Zinoviev, which read: “Have won Motherwell in Scotland for communism”. The excited announcement came: “‘We have a man in the English [sic] parliament! We have a man in the English parliament! The English [sic] delegates were up shouting, ‘Gallacher! Gallacher’s in!’” (ibid p10)

In fact Willie Gallacher, despite receiving 5,906 votes, was bottom of the poll in Dundee. As the confusion cleared, the whole congress rose to sing ‘The Internationale’ and Newbold was elected by acclamation to the presidium of Comintern. He was subsequently elected as honorary member of both the Moscow and Leningrad soviets.

Whether communists were standing under the Party banner or as Labour candidates, nowhere did they stand against the Labour Party in this period. Millions of workers were moving left and Labour had been forced to adopt clause four to retain their support. The CPGB and the International were agreed that Labour should be supported in order to shatter the socialistic illusions that the mass of workers had in MacDonald’s party:

“The large body of the working class forces in the Labour Party stands for the fight against capitalism, even though they do not clearly understand the implications of the struggle ... But, inasmuch as they stand for the fight against capitalism we are with them in action, even while we point out their mistakes ... But support the Labour Party candidates with your eyes open” (The Communist March 4 1922).

After their election Newbold and Saklatvala regularly attended meetings of the Party’s Political Bureau and Executive Committee. Newbold in particular made significant revolutionary interventions in parliament in 1923. He delivered his maiden speech early that year from the gangway, as his application for the Labour whip was refused and he was denied a place on the opposition benches.

“There have been many precedents in this country for revolution ... It is the first time that an elected representative of the Communist International has had the chance of standing at the foot of the throne. It is not the last - not by a long chalk ... I am rallied under the same flag as Ulianov Lenin ... I am here in the name of my people. I am demanding justice. I am going to get justice. If not at this table then we will get it” (quoted in Fox, p27).

Always closely advised by the Party, he made militant speeches on the unemployed, rents and the 1923 French invasion of the Ruhr (he attended two international conferences as a Party delegate in Germany in January and March to protest against the Allied annexation).

He gained great publicity when he was suspended from the Commons in May for refusing to be silenced on the ultimatum that foreign secretary Lord Curzon had delivered to the USSR. He accused Curzon of telling a “falsehood” and then compounded the offence by labelling him a “bourgeois”.

In the December 1923 general election the Communist Party’s slogan was: “Return the Labour candidates, but make them fight for the Communist Programme” (Workers’ Weekly December 7 1923). Again no communist was put up against a Labour candidate. Newbold once again won the support of the Motherwell and Wishaw Trades and Labour Council, by a margin of 36 to five.

In his address he stated:

“I am not going to permit this election to be fought on an issue so unreal as that between free trade and protection [which provoked the election]. The issue in this contest, as in all that may ensue until the final conquest of power by the working class, will be the question of who is to rule the country - the capitalists or the workers” (quoted in Fox, p30).

Despite increasing his vote to 8,712 (rising to 37.4%), Newbold was beaten by the Independent Conservative, H Ferguson, who polled 9,793. This was largely as a result of the National Liberals standing down in favour of Ferguson, while the support for the third candidate, the Independent Liberal, was cut by more than 500 further defectors to the Tory.

This defeat seems to have had a devastating effect on Newbold. Within months he was criticising Party policy, particularly in relation to the Labour Party. As the Labour bureaucracy moved to ban communists from membership, Newbold’s attitude to Labour softened and he already began to drift away from the ideas of revolution and communism.

Despite winning the nomination once again from the Motherwell labour movement (there was to be yet another general election at the end of 1924), he withdrew shortly afterwards. He declined the invitation from the CPGB Political Bureau to discuss his differences and in September 1924 publicly resigned from the Party.

This left him free to resume his career in the Labour Party, standing five times for Labour, each time with an increasingly right wing programme. He became bitterly anti-communist and joined the Catholic Church.

Using his inheritance from his father’s estate, he travelled widely. At the height of the class battles which culminated in the General Strike he embarked upon a tour of the United States in February 1926.

Newbold’s defection was remarkably rapid, but he was not alone. James Klugmann explained how political pressure, combined with the weakness of individual CPGB members, served to prise away many comrades:

“The period of the first Labour government, the need to challenge the policy of the rightwing leaders, the decisions of the Labour Party conference prohibiting communists to stand as Labour Party candidates or even to take up individual membership of the Labour Party, the problem of facing the indignation of many Labour Party members and trade unionists who felt that it was necessary to be ‘loyal’ whatever the policy of the government, was a test of real loyalty to principle and the [Communist] Party. It was not by accident, therefore, that a handful of Party members, mainly of middle class origin, including some whose names were well known in the movement, should lack the political strength that was needed and prefer their political careers to the Party. Most of these men and women had come towards the Party in the immediate post-war years when ‘revolution’ was in the air, when it was almost fashionable to term oneself a ‘revolutionary’, when ideas were abroad of quick revolutionary successes rather than a hard, continuous, patient struggle against the stream; When, moreover, there seemed to be no contradiction between Party membership and a political career in parliament” (J Klugmann History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1919-1924 London 1976, pp332-333).

Nevertheless, communists owe John Walton Newbold a tremendous debt for the intransigent role he played - brief though it was - both in his vigorous election campaigns and as a revolutionary working class voice in parliament.

Peter Manson