26.03.1998

Welsh road to British road

Mark Fischer highlights some moments from the career of Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the CPB

What does the ascendancy of Robert Griffiths over Mike Hicks mean for the so-called Communist Party of Britain? In spite of the split over the Morning Star crisis it is still hard to say. The CPB comes from a political tradition in our movement that believes that political openness is actually a sign of weakness, not strength. Thus, in the battle for the leadership of the CPB, we have had no clarification of political platform, but only nuance or shade.

But then, the same can be said of comrade Griffiths as an individual political personality. He has travelled a long and winding road since his younger days. From revolutionary Welsh nationalist, through extreme left ‘official communist’ to today’s pinnacle as CPB general secretary - an organisation synonymous with reformism and pro-Labour cretinism.

Griffiths has had an interesting political past. Brought up in Cardiff, he graduated from Bath University in the early 1970s with an economics degree. He became the parliamentary research officer for Plaid Cymru from 1974-79 when he was made redundant in a storm of controversy (although the organisation always claimed that financial, not political, considerations led to his departure). Griffiths was thus a prominent figure on the left of Welsh nationalism just as its traditional face had started to change.

Gwyn Williams writes of this Plaid Cymru that “whereas the party built up some strength in the Welsh-speaking areas and registered a presence in some of the South Wales valleys, its parliamentary record was one of marginality and lost deposits. It was in its abrupt breakthrough over the late 1960s and early 1970s that equally abruptly became a distinctly modern and radical movement, less concerned with language and cultural issues, moving rapidly into a European left and provoking a crises in its own ranks in the process” (G Williams When was Wales? Harmondsworth 1985, p290)

From personal experience, I know the young rank and file leftists of Plaid Cymru tended to define themselves as Welsh working class revolutionaries, reflecting an understandable “disillusionment with the Labour Party”. Labourism in South Wales is mired in corruption and graft.

The heavy defeat of Labour’s Welsh devolution proposals in the 1979 referendum caused real ferment in left nationalist circles. Into this fluid situation stepped Griffiths, still then Plaid’s research officer. In July 1979, he and Gareth Miles, then organiser with UCAC, the Welsh school teachers’ union, put out the influential pamphlet Sosialaeth i’r Cymru, later published as Socialism for the Welsh people. This damned the mainstream Welsh nationalist movement - and in particular the “rural right” of Plaid Cymru - for its timidity and reformism. The leadership of the movement claimed that Welsh nationhood could be achieved “without any stand up fight, any subversive activity, certainly without any violence (let the Welsh nation perish rather than that!)” (cited in J Osmond Police conspiracy? Ceredigion 1984, p27).

Early in 1980, a halfway house between PC and a projected “Welsh Socialist Party” was founded - the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement. It is claimed that at its peak, this organisation had over 300 members, organised in 12 clubs throughout Wales, although this seems an exaggeration.

Very quickly, the new group faced a crisis or orientation. Was it to be merely a pressure group on mainstream constitutional nationalism? If it subordinated its perspectives to the arson campaign against holiday-homes in Wales, the WSRM could “easily degenerate into being merely the political wing or ‘voice’ of violence”, as a discussion paper presented to the organisation’s first conference in Aberfan, June 1980, put it.

The prospect of transformation into a political party was the only serious option. But this raised the fundamental problem - reform or revolution? The Aberfan discussion paper leaned towards revolutionism. It called on a new party “to organise and assist in the self-organisation of the Welsh working class, to resist attacks upon it, to develop self-confidence and the ability to take on British capitalism, the police and, ultimately, the armed forces” (ibid, p29).

The WSRM was clearly a heterogeneous grouping. A majority retained electoral allegiance to Plaid Cymru and would define themselves primarily as nationalists rather than socialists. Sitting uneasily atop of this was a leadership - with Griffiths as the “central figure … certainly as far as the police were concerned” (ibid pp33-4) - inclined in the direction of an independent revolutionary party of some sort. In its micro-form it thus replicated one of the main tensions in the revolutionary nationalist movement in Ireland. Clearly, both the nationalist and socialist elements within the group looked at this stage to events Ireland both for inspiration and - to a certain extent - political models.

Thus, in Robert Griffiths’ first annual report to the WSRM (February 1981), he characterised the holiday-home arson campaign as “understandable expressions of popular anger and frustration … we sought to explain them” (ibid p32). Certainly the South Wales police were sufficiently concerned to launch systematic surveillance and harassment of the organisation, explicitly linking it with the IRA (particularly after the appearance of paramilitary colour parties of the WSRM at various Welsh marches and events).

In a report broadcast by Nationwide news programme (March 12 1980), Griffiths was interviewed in his capacity as secretary of the WSRM and had this to say about the arson campaign: “Our attitude is that in the past peaceful methods have been tried, democratic methods … These have got nowhere, no one has taken any notice of them. Therefore, we quite understand, as a movement, why these people have been driven to these sorts of methods … this seems to be the only language that the authorities, and the British government in particular, seem to understand” (ibid p40).

Through its campaign of harassment, arrests and surveillance, the South Wales police were laying the basis for a conspiracy charge. Things culminated in the Cardiff Explosives Trial in 1983 which featured leading members of the WSRM, including Griffiths as the accused. In many ways, it was this trail - which collapsed in a storm of accusations against police fabrication and malpractice - which killed off the politically unviable WSRM. In the wake of the fiasco, Griffiths applied to join the Communist Party of Great Britain. He explained the fate of the WSRM thus:

“There was an unholy alliance between nationalism and ultra-left anarchism that undermined what the WSRM was intended to become - a socialist party of the Welsh working class … Our resistance to this attempt was based on political principle, not on naivety or fear of the British state. We are not in a Northern Ireland situation here in Wales” (ibid p137).

Griffiths’ move to the CPGB was undoubtedly a positive one. He did not initially dump the ‘Welsh road to socialism’ for the British road to socialism (the CPGB’s then opportunist programme).At first, he retained his revolutionism, shorn of its Welsh nationalism, as his criticisms of the BRS made clear (see Weekly Worker March 19 for an edited reprint of his critical analysis from 1987). Yet as Jack Conrad showed at the time in The Leninist, forerunner of this paper, his critique remained partial, one-sided and in danger of slipping into apologia. Centrally, while Griffiths and his co-thinkers in the left-inclined Communist Campaign Group in Wales failed to go to the core of the opportunist canker eating away at ‘official communism’ in Britain - the pernicious influence of the Soviet party after it had become dominated by opportunism from the mid-1920s onwards. As comrade Conrad put it, “this [was] something the South Wales CCGers [fought] shy of even considering” (ibid).

It was the pull of Soviet ‘invincibility’ that was eventually to prise Griffiths free from his petty bourgeois revolutionary moorings and set him on a route to support for Gorbachev’s counterrevolution. From that denouement it was a logical step for a man of drive and personal ambition such as Griffiths to set himself the goal of unthroning Hicks as CPB general secretary. Having succeeded, Griffiths now rules a fractured CPB, which was formally established to defend the British road programme against the infringements of the Eurocommunists.

However, none of this was inevitable. There was a possibility of Leninism - albeit weak and inchoate. In June 1985, he wrote to The Leninist, complaining about remarks he considered ill-judged in an article about Wales. Nevertheless, he was not unsympathetic. Griffiths told us that “a number of comrades in South Wales subscribe to your paper and largely agree with a number of positions put forward by it. In particular, your treatment of the women’s question, Ireland, the Labour Party has been excellent …”. Furthermore, we “rightly [oppose] the British nationalism that infests the working class movement and, to some degree, all sections of the Communist Party - and which we see in some of the arguments about import controls, the EEC, Ireland, etc”. In a two-fingered salute to the Eurocommunists who were then busily purging the Party, he defiantly ended his letter “please print my real name and not a pseudonym” (The Leninist June 1985).

Today, comrade Griffiths finds himself the leader of a political organisation that calls for import controls to protect “our” economy and advocates withdrawal from the EU; has condemned the struggle of revolutionary nationalism in Ireland as “terrorism” and supports New Labour as the vehicle to bring socialist change. Ideologically, the comrade surely has some explaining to do.