06.01.2011

Haunted by ghosts

The death of Mary Rosser has opened up a can of worms. Sammy Hollingworth wonders why leading CPB members have such a strained relationship with the past

Robert Griffiths, the recently re-elected general secretary of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, sounds a worried man. Speaking to the organisation’s new executive committee in November 2010 (following the CPB’s bi-annual national congress the previous month), he said: “The next two years will be a supreme test for the Communist Party. If we are of no great use to the working class as it faces an historic struggle to hold on to the gains of the 20th century, then we should drop any ambition to play a leading role in the revolutionary transformation of society. This is no time for passengers on our executive committee. We need all EC members helping to take forward at least one specific aspect of party work in between meetings, and putting a high priority on supporting and mobilising for national party and Morning Star events.”^[1]

The subtext of this passage is, of course, an EC and an organisation that is awash with passengers, who see the CPB as an occasional focus of their individual identity in the context of other, more pressing, tasks in the broader movement. This was expressed at the October congress by South London delegate Lorraine Douglas, who was quoted in the Morning Star as stating that many CPB members did good work in the labour movement, but little actual party work.^[2] This is also an organisation that is not showing any signs of significant growth (in December 2009 it claimed 955 members - a slight fall from December 2008, when it had 967 recorded members^[3]) and there have been no major announcements to suggest otherwise. This is all pretty much standard for seasoned CPB watchers and the organisation, barring a titanic cultural revolution in the short term, is bound to fail the “supreme test” set for it by comrade Griffiths. What will be more interesting is the political fall-out inside the CPB. Suggesting that the organisation should “drop any ambition to play a leading role in the revolutionary transformation of society” (ie, to disband itself, in other words) in the event of future failure is strong stuff for a body as terminally sluggish as the CPB and indicative of Griffiths’s own frustration.

Somewhat surprisingly there has been no obvious political shift inside the CPB since the formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in May 2010. One might have expected that, with the likelihood of Labour shifting to the left and thus choking off space for what CPB ‘modernisers’ such as Griffiths like to call a “new mass party of labour”, CPB ‘traditionalists’, wedded to the idea that the Labour Party is the only conceivable strategic route to a national, British, socialism, would have a strong hand and that the ‘modernisers’ might collapse back into that traditional stance. In fact, the 2010 congress did little more than re-elaborate the twin-track compromise arrived at the 2008 congress, where, in order to keep some kind of factional order, the CPB avoided putting all its eggs into either the Labour or “new mass party of labour” basket.

As Griffiths put it to the CPB EC in November 2010, “The Communist Party must engage more systematically with its trade union and Labour Party allies to challenge and defeat the New Labour trend ... But our party’s 51st congress was also clear that horizons cannot be limited by the struggle in the Labour Party, however important that is. There are other significant forces on the left outside the Labour Party, in the labour movement, in the green, Welsh and Scottish national movements. We seek unity across the left, labour and progressive movements, while recognising that this will not always be possible in the case of many sectarian and ultra-left groups.”^[4]

Laboured

The arguments about “other significant forces on the left outside the Labour Party” were beginning to look a bit tired in 2008, let alone in 2010, when Griffiths is forced to enlist greens and nationalists to his cause. What it does suggest is that simple reconciliation between the CPB’s loose factions is not an option and that differences that are pretty marginal on the surface are still being bandied about as part of the organisation’s internal discourse. This can clearly be seen around the CPB’s review of its programme, Britain’s road to socialism, a draft of which was unveiled in July 2010 after being produced by Griffiths, Mary Davis and Gawain Little.

As Eddie Ford previously reported in the Weekly Worker: “Needless to say, this tension or confusion over the Labour Party - with it or against it? - makes its way into the ‘updated’ BRS, predictably enough. So it leaves open the possibility of ‘reclaiming’ Labour - after all, never throw all your cards away. Thus the draft states that the ‘potential exists to wage a broad-based, resolute fight to reclaim the party for social democratic and more leftwing policies’. However, ‘should it prove too difficult to challenge New Labour with any real prospect of success’, then the ‘major sections of the trade union movement should meet together with their political allies to consider how to re-establish a mass party of labour’ - which is to say, ‘one which will represent the interests of the working class and the people generally’.”^[5]

These conceptions have come under fire from ‘traditionalists’, most notably those in Scotland. Contrast the careful twin-track strategy elaborated by comrade Griffiths above with the blunt analysis given in the Scottish wing of the CPB’s current educational lecture on the BRS (dated October 2010).

Formulated by comrade Jim Whyte, the speaker’s notes make reference to calls for a new political party of the left and reply in the following terms: “Communists fully understand the frustration and share it. Who would not want a new mass-based party of the left? But we must separate wishful thinking from reality. The material conditions do not exist for the creation of such a party in Britain; and most importantly the trade unions for the most part have no intention of walking away from the Labour Party. Like it or not, the Labour Party continues to be the mass party of the working class and, come the next election, they still will be. In the years ahead what is needed is to build a mighty movement against this monopoly capitalist government, stop them in their tracks, and create the conditions in which the next Labour government is returned on a left manifesto.”^[6]

In private, Scottish ‘traditionalists’ have been heard to voice the opinion that sections of the new draft BRS are “toy-town Bolshevism”. So now, it seems, both sides are playing for time and jockeying for position around implementing the new draft. Clearly talking in response to the rough reception accorded to the draft in some quarters, Griffiths told the CPB’s EC: “There is no need to try to polarise the party over what is only the first draft, even before most comrades have had the opportunity to read and discuss it. This EC has been given the responsibility of conducting that inner-party discussion, which should be undertaken in an open and comradely way, without any return to the superficial labels and caricatures that misinformed previous debates.”^[7] This is all a bit strange, considering that the draft has been available since July 2010. Surely most CPB members would have read it by November?

Characters such as Griffiths are part of a consistent strand inside the CPB that, despite seeing the organisation as the ‘only show in town’ as regards to British communism (and thus are prepared to mouth the majority of its shallow myths and orthodoxies), sees the group that split from the ‘official’ CPGB under the leadership of Mike Hicks and Mary Rosser in 1988, following the liquidation of the Morning Star as an ‘official’ CPGB publication under the editorship of Tony Chater, as flawed in some way. Cliquish, sectarian and undynamic in the extreme, the early incarnation of what was the Morning Star’s CPB (ie, the ‘party’ was set up as the ‘muscle’ of a ‘broad labour movement’ publication) was in many respects a stillborn enterprise and even those comrades initially attracted to its political outlook were not enamoured by its divisive and unlamented former general secretary, Mike Hicks, who often sneered at the ‘surrender’ of individuals and factions who chose to join the CPB later on. Griffiths had to throw over his own public opposition to the politics of what was then known as The British road to socialism (the ‘official’ CPGB’s programme), after the breakaway CPB adopted its own version. While Griffiths is no longer the ‘revolutionary oppositionist’, he obviously has a more complex relationship to his organisation’s politics than supporters of the ‘traditionalist’ pro-Labour wing.

Hicks was eventually ousted in 1998, and retaliated by having his supporters at the Morning Star sack the then editor, John Haylett, which led to the successful strike of Star journalists for Haylett’s reinstatement. CPB members have been reliving this vicious factional war over the festive period, after Mike Hicks recently published an obituary for his wife, Mary Rosser, in The Guardian (after a previous notice in Tribune).

He said: “After 10 years, [Rosser] was one of almost 50% of executive committee members of the Communist Party of Britain who were virtually forced out of office and membership during a time of sharp political differences.”^[8] Griffiths himself replied in the Star (December 30). While paying due respect to her role in “saving” the Star and founding the CPB, he said: “[Rosser], like [Hicks], lost office in elections that nobody has ever claimed were unfair, and by a substantial majority. No member of the CPB executive was forced out of party membership in 1998 or subsequently, neither virtually nor otherwise.” Surrounding this response has been a host of internet allegations concerning Hicks’s and Rosser’s time (moving money from the CPB to the Star, forging minutes, factionalism and so on). None of this is very interesting or educational, but one thing does become clear: many CPB members have long and painful memories of these years and the so-called ‘re-establishment of the Communist Party’ in the late 1980s and 1990s was not exactly drenched in joy.

Divisive

But then, this is not the first time these misgivings have been publicly voiced. Graham Stevenson is on the CPB’s executive and political committee, and national organiser for transport for the T&G section of Unite. Tucked away on his personal website is a rambling, turgid document entitled ‘The British Communist Party in the 1980s: revisionism, resistance and re-establishment’.^[9] Stevenson puts the CPB’s so-called re-establishment congress of 1988 in single-quote marks, faithfully records the views of those oppositional comrades inside the ‘official’ CPGB who were opposed to the CPB split and notes the divisive nature of Hicks’s leadership, leaving the reader in no doubt that Stevenson himself was opposed to the formation of the CPB at the time.

But the real clincher is here: “... it had been the Communist Party congress of November 1995 that had first seen some immediate effects of a new mood sweeping the CPB. From the summer, many key people had moved into membership of the CPB as a result of the communist unity process. The grip of the Hicks leadership on the party was noticeably weakening. Mary Davies and Ivan Beavis were voted on to the EC despite not being on the recommended list. Those who had dominated the CPB, indeed who had pushed the precipitant strategy of breakaway in 1988, such as Tony Chater and the husband and wife team of Ron and Joan Bellamy, were outraged, the latter shouting out loud at the results: ‘It’s a faction - it’s all Straight Left’! Such insularity from reality was by no means an aberration and the next three years would be difficult. The Communist Party of Britain formally dates the re-emergence of a real Communist Party from 1988. Although some may quibble over the precision of this, what is for sure is that the 1995 congress had really marked this for certain. There were still problems to come and it had taken the best part of a decade to come through the process but, from this point, it could now be truly said that the Communist Party had been truly re-established.”^[10]

This is dangerous territory for the CPB. The organisation presents itself as the continuation of the ‘official’ CPGB. Thus, its congress of last October was deemed to be its “51st congress”. Its members like to think of themselves as being in the same party as that run by Harry Pollitt and John Gollan. All nonsense, of course, but nonsense that has been agreeable to the Electoral Commission (which let the CPB have the ‘Communist Party’ name for elections) and some courts that have ruled in favour of the CPB in regard to wills and legacies left to the ‘Communist Party’. But according to Stevenson, the CPB only became the true successor to the CPGB in 1995 after the writing was on the wall for Hicks (a truly bizarre, almost apolitical, method of deciding such issues), which does rather chronologically bust up the ‘we are the continuation of the Communist Party’ argument by eight years or so. Also, if, in 1988, we did not have the ‘Communist Party’ reborn, in what ways is the CPB working at a qualitatively higher level in 2011 than, say, 1990? What specific changes did this shift in 1995 usher in? By any reasoned analysis, the CPB is still lumbered with much the same ‘official communist’ baggage, has a shrinking membership and struggles to establish any kind of political profile, national or otherwise. Sure, the CPB has ‘modernisers’ working within it, but exactly how much has been modernised is a moot point.

The tortured nature of the CPB’s formation represents a thoroughly toxic base for mapping out the organisation’s future, whether that is the unwillingness of Rob Griffiths to resign himself to its traditional Labourite perspectives or the unwillingness of Graham Stevenson to admit that ‘the Communist Party’, or anything remotely close to it, was ‘re-established’ in 1988.

Notes

1. southdevoncommunist.blogspot.com/2010/11/general-secretarys-address-to-new.html
2. Morning Star October 31 2010.
3. www.electoralcommission.org.uk/party-finance/database-of-registers/statements-of-accounts/soa/pdfs/soa_24-05-10_11-24-04.pdf
4. southdevoncommunist.blogspot.com/2010/11/general-secretarys-address-to-new.html
5. ‘Programmatic dead end’, September 2 2010.
6. www.scottishcommunists.org.uk/marxist-documents/british-road-to-socialism-speaker-s-notes
7. southdevoncommunist.blogspot.com/2010/11/general-secretarys-address-to-new.html
8. The Guardian December 24 2010.
9. www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=700&Itemid=56
10. Ibid.