1
Locking out the Communists: The Labour party and the Communist party,
1939-46
ABSTRACT
The Second World War was a crucial period in the development of the British left,
and particularly in finally delineating between the Labour and Communist parties.
Communist party membership hit record levels just when Labour’s own organisation
was creaking under the impact of war, while Britain’s alliance with the USSR from
1941 onwards brought reflected glory on the CP. This gave the Communists their
best-ever opportunity to influence, and perhaps even join, Labour. Yet Labour’s
leaders and officials were clear in their opposition to Communism, and worked hard
to contain the threat they believed that it posed. This led to a long-running battle
which was only ended by Labour’s landslide victory in 1945 and the concomitant
organisational changes that it, and the deterioration of Anglo-Soviet relations in 194546, allowed. By 1946, for all the fleeting successes of wartime, the Communists were
more effectively shut out of Labour politics than ever before. There were long-term
effects on Labour’s leadership and officials. By 1946, partly as a result of the war
years, Labour language had developed in ways that would fit closely with Cold war
stereotypes. Crucially, too, Labour’s long struggle against the British Communists
prepared it well for the rigours of office after 1945, and set the tone for much of
Labour politics over the next three decades.
2
Locking out the Communists: The Labour party and the Communist party,
1939-46
When Clement Attlee formed the first majority Labour government in July 1945,
most of the ministers he appointed brought into office a decided hostility towards
Communism. People such as Attlee himself, Herbert Morrison, and Ernest Bevin had
settled firmly into anti-Communist views two decades or more previously. There were
exceptions – Sir Stafford Cripps had favoured united action with the Communists at
various stages in the 1930s, and had been expelled from the Labour party with
Aneurin Bevan and others in 1939 for supporting steps to link up with other parties.
But the prevailing ethos was very much anti-Communist. It is possible to argue that
this represented no great change from the pre-war period. But it will be the first
contention of this article that the period of the Second World War, by keeping the
issue of Labour-Communist relations in the spotlight, represented an unusually rich
period in the development of the relationship between the two parties, and that it, and
its immediate aftermath, ultimately saw a final resolution of the issue. In 1939, the
Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB) had still been capable of acting as a
hopeful suitor to the Labour party, but by 1946, any such hope had gone. Secondly, it
will be suggested that the experience of the war years in this area had a strong
influence on Labour language about perceived extremism. Thirdly, it will be shown
that the people who led and ran the Labour party both during and after the war were
influenced significantly by their wartime experiences in relation to the Communists.
Finally, the article will suggest that Labour chose wisely in rejecting Communist
advances in wartime. Even having worked hard to keep the Communists at arm’s
length, Labour still had to work hard in the Cold War era that followed 1945 to play
3
down Conservative claims that it was ‘soft on Communism’ or even cryptoCommunist – any kind of wartime dalliance would have been grist to their opponent’s
mill.
The article sets out its case, first, by analysing the state of Labour-Communist
relations in 1939, in the context of the inter-war period as a whole. It then discusses
the impact of the CPGB’s change of line regarding the war in September-October
1939; the period 1939-41 when, formally at least, the parties were a long way apart,
with the Communists denouncing ‘imperialist war’ while Labour (from May 1940
onwards) sat with the Conservatives and Liberals in Churchill’s Coalition
government; the various campaigns for and against Communist-Labour ‘co-operation’
between 1941 and 1945; and, finally, the British version of what Geoff Eley called
‘closure’ for western Communism in this period, represented by the change of Labour
party rules in 1946 which finally and permanently ended any hopes that the
Communists could become part of the Labour party.1
*
By the summer of 1939, the Labour party was the chief force on the British
left, and the much smaller Communist party its only conceivable rival. Labour had
been in opposition since its electoral rout at the hands of the National government in
1931, and its leaders were – almost certainly rightly – pessimistic as to its prospects at
the general election widely expected for October 1939. But it remained much stronger
than its rival, having formed two minority governments in the 1920s whereas the
CPGB had never had more than two MPs at the same time. In 1939, Labour had more
than 150 MPs to the Communists’ one, over 400,000 individual members as opposed
to their 18,000, and the affiliation of almost all the major trade unions in the country
as opposed to the limited, though in some cases growing, degree of influence in a
4
handful of unions that the Communists could boast. Indeed, the CPGB, having been
formed in 1920 in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, had struggled
for two decades to establish itself and find its own political place and voice. At
various times, such as the early and mid-1920s, the party had sought to work with
Labour, or at least with grassroots Labourites; at others, most notably the ‘class
against class’ period of the late 1920s and early 1930s, it had looked to denounce
Labour as the enemy of the workers and to supplant it as the main party of the
working class. Neither strategy had shown dramatic success; indeed, the latter had
seen membership slip as low as 2,500 in 1930. But the ‘popular front’ period from
1935 onwards, highlighting united struggle against fascism, had proved more
successful, and led to a trebling of membership as well as greater influence in parts of
the trade union movement.
Labour, though, remained resistant to calls for greater unity. Even in the early
1930s, with the British economy in crisis and Labour smashed electorally, serious
enthusiasm for the ‘Soviet experiment’ proved short-lived.2 As British capitalism
recovered after 1932, it became easier to argue for gradual progress and moderate
social democracy once more, a development helped by the election of reforming left
governments in Sweden in 1932 and New Zealand in 1935.3 By 1939, the Labour
intellectual Evan Durbin was arguing, much as a previous generation of Labour
leaders had done, that ‘egalitarian parties’ were divided fundamentally between those
that ‘repudiate[d] democracy as the right method of political action, and those that
d[id] not’; Communist parties fell into the former category, and Labour and Social
Democratic parties into the latter.4
But although the Communist ‘threat’ seemed to be under control, Labour
leaders and officials remained concerned about the potential for matters to spin out of
5
control: even by 1939, therefore, Communism could not be discounted as irrelevant
by Labour. This was, in part, because lines of demarcation between the parties were
not always tidy. David Blaazer has demonstrated the extent to which, down to 1939, a
strong tradition of broad left co-operation remained.5 This chimes in with the
arguments of Kevin Morgan, who has detailed the extent to which there remained
strong linkages, and porous boundaries, across the left.6 It also explains the lengths,
painstakingly outlined by David Howell, that Labour leaders and party managers had
had to go to in the 1920s to marginalize the far left.7 The sheer complexity of the
situation is seen in the work of Nina Fishman, who argued that the same Labourite or
trade unionist could be anti-Communist in some contexts (for example as Labour
party members) but willing to tolerate Communists in others (for example as union
activists and lower-level organizers), perhaps the most notable example being Bevin,
the leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), who was to serve
as Attlee’s Foreign Secretary from 1945-51.8
The question of Labour-Communist relations reached a new intensity from
1936 onwards. The Communists’ shift towards an anti-fascist ‘popular font’ strategy
at a time when fascism appeared to be on the march mean that there was bound to be
controversy. In 1936, Labour’s annual conference defeated, by a four-to-one majority,
a motion calling for Communist affiliation to the Labour party. That the possibility of
affiliation remained was something of a hangover from the party’s pre-1918 federal
structure. Under the rules, other organizations were still eligible to join Labour en
bloc by means of payment of a fee based on the size of their membership, becoming
part of the Labour party, while at the same time retaining their own identity. This
federal structure had made sense in a pre-1918 context, and continued to make sense
in respect of the unions, but by the 1930s, the ability of a separate party to affiliate
6
and yet retain its own programme, policies and organization was already something of
an anomaly, as the departure of the Independent Labour party (ILP) in 1932
demonstrated).9 The rejection of affiliation in 1936 did not calm all Labour fears, if
only because, as the European situation continued to develop, it could always be
suggested that ‘new’ circumstances demanded new solutions. Labour responded
firmly, and 1937 saw it forcing the dissolution of the left-wing Socialist League when
it joined the Unity Campaign with the Communists and the ILP, and establishing a
South Wales Regional Council of Labour (RCL) to co-ordinate anti-Communist
activity across the coalfield there.10
However, Communist influence in certain unions, like Bevin’s TGWU and the
National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) had increased significantly since the early
1930s, and this mattered, given the centrality of the unions as a whole to the Labour
party and its decision-making process, especially at the annual conference, where
their collective votes overwhelmed those of divisional (constituency) Labour parties
(DLPs).11 Labour’s continuing failure to look like winning a parliamentary majority
meant that some Labourites continued to believe the argument that they needed the
support of the Communists and other ‘progressives’ to defeat the Conservativedominated National government. Labour headquarters was alarmed when many
Labourites worked with Liberals and Communists in support of ‘Independent
Progressive’ candidates at the Bridgwater and Oxford by-elections in autumn 1938.
When this was followed, early in 1939, by Cripps’s campaign for a united movement
against fascism and the National government, leaders and officials were quick to act:
Cripps, Bevan and others were expelled from the party. Although Labour was
pessimistic about its prospects for an autumn 1939 general election, it did not believe
that electoral deals, be they with Communists or Liberals, would do anything to
7
improve matters, and one typical right-wing Labour view was expressed by George
Brown of St Albans at the party’s May 1939 conference, that they had ‘spent nine
blasted months in a pre-Election year just doing nothing but arguing the toss about
Cripps!’.12 If, by mid-1939, Labour appeared to be holding off the Communist
challenge, there was no room for complacency, and a further sign for concern was the
CPGB’s plan to change its rules to play down their ‘foreign’ image, which would
have been adopted that autumn had the outbreak of war not forced the cancellation of
their October congress.13
*
The first moves of wartime seemed to help Labour by placing the Communists in an
unfavourable light. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939 elicited considerable
adverse comment on the British left, and more generally. War soon followed. Harry
Pollitt, secretary of the CPGB, led the party towards a ‘war on two fronts’ line against
fascism abroad and the National government at home. However, the party then
changed its mind under pressure from Moscow, and denounced the war as
‘imperialist’; Pollitt resigned.14 This switch, completed in the first week of October,
had a very negative effect on some party members and on many erstwhile
sympathisers, while being met with derision by most leading Labourites.15 When the
Soviet invasion of Finland followed soon afterwards, there was further anger. Sir
Walter Citrine, general secretary of the TUC, visited Finland and wrote a bestseller
about how Soviet Union had ‘brutally’ attacked ‘her little neighbour Finland’ in ‘an
outburst of savagery’, and praising the ‘gallant’ Finns.16 His co-traveller, Philip NoelBaker – one of Labour’s leading experts on foreign policy, who would go on to serve
as Minister of State under Bevin in 1945-46 – wanted the British government to arm
the Finns against the invaders.17 From December 1939 National Council of Labour
8
(NCL), which brought together Labour, the unions and the Co-operative movement,
organised aid for the Finns.18 April 1940 saw the publication by Labour headquarters
of a vitriolic pamphlet, Stalin’s Men, About Turn, which argued that the USSR stood
second only to Germany as responsible for the outbreak of war, and denounced the
CPGB as ‘the “Sixth Column” operating abroad on behalf of Soviet Imperialism and
Power Politics’.19 They were ‘not only the slaves of Moscow but also the allies of
Hitler’, their only aim being to ‘serve the ends of the Dictator in Moscow’.20 The MP
D. N. Pritt, a member of the party’s ruling national executive committee (NEC), was
expelled for his strongly pro-Soviet views in the spring of 1940.21 Some more
orthodox Labourites were sceptical, too, with Hugh Dalton, a leading MP and NEC
member, describing the pro-Finnish line of some of his colleagues as ‘sheer political
lunacy’.22 Such views were also reflected lower down the party.23
Most unions and local organizations were prepared to follow the Labour
leadership’s approach, certainly to the extent of rejecting motions condemning an
‘imperialist war’.24 At the same time, however, there was rather more sympathy for
the Communist line in 1939-40 than people would later choose to remember. When
news came through of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939, one DLP chairman told
his members that the Communists had not ‘betrayed democracy’, but had instead
‘shattered’ the Anti-Comintern Pact by isolating Germany from its fascist allies.25
Misgivings about the war were reflected in some calls for a negotiated peace and in a
broader demand from local parties for a statement of ‘peace aims’ from the Labour
leadership.26 Brecon and Radnor DLP welcomed the Soviet occupation of eastern
Poland as ‘protecting the workers and inhabitants of that part of Poland from Nazi
barbarity and savagery and in making them acquainted at first hand with the economic
security of a classless socialist state’.27 When, in December 1939, the former cabinet
9
minister J. R. Clynes stated that Labour would ‘fight to the last man’ to win the war,
‘many members’ of Lambeth North DLP ‘entirely disassociated themselves from the
statement’.28 Calls continued to be heard into early 1940 for the immediate convening
of an international peace conference.29 In March 1940, the NUR executive refused to
take a pro-Finnish line, and was soon demanding Pritt’s restoration to the party.30 A
number of DLPs reported the loss of members,31 officers,32 or occasionally
prospective parliamentary candidates,33 in protest at the party leadership’s line. A
proportion of these ended up in the CPGB.34 Some local parties as a whole went
further towards the CPGB’s new line. Epsom DLP passed a resolution declaring the
war a clash of rival European imperialisms, and stating that only world socialism
could ensure lasting peace. But some such votes were only won very narrowly, and
approaches changed over time: Huddersfield DLP voted on 20 September 1939 to
expose ‘the imperialist character of the war’, but only by 29 votes to 25; two months
later it was refusing to participate in a meeting involving Communists, and by early
1941 it was supporting the ban on the Communist Daily Worker.35
By taking the line it had, the Communist party had put itself in a position to
exploit this kind of Labour anxiety and anger as well as to compete with Trotskyites
like the Militant Labour League for the leadership of a small but vocal anti-war left.
Front organizations such as the Russia To-day Society also gave cause for concern
and were proscribed by Labour headquarters.36 Communist candidates fared poorly in
by-elections in early 1940, but were able to cause and exploit divisions within local
Labour parties.37 And the CPGB’s membership actually rose slightly with the new
line, reaching 20,000 for the first time ever in March 1940. This was in part because,
in practice, the party eschewed revolutionary defeatism and instead focussed mainly
on exploiting popular grievances around issues like rationing and air raid shelters, a
10
process that culminated in the establishment of the People’s Vigilance Committee and
the January 1941 People’s Convention.38
Major Labour and union gatherings continued to rally behind the war effort
and to vote down Communist anti-war critics.39 The May 1940 Labour party
conference overwhelmingly supported the party’s entry into Churchill’s government,
and when NUR President, J. H. Potts, expressed doubts he was rewarded with a shock
non-election to the party’s national executive.40 But even so, Labour officials and
leaders were worried about the future. Early in 1940 the South Wales RCL printed
95,000 copies of a pamphlet attacking the Communists’ change of line by quoting
Pollitt’s earlier publication How to Win the War.41 That July, leading party
committees approved a circular on ‘Subversive Movements’, which betrayed a great
deal about the contemporary headquarters mentality. Communications from
Communists were to be ‘placed in the waste paper basket’; resolutions on Communist
lines to be ‘declared out-of-order’; and ‘cases of subversive activity or acts of
sabotage properly authenticated’ were to be reported to Head Office.42 That autumn,
the NCL denounced the People’s Vigilance Committee as the CPGB’s ‘latest attempt
to rise above its normal futility’ in ‘an obvious attempt in face of the Nazi and Fascist
menace to weaken the British Government, to counteract the Nation’s war effort, and
to destroy our democratic institutions’.43 It warned of disciplinary action to follow,
and Labour certainly acted strongly against the Communists in the winter of 1940-41,
which saw more local Labour parties disbanded and reformed without their
‘disruptive elements’ than at any time since the late 1920s. More than 150 activists
were warned as to their future activities, and of these 88 were expelled.44 Some
Labour leaders, officials and local parties were also keen advocates of the ban on the
Communist Daily Worker that was imposed by the Churchill government in January
11
1941.45 But although the previous October’s annual Trades Union Congress had
‘overwhelmingly’ supported the decision of the TUC’s ruling general council to
prohibit any reporter from the paper from attending its proceedings,46 there was much
Labour criticism of the ban on civil liberties grounds; it was going to become a
significant problem for the leadership.47
*
The Communist party’s line on the war changed rapidly following the German
invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. Pollitt returned as secretary with Moscow’s
support, and talk of imperialist wars disappeared as the party came out for the fullest
possible support of the British war effort and defence of the Soviet Union, now
Britain’s ally. The British government, including its Labour members, welcomed the
entry of the Soviet Union into the war. But from the point of view of Labour party
management, the entry of the Soviets and the CPGB’s change of line caused real
problems. Norwich DLP, for example, called on the British government to prove its
solidarity with the Soviet cause by lifting the ban on the Daily Worker.48 But Labour’s
leaders did not need Churchill to tell them – although he told them anyway – that ‘it
was important that the Labour members of the Cabinet, in any speeches which they
might make, should continue to draw a line of demarcation between the tenets of the
Labour Party and those of Communism’.49 The change of line might well, in the
retrospective view of one CPGB member, have ‘lifted an enormous burden of doubt
from the consciences of most [Communist] Party members’, but Labour party
officials did not blink, arguing ‘that no circumstances ha[d] arisen to justify any
change in the attitude of the Labour Party to the Communist Party’.50 Co-operation
was impossible because of the CPGB’s ‘irresponsible and unstable character’: as
Citrine put it, ‘they were not prepared to collaborate in any measure or in any degree
12
with the British Communist Party’.51 Coventry DLP welcomed the CPGB’s change of
line, but refused its request for talks about co-operation.52 It would take more than
three million Axis troops marching eastwards to shift the solid resolve of Labour’s
officialdom on the issue. However, increasing popular appreciation of the sheer scale
of Soviet resistance and war effort threatened to make such a position look grudging,
at best, and Labour would face a struggle to meet and counter the powerful rhetoric of
pro-Soviet speakers, whether Communist or not, until well into 1944.53
This was particularly so because much Labour’s grassroots organization was
in decline at point, with individual membership falling from 409,000 in 1939 to just
219,000 in 1942. The reasons for this were by no means wholly political, of course: it
was probably the result of weakening organization and, crucially, a failure to keep up
the collection of subscriptions.54 But it was worrying, especially as the CPGB,
basking in the reflected glory of the Soviet war effort, increased its membership from
22,000 in December 1941 to 56,000 a year later. Campaigns against the Daily Worker
ban and in favour of a second front in Europe appealed much more broadly than
previous Communist efforts.55 Such was Labour’s fear of organizational decay, and
the chance this gave for Communist infiltration, that it suspended the selection of new
parliamentary candidates from October 1941.56 The TUC general council and the
NCL both voted against lifting the Worker ban in the winter of 1941-42,57 while NoelBaker summed up the scepticism of many Labourites regarding the second front
campaign when he wrote privately in October 1941 that he ‘d[id] not think that
anyone should ask for a western front who was against having any front at all until
last June’.58 Such resistance was part of a wider Labour effort, which involved
increased emphasis on organizational questions from mid-1941, attempts to keep the
Labour rank and file more informed and active, and close monitoring of Communist
13
activities, like factory-gate meetings.59 Meanwhile, the NCL’s Aid to Russia
campaign assiduously excluded Communists, and constituency parties were firmly
and repeatedly warned against involvement with Communist-led bodies.60
This was all very well so long as the officials could maintain control. But
Labour’s annual conference was one arena where, potentially, control could be lost, at
least for a time. At the May 1942 conference, a call for ‘working-class unity’ and cooperation with the Communists ‘on specific issues’ as the basis for ‘working-class …
victory in the war and victory in the peace’ was very heavily defeated; but a motion to
lift the ban on the Daily Worker, debated immediately afterwards, was narrowly
passed against NEC advice, showing that Communist causes could still have a much
wider appeal, if they could be related to wider issues, such as civil liberties, that were
of particular concern to Labour supporters.61 Matters were made worse by reports of
Labour MPs and other notables appearing on Communist platforms that summer.62
Labour’s national agent, George Shepherd, warned the NEC that unless it sustained its
‘general and determined’ line against the Communists, head office’s position would
be ‘impossible’, and he also told London Labour officials that they ‘ought not to be
mealy-mouthed in dealing with the Communists’ who were exploiting a transient
stage of the war, when the Soviets appeared to be doing most of the fighting, to their
own advantage – ‘when the United Nations [Britain and the United States] moved into
full action’, he added, ‘this factor would appear in proper perspective’.63 One leading
London Labourite betrayed a note of envy when he claimed in September 1942 that it
‘was a bad thing for Labour people to watch the Communist Party getting big
meetings and attracting young people without having the opportunity for action
themselves’.64 A hard-hitting circular of August 1942 made a further strong attack,
14
stating that there was ‘great need for continued alertness’ and adding, with references
calculated to raise Labour hackles:
In these tragic days when British Communism outvies [sic] British Jingoism in
flag waving, in the use of military bands, and when it associates with
prominent but erratic politicians [such as the Conservative Lord Beaverbrook,
at the time a prominent advocate of the second front], Labour men and women
should beware. Gilt-edged cards of invitation and flash advertising, despite the
paper shortage, are no guarantees of the genuine purpose of a public gathering.
Front organizations were particularly to be watched, their ‘main and almost Nazi and
Fascist purpose’ being ‘to enable a closely organized minority party to secure the
support of masses of people without giving them the democratic right of participating
in government, or in the direction of their political activities’. Above all, ‘Labour
Party members must not be led astray by the expensive propaganda of a very small
political organization [the CPGB] mysteriously in command of very large funds’.65
Part of the problem, though, was precisely that the Communist party was no longer ‘a
very small political organization’. As one party member wrote to Attlee, ‘the Labour
Party Organisers had better stir their stumps, because the CP [sic] is growing too
damn fast for my liking’.66
*
The nine months between the Trades Union Congress in September 1942 and
Labour’s annual conference in June 1943 represented the Communists’ single most
sustained campaign to overturn official Labour’s anti-Communism. At the 1942
congress, Citrine and the ruling general council continued to push the anti-Communist
line strongly, but they came under pressure, especially when the Amalgamated
Engineering Union (AEU) proposed the withdrawal of the 1934 ‘Black Circular’
15
which prohibited Communists from acting as delegates to local trades councils
affiliated to the TUC. In this it was supported by the Associated Society of
Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), the National Union of Distributive and
Allied Workers (NUDAW), the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain (MFGB), and the
Electrical Trades Union (ETU). The AEU proposal was only defeated by 2,550,000
votes to 2,137,000.67 As sympathy for the Soviet war effort continued to develop over
the winter of 1942-43, against the backdrop of the protracted and ultimately
successful defence of Stalingrad, agitation for a Second Front grew, benefiting the
Communists.
The state of the war, evidence of union support and the apparent debility of the
Labour party all provided a relatively strong basis from which the Communists could
renew their appeal for affiliation. The Communists’ initial sally in 1942 was rejected
out of hand by Labour officials, but the question could not be kept off the agenda of
the annual party conference due to be held in June 1943, not least because it now had
some powerful backers, including the MFGB, which was a major player in, and
paymaster of, Labour politics. Labour leaders and officials met in January 1943 to
plan the six-month battle ahead.68 It was worrying that even on the NEC, four
members – the intellectual Harold Laski, former party chair Barbara Ayrton Gould,
the MP Emanuel Shinwell and Sam Watson of the Durham miners – voted in favour
of a more conciliatory approach late that month.69 There was also a realization that,
although affiliation needed to be defeated, Labour must offer a more positive
approach, as part of which it ran a strong nationwide campaign in favour of the
Beveridge Report, which had been published to popular acclaim in December 1942
and which was widely seen as the blueprint for a post-war welfare state.70 The actual
‘anti-affiliation campaign’ was a major operation, closely co-ordinated with the editor
16
of the TUC-controlled Daily Herald.71 A hard-hitting pamphlet attacking Communist
‘hypocrisy and treachery’ was sold in bulk to local parties.72
In past struggles with the Communists, official Labour had made much of the
view that the CPGB was controlled and financed by ‘sinister’ forces in Moscow. As a
self-proclaimed branch of a world Communist party, it could not, by definition, be
entirely the master of its own fate. The events of autumn 1939 were now seen by
Labour officials as such ample proof of this proposition that they couched their
resistance to affiliation almost entirely in these terms. In every response to Pollitt,
duly published, Labour party secretary James Middleton stressed that the CPGB was
the ‘British Section of the Communist International’.73 This old standard argument
worked well enough as long as the Comintern existed. Somewhat inconveniently,
however, Stalin abolished it on 15 May 1943, just a month before the conference was
due to meet. Stalin’s motivations have been much debated, and it is likely that he was
keen to appease the Americans who had just sent a diplomat to Moscow to seek that
very end; to increase pressure on Britain and America to open a second front; and to
allow the Soviets to refocus resources for international communism onto eastern and
central Europe.74 In addition, though, it is inconceivable that Stalin and his advisers
were unaware that the Comintern’s dissolution would also weaken Labour’s case
against Communist affiliation at its forthcoming conference. Pollitt and his colleagues
were quick to capitalize by renaming themselves the Communist party (omitting ‘of
Great Britain’), and anglicizing party nomenclature. It was hardly surprising,
therefore, that Labour ministers vetoed Churchill’s (probably mischief-making)
suggestion that the British government should formally welcome the dissolution, on
the grounds that they saw it as part of a Communist plot to ease infiltration of the
17
Labour party and the unions. Worryingly, Laski and Shinwell renewed calls for the
NEC to look into the possibilities of co-operation, although they were defeated.75
At the local level, constituency parties espoused a range of views on the issue
in the months prior to the conference. Many came out strongly, and loyally, against
affiliation, albeit sometimes with a warning that the best way to defeat Communist
pressure was, in the words of Lewisham West DLP, for the NEC to pursue ‘a virile
and fighting policy on socialism’.76 Some voted in favour of affiliation and then
changed their minds, partly in fear of headquarters sanctions.77 But some were
straightforwardly favourable, subject only to the obvious proviso that, once in, the
Communists should conform to Labour’s rules and constitution.78 Even parties such
as North Lambeth, which had suffered considerable disruption in 1940 as a result of
Communist activities, were prepared to see affiliation ‘favourably considered’.79 Even
among those who could see that affiliation was a step too far, there was support for
the idea of joint campaigning at local level.80
Because of the way in which union delegations were mandated in the months
before the conference, it was fairly clear by June that the vote was going to go the
NEC’s way: most unions were not – yet, at any rate – prepared to repudiate the
Labour leadership by supporting Communist affiliation against its strong opposition.
However, it was important, in terms of validating that leadership, that there should be
a large majority against affiliation, and a chance of burying the issue once and for all.
The party chairman, A. J. Dobbs of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives,
set the tone by opening the conference on 14 June with a firm statement that
Communism ‘did not fit in with our national independence, nor … with our
democratic traditions’.81 When the debate on affiliation came two days later, a fierce
opening speech by NEC spokesman George Ridley (Railway Clerks’ Association)
18
stressed that the Communists, if admitted, would be a party within a party, ‘a snake in
this Movement coiling itself with pretended affection around the body of its victim,
sucking its life-blood and nourishing itself on it at the same time’. Ridley reminded
delegates of the CP’s ‘dreadful exhibition of conduct’ between 1939 and 1941, and
stated that accepting the Communists ‘would break the hearts of thousands of our
people ... by whose devotion and sacrifice this great Movement has been created and
upheld’: ‘We should have killed the Movement, we should have murdered its body,
we should have mortified its spirit’.82 Other opponents of affiliation also drew heavily
on adverse images of the Communists. They referred to the lack of democracy within
the CP; the party’s (at best) equivocal attitude towards democracy more generally; its
condemnation of Labour as the enemy of the working class in the late 1920s and early
1930s; its conduct in 1939-41; Communist splitting tactics; the fact that Labourites
would resign in disgust if the Communists were allowed in; and the ‘tripe’ of their
jargon-ridden political language.83 Pro-affiliationists countered as best they could.
MFGB president Will Lawther denounced Ridley for making ‘a speech that Goebbels
or Franco might have delivered’, and argued that, if affiliation was accepted on
condition that the Communists agreed ‘to accept and abide by’ Labour’s constitution,
it ‘would make for real unity in our Movement’ in the fight against fascism.84 Other
arguments in favour of affiliation were that ‘unity’ was the essential prerequisite of
continuing co-operation with the USSR after the war, and that Communist activists
were good recruiters for the unions.
It was left to Herbert Morrison, the veteran anti-Communist who had pushed
for Communists to be expelled in the early 1920s as a member of the NEC, battled
with them for years as secretary of the London Labour party, and latterly banned the
Daily Worker as Home Secretary, to reply to the debate. He denied that good relations
19
with the USSR depended in any way on Communist affiliation. That was because
there was a world of difference between Soviet statesmen who happened to be
Communists, and British Communists who were merely scheming and dishonest
politicians: whereas ‘Mr Stalin is a great man; one of the world’s greatest men,’ the
CPGB’s leaders had shown in 1939 that they had ‘a mental kink’, and could not be
bracketed with him (this reflected another delegate’s comment that ‘if the
management of the Communist Party in Russia had been conducted on the same lines
as the Communist Party in Great Britain you would not now see Stalin where he is’.)85
Morrison claimed to like Pollitt, who was enjoying wide popularity at the time, but he
was quick to use fear of ‘the other’ when speaking of Dutt as ‘a gentleman of another
order altogether’; bearing in mind that Dutt had an Indian father, it is hard to believe
that no racist overtones were implied, or at least inferred by some members of the
audience. Morrison admitted that the dissolution of the Comintern represented a
change, but not one that materially affected the fact that the Communist party was
‘unclean, and if they came into this Labour Party we would become unclean by the
contact we would thereby contract’. The Communists believed in ‘dictatorship’,
‘revolution by violence’, and ‘bloodshed’, he argued: ‘I say you cannot mix our
policy of government by persuasion, of winning elections by contesting them and
convincing the electorate, with that policy which fights elections and prepares for
violent revolution at the same time.’ If they were allowed in en bloc, they would
cause considerable ‘nuisance’, and moderate voters would be alienated. If they were
serious about wanting to help Labour, the Communists should follow the example of
the Comintern by dissolving their party and applying for individual membership of
the Labour party. Finally, Morrison appealed to Labour people to ‘go forward
building our propaganda, rekindling our Socialist faith, determined to make of our
20
country a great country in the progress of humankind, determined to make of our
Party a clean, upright and efficient fighter for the progress of our people and of
humankind’.86
The verdict, when it came, was very clear, with affiliation being defeated by
1,951,000 votes to 712,000. This was a large margin. However, it was the biggestever vote for affiliation, dwarfing those of the early 1920s and significantly larger
even than that of 1936. And major unions, such as the MFGB and the AEU, had
supported it.87 Concerns remained as to the extent to which some constituency parties
and trade unions continued to favour closer co-operation. It is noteworthy that the
CP’s national organizer, Douglas Springhall, was arrested for espionage the day after
the debate, especially given that the chief speaker against affiliation at the conference,
Morrison, was also Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security. Although a
definite causal relationship cannot be proved, it is hard to believe that the action
against such a prominent Communist at such a time was completely unrelated to the
debate within the Labour party about Communist affiliation. One hypothesis would be
that the arrest was not made before the debate because the vote was already in the bag
due to the mandating of union delegations to conference, but that it was timed,
instead, to follow straight after the vote so as to ‘prove’ what Morrison and the NEC
had been saying there. Certainly, Morrison himself, reporting on the matter to the war
cabinet, was unequivocal as to the nature of the Communist party and its unhealthy
relationship with the Soviet Union, stating that ‘[a]lthough there is no evidence that
Springhall in this matter was acting on instructions from the Communist Party, it
cannot be assumed that this is an isolated incident, or that it is not part of the policy of
the Party to engage in espionage activities in the interests of the Soviet Union’. There
was a ‘risk’ of the party ‘trading on the current sympathy for Russia to induce people
21
who would not think of betraying secrets to the enemy to betray them to the Party in
the belief that by so doing they are helping the Soviet Union’. Morrison concluded by
telling his cabinet colleagues that he had ‘given instructions to the Security Services
to continue to exercise ever closer vigilance over the Party’s activities’.88 In short,
Morrison saw the Springhall case as a concrete manifestation of the view of the
Communist party and its members that he had expressed at the Labour party
conference. He was not alone among Labour leaders and officials in drawing such
conclusions.89
*
In retrospect, June 1943 was the high-water mark of Communist potential within the
Labour party. Under Labour’s rules, a topic debated and decided upon at an annual
conference could not normally return to the conference agenda for three years. This
‘three-year rule’ meant that the issue of Communist affiliation could not be discussed
again until 1946. CP membership in December 1943 was no higher than a year earlier,
and then began to fall, to stand at 45,000 in March 1945. Second front agitation was
rendered otiose by the Normandy landings of June 1944, and popular enthusiasm for
Russia began to wane somewhat as the Red Army’s march across Europe began to
raise concerns about post-war Soviet intentions. Labour, for its part, had sharpened up
its political act considerably. Its strong and positive response to the Beveridge Report
in the winter of 1942-43 had been followed by tangible legislative achievement in the
1943 Catering Wages Act, introduced by Bevin in his role as Minister of Labour and
National Service. Increasing awareness that the more ‘reactionary’ aspects of the
Conservative party had not disappeared also helped to bind Labourites more closely
together, ready for the post-war world. Increasingly, too, there was organizational
progress, albeit halting and patchy in places.
22
Labour’s leaders continued to be wary of the Communists, nonetheless. This
was not least because, at the grassroots of the party and in some unions, the
Communists and their appeals continued to exert some leverage. Indeed, Citrine was
forced to announce the withdrawal of the Black Circular at the September 1943 TUC
for fear that the general council would be defeated if it came to a vote.90 This in itself
gave rise to some problems in those areas where the trades council also operated as
the Labour organization for the constituency, such as Stockport or parts of South
Wales.91 Labour headquarters continue to pay close attention to anything that looked
remotely subversive, particularly around by-elections, while news that a prominent
local Labourite had opened a Daily Worker bazaar in Kirkcaldy were met with alarm
in November 1943.92 A number of DLPs disciplined members who were found to
have consorted with Communists.93 The refusal of the War Office to accredit a Daily
Worker war correspondent for the anticipated second front in 1944 was a good
campaigning issue with which the Communists could expect, and did receive, some
sympathy in Labour and union audiences.94 Even that October’s Trades Union
Congress voted unanimously in favour of a motion demanding such accreditation, and
this was followed by a general council deputation to Churchill in March 1945.95
Affiliation might have been off the agenda, but pressure for some looser form
of co-operation continued to come from the CP and sections of the Labour party. The
typical slogan called for the ‘unity of progressive forces’ to meet the challenges of the
post-war era. For example, in 1944 the CP proposed a joint campaign to increase
payment of the optional political levy by trade unionists, and to pull together all
working-class organizations with a view to securing a Labour majority at the next
general election. Predictably, the NEC rejected the plan, with only Shinwell and Percy
Collick of ASLEF in favour. When the AEU proposed a conference on ‘left unity’,
23
the NEC was quick to stamp down on the idea, repeating the line that associating with
the Communists would bring no positive benefits, but would disrupt the party and put
off large numbers of potential Labour supporters. Even Laski and Shinwell now
appeared to agree that Labour should fight the next election as an independent party
without ties to other left organizations. It was agreed that ‘the only permanent aim
worthy of the Labour Party [was] to acquire political authority and representation to
government as a single Party’.96 Meanwhile, local parties were autonomously ruling
out electoral pacts, with Communists or anyone else.97 That November, when
Shinwell and Watson called for talks about possible co-operation, they were
defeated.98 Labour officials’ nightmares seemed to be coming true when the
December 1944 crisis in Greece looked briefly like destabilizing the whole party and
allowing the Communists an opening; but the crisis soon passed, helped by the fact
that, because Greece was not within the agreed Soviet sphere, it was not regarded by
Moscow as a priority for British Communist campaigning.99 Meanwhile, the
replacement that month of the ageing and ineffectual party secretary, Middleton, with
Morgan Phillips promised more efficiency but no less anti-Communism, given that
the latter was himself the product of the South Wales coalfield where LabourCommunist tensions were often at their most intense.
At the July 1945 general election, the Communists called for the election of a
‘progressive’ majority. This line was pursued with particular alacrity by Pollitt: he
saw it as following logically from the February 1945 Yalta conference, which had
been ‘a turning point in world history’ suggesting a permanent alliance of the Britain,
the USA and the USSR internationally and, at home, ‘a Government of National
unity’ which, although resting ‘on a solid Labour and progressive majority’, would
include ‘representatives of all political sections supporting [Yalta]’.100 Pollitt would
24
soon suffer considerable criticism for his continued support for this line against
increasing evidence of its obsolescence, but there was some Labour sympathy for
such views.101 The AEU and the pro-Communist Fire Brigades Union (FBU) were
particularly persistent in arguing that the rejection of affiliation in 1943 did not rule
out ‘progressive electoral unity’; however, the NEC was no less firm in rejecting their
arguments and refusing to receive their deputations.102 The result was an altercation at
the May 1945 party conference, where some delegates argued that the conference
arrangements committee had had no right to rule out discussion of ‘unity’ under the
three-year rule. Their critical motion was rejected, but only by the narrow margin of
1,314,000 votes to 1,219,000, and with many people who were normally leadership
loyalists on the wrong side of the vote.103
The 1945 election campaign saw some examples of Labour candidates
accepting the help of individual Communist campaigners.104 But there were also
numerous examples of Labour hostility towards Communist overtures.105 The CP
itself put up 25 candidates and seems to have hoped for the election of a bloc in
parliament that might have been big enough – when combined with a number of
fellow-travellers who were standing as Labour candidates, plus a few independents
like Pritt – to make an impact, and follow a broadly Communist and pro-Soviet line.
Had the election result been a small Labour majority, or a hung parliament, such a
bloc might have been able to exert considerable leverage well above its actual size.
However, the Communists fared worse, and Labour much better, than expected. With
an overall majority of 146, Attlee could afford to take a relaxed attitude towards the
handful of Labour fellow-travellers and the two Communists elected. The key
arguments for ‘progressive unity’ – that Labour was not strong enough to win a
majority by itself, and that the CP had access to significant levels of support into
25
which Labour could not itself tap – were utterly, and finally, discredited. When a
euphoric NEC passed a resolution of ‘grateful appreciation’ for the work of Morrison
as chair of the campaign committee, it was recognizing that one of his greatest
services had been to keep the Communists at bay.106 As Phillips put it, where ‘unity’
was concerned, ‘Labour’s great victory as an independent political party in the recent
General Election appears, in our view, to justify the policy consistently pursued by the
National Executive and approved by the Annual Conference’.107
*
Phillips’ reaction might have betrayed a hint of smugness, but he was not complacent,
and he and his colleagues remained vigilant against continuing pressure for ‘left
unity’. While perhaps no longer a threat to the future course of the party as a whole,
such pressure retained the potential to irritate and embarrass, particularly now that
Labour was in government. Communist gains in various parts of Britain, including
Morrison’s London, at the first post-war municipal elections in November 1945 were
not massive, but they did help sustain Labour attention.108 Relations with other left
parties were conditioned by concern about the Communists: thus it was decided not to
allow the (much-attenuated) ILP to re-affiliate, while the already-affiliated Cooperative party was tied closer than ever before to Labour; meanwhile, former
members of Common Wealth were welcomed now it was clear that it posed no
organizational threat to Labour.109 International developments were also watched
closely. In September 1945, for example, it was noted that, in Scandinavia, attempts at
fusion between communists and social democrats had broken down because ‘in all
cases ... the Communists ... want[ed] to exploit a joint appeal to the electors, but at the
same time to preserve their own structure as a party’.110 Party officials were seeing
more and more of this at first hand. Phillips was increasingly travelling to Europe and,
26
along with the party’s new international secretary, Denis Healey – a one-time
Communist who had left the CPGB after the fall of France in 1940 – needed little
persuading of the iniquities of Communist activity there.111 At the request of Bevin,
now Foreign Secretary, Labour’s assistant national agent, R. T. Windle, went to
Greece in November 1945 as chair of the British Commission on the elections to be
held in March 1946.112 The forced ‘fusion’ of the Communist and Socialist parties in
the Soviet zone of Germany in March 1946 was condemned in the strongest terms.113
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Labour was pushing hard, by the end of 1945, for the
establishment of a revived Labour and Socialist International as a bulwark against
communism.114
It was in this context that the question of Communist affiliation began to
resurface. Under the three-year rule, affiliation would become a legitimate topic for
debate at Labour’s 1946 conference. A formal letter from Pollitt duly arrived on 21
January 1946.115 It made what it could of grassroots co-operation in the 1945 election,
potential Conservative revival and fears of resurgent fascism; but it was in many ways
a tired document, repeating catch-cries that had not succeeded even in more
propitious times. In contrast, there was little that was tired about Phillips’s firm
rejection of the approach:
The events of the past twenty-five years have left the National Executive
Committee in no doubt that both the immediate programme and the long-term
aims of the Communist Party differ fundamentally from those of the Labour
Party. The gulf between us has not been narrowed to any degree since the
General Election of last year, which amply demonstrated the ineffectiveness
and the political incapacity of the Communist Party. That Election also
showed that a united Labour Movement behind the Labour Party has in fact
27
been achieved in Britain. ... It only remains therefore for the Communist Party
to take the one rational course now open to it – to admit its failure, to disband
its organization and to advise its members to apply for individual membership
of the Labour Party.116
Beyond this, Labour’s planning started in the accustomed way, with an anti-affiliation
campaign along the lines of that conducted in 1943. This began in February 1946 with
the publication of a 20-page pamphlet, and a meeting of district organizers at
Transport House.117 Evidence of the problems being caused by Communists in the
country at large was eagerly collected.118 Reports came in of union branches declaring
for affiliation at meetings where only one per cent of the membership was in
attendance: as Phillips put it, ‘I am perfectly certain that if all Unions were able to
command an attendance of their members to the branch meeting, there would be no
Communist problem’.119 A standard letter was sent in reply to those party and union
branch officials who continued to write in favour of affiliation.120 And the Moscow
card was played again, albeit to a more limited extent than in 1943 and only after
consultation with Bevin regarding possible foreign policy implications.121 There was
no room for complacency: in March 1946 it was announced that 170 leading trade
unionists had signed a petition in support of Communist affiliation, and the AEU,
among others, kept up strong pressure on the issue.122 But the spring conferences of a
number of unions, such as NUDAW, came out against affiliation.123 It was significant
that although the South Wales area of the National Union of Mineworkers gave 90 per
cent support to the Communist Arthur Horner in the ballot for the position of National
Union of Mineworkers (NUM) general secretary, it voted against Communist
affiliation to Labour.124
28
This was all very well, but it carried the promise of a triennial battle over
affiliation, which would have been tiresome enough at any time but which would be
potentially very damaging to the Labour government, especially because, under the
three-year rule, the next debate on the subject would have fallen in 1949, in the run-up
to the general election that had to be held by the summer of 1950. Therefore party
managers now moved to a more radical solution. It was a good time at which to do so:
views on the union side, especially, were shifting, helped by the diminution of
wartime enthusiasm for the USSR, and the fact that Attlee and his colleagues had
made a good start towards delivering full employment and the first instalments of the
Labour programme in areas such as nationalisation and welfare. The miners were an
interesting case in point here. The MFGB leadership, and Lawther in particular, had
been keen advocates of affiliation in both 1936 and 1943. Some of this had been down
to personal loyalties, especially to Cripps in 1936, but it had also been driven by the
desperation of the MFGB leadership to achieve a government that would nationalise
the mines and, in Lawther’s own case, by a visceral anti-fascism resulting from
personal as well as political considerations (his youngest brother, Clifford, had been
killed in 1937 fighting with the International Brigade in Spain). But the advent of a
Labour government pledged to nationalisation, and Lawther’s own increasing
misgivings about Communist tactics abroad and within what was now the NUM,
pushed him and most of his colleagues towards loyalism, to such an extent that he
would soon be ‘paranoid’ about communism.125 From being the rebel of 1943,
Lawther would form, with Arthur Deakin of the TGWU and Tom Williamson of the
National Union of General and Municipal Workers (NUGMW), a forceful union
troika backing the Labour leadership until well into the 1950s.
29
It made sense for Labour’s officials to act before any serious discontentment
with the government set in. So, in March 1946, fresh from difficult negotiations with
the Co-operative party and in the face of the traumas in the Soviet zone of Germany
described above, the NEC approved a statement for the forthcoming party conference.
This made it clear that parties that were not affiliated to Labour at the start of 1946,
and which had ‘their own Programmes, Principles and Policy for distinctive and
separate propaganda, or possessing Branches in the Constituencies, or engaged in the
promotion of Parliamentary or Local Government candidatures, or owing allegiance
to any political organization situated abroad’ would be ineligible for affiliation.126
Short of a statement that it applied to any party led by a Mr Pollitt, the intended victim
of the rule change could not have been made clearer. There is no reason to doubt
Healey’s subsequent claim that he instigated this change: certainly, his own earlier
experiences with the CPGB, and also his more recent first-hand observations of
Communists in action in continental Europe, had made him a fervent antiCommunist.127
The rule change was presented to party conference delegates as the natural
culmination of Labour’s development. Originally it had been a ‘Federation’, but the
1918 constitution and developments since then had turned it into ‘a body corporate’.
Labour had always aimed to cover the whole country ‘from the large cities to the
smallest villages’ with Labour organization, without reference to potential allies. It
had now achieved that aim, and so it no longer needed to consider bringing in other
parties – an interesting commentary on the extent to which Labour’s organizational
development since the low-point of 1942 was used to support changes that were very
much political in orientation.128 In proposing the change at conference, Morrison was
even more forthright than in 1943: the CP was ‘more of a conspiracy than a political
30
party’, as seen by its ‘somersaults’ in the period between 1939 and 1941. Pollitt’s
‘national unity’ line at the 1945 general election had been totally mistaken and, if
followed, would have denied Britain its first majority Labour government. Morrison
also stressed the extent to which Communists could disrupt trade union activity as
well as Labour efforts. Most notably, he focussed on Communist subversion and
espionage, and reminded delegates of ‘the case of Mr Springburn [sic]’, who had been
guilty of ‘working secrets from a little woman clerk’.129 Critics from the AEU and the
FBU were unable to explain how in concrete terms how a Labour party that had won a
landslide victory in 1945 could be strengthened by Communist affiliation, and the
AEU’s pro-affiliation resolution was lost by 468,000 votes to 2,678,000. The rule
change was then passed by the scarcely less convincing margin of 2,413,000 votes to
667,000.130
Labour’s anti-Communism was now more firmly established than ever, and in
the months that followed, events in Europe served merely to reinforce the view that
communism and social democracy were very different beasts.131 Efforts to revive the
Socialist International continued, with a very definite anti-Communist motivation.132
When he addressed the TUC Congress in October 1946, Attlee was able to deal
briefly with Communists as ‘those who have never understood or practiced
democratic principles’, citing their attitude in Greece and other parts of Europe in his
support; he complained of the Communists’ approach whereby ‘[e]veryone who does
not take his orders from the Communists is described as a Fascist’; and he referred
disparagingly to their ‘dupes and fellow travellers’.133 Meanwhile, Pollitt, stung by
internal and external criticisms that he had led the party too far to the right in the latter
part of the war, led his party leftwards once again, with attacks on Labour in some
ways reminiscent of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The creation of the Communist
31
Information Bureau (Cominform) in September 1947 was, for many, just a revival of
the old Comintern (significantly, though, the British Communist party was not invited
to be a member). All this provided a glittering retrospective justification for official
Labour’s hostile stance towards the Communist party in the preceding period. That
stance hardened further as the Cold War developed and as Communist criticism of the
Attlee government became more strident. When, in May 1948, the Labour party
conference saw renewed calls for Labour-Communist collaboration, the proposal was
defeated ‘overwhelmingly’, with formal condemnation being made of the ‘totalitarian
actions’ of Communists in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere.134 Two months earlier,
Attlee had announced that, due to fears over split loyalties and potential subversion,
Communists would no longer be eligible for employment in areas of the civil service
responsible for national security, and when he was taunted on the question in
parliament by a Communist MP responded: ‘I am well aware that we have to deal
very carefully with the Communist Party. I have not forgotten 1939, 1940 and
1941.’135 The North Atlantic Treaty was signed the following year. Increasingly, as
Eley has argued, in Britain (as in the rest of northern and western Europe), ‘antiCommunism became subsumed in the economics of reconstruction’.136
*
There are four main conclusions to be drawn from all this. The first is that the
Communists were even more effectively and permanently shut out from Labour
politics after the war than they had been before it: if the door had been closed in 1939,
by the end of 1946 it was locked and bolted. Far-left infiltration would remain a
potential, and sometimes an actual, problem for Labour; and the Communist party’s
final descent into political irrelevance was not immediate, for it retained limited
significance, at least in British industrial politics, until the 1970s. But the historic
32
threat provided by the Communist party to the Labour party had effectively been
overcome. The war had not given the CP a compelling narrative such as that afforded
by the Resistance to the French Communist party – the latter could point to real
martyrs, whereas the British had to make do with retelling the tale of the ban on the
Daily Worker.137 This does not means that the Communist party was of no
significance: there had always been the nagging fear that, as one local Labour party
official put it in 1941, the Communists would ‘steal our thunder’,138 and it played a
part in stimulating Labour to keep its organization active, and in ensuring that Labour
leaders did not veer too far to the right for fear of losing the left to Communist
influence. But beyond that, it did not go. Significantly, both its MPs lost their seats at
the 1950 election.
Secondly, experience of wartime meant that Cold War typologies fitted
easily into the mindsets of many Labourites, and most Labour leaders. In particular,
the war years sharpened up an existing vocabulary of Communist infiltration,
subversion, and betrayal;139 of ‘splitting tactics’140 and ‘secret members’;141 and of
serving ‘the requirements of Russian needs’ whereas Labour’s ‘primary duty [wa]s to
help Britain’.142 So when, for example, Hugh Gaitskell used smear tactics against the
Labour left in the early 1950s, most notoriously in his 1952 Stalybridge speech, he
was not just drawing on American McCarthyism, but on what had, by then, become a
very traditional British Labour way of speaking about Communists and their
sympathisers, and the far left more generally. Similar elements would be seen in
Harold Wilson’s condemnation of the seamen’s strike of 1966 as being the work of ‘a
tightly knit group of politically motivated men’,143 and later still in official Labour
denunciations of the entryist Militant Tendency in the 1970s and 1980s.
33
Thirdly, the people who led and ran the party after the war were, by and large,
veteran anti-Communists. Politicians like Bevin and Morrison needed no persuading
of the iniquities of communism as a system of government, or of the defects of its
supporters as potential allies. They had a view, formed after long experience, of
Communists as essentially violent in thought and nature, dishonest, disruptive, and
undemocratic. It was not at all difficult for them to fit the events of post-1945 eastern
Europe into a model of Communist mendacity that was already well formed and
increasingly finely honed. That their wartime experiences of the British Communists’
own manifestations of those undesirable characteristics remained fresh made them all
the more prepared to accept the logic of the Cold War and to move towards the
Atlantic Alliance in 1949. It was not least due to his long record of anti-communism
that it was Morrison whom Attlee appointed to succeed Bevin as Foreign Secretary in
1951 when the latter’s health failed.144 And their successors, too, were practiced antiCommunists: Healey was to serve as Defence Secretary throughout Harold Wilson’s
government of 1964-70, while George Brown, the exasperated anti-Crippsite of the
1939 party conference, was to serve Wilson for three years as Foreign Secretary.
Wartime experience also meant that a whole generation of Labour organizers
and officials were practised anti-Communists. This applied not just to those officials
like Middleton (secretary) or Shepherd (national agent) who retired during or shortly
after the war, but also to the next generation: men and women like Middleton’s
successors as general secretary to 1968, Morgan Philips and Len Williams, and
Shepherd’s successors as national agent to 1969, Windle, Williams, and Sara Barker.
It was, indeed, significant that it was the liberalization that followed the passing of
this wartime generation of party organizers that allowed the Militant’s entryism to
make some headway in the 1970s and early 1980s. Phillips, Windle, Barker and their
34
ilk would never have been taken in by arguments that Militant was no more than a
newspaper. It took the relearning of some of those old ‘lessons’ about the far left –
which began, ironically, in the summer of 1981 as Healey beat off the leftist challenge
of Tony Benn to retain the deputy leadership of the party – for the party, first under
Foot and Kinnock, and later under Blair, to reimpose internal discipline.
Finally, it must be emphasised that, if Labour had seriously entertained the
prospect of Communist affiliation during the Second World War, it could not easily
have maintained its moral or political credibility as a party of government as the Cold
War developed. That it maintained its integrity and shook off the siren calls for
‘progressive unity’ helped the party to establish itself on more or less equal terms with
the Conservatives for a generation after 1945. Labour’s attitude towards the
Communists during and immediately after the Second World War was, therefore,
crucial to the shape of Cold War politics, both in Britain and in the wider world.
35
1
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000
(Oxford, 2002), 299.
2
Compare the rather self-consciously ‘open-minded’ views expressed by many of the
contributors to Margaret Cole (ed.), Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia (London, 1933),
with the rather less forgiving Walter Citrine, I Search for Truth in Russia (London,
1936).
3
C. R. Attlee, The Labour Party in Perspective (London, 1937), 17-20, 180, 194; E.
F. M. Durbin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism: An Essay on Social Policy
(London, 1940), 248, 284.
4
Durbin, Politics of Democratic Socialism, 101; and see e.g. J. R. MacDonald,
Socialism: Critical and Constructive (London, 1921) and Philip Snowden, The Faith
of a Democrat (London, 1928).
5
David Blaazer, The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists,
Liberals, and the Quest for Unity, 1884-1939 (Cambridge, 1992), esp. 23-4, 173-97.
6
See especially Kevin Morgan, Bolshevism and the British Left, volume I: Labour
Legends and Russian Gold (London, 2006), esp. 9-22.
7
David Howell, MacDonald’s Party: Labour Identities and Crisis, 1922-1931
(Oxford, 2002), esp. 380-403.
8
Nina Fishman, The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1933-45
(Aldershot, 1995), 4; idem., Arthur Horner: A Political Biography (London, 2010),
798-9.
9
Gidon Cohen, The Failure of a Dream: The Independent Labour Party from
Disaffiliation to World War II (London, 2007).
10
Cliff Prothero, Recount (Ormskirk, 1982), 40.
36
11
Douglas Hyde, I Believed: The Autobiography of a Former British Communist
(London, 1950; Reprint Society edition, 1952), 64-6. In one South Wales
constituency, the whole Labour League of Youth branch disbanded and reconstituted
itself as a branch of the Young Communist League: see Pontypridd trades council and
Labour party papers, trades council and Labour party [TCLP] meeting, 31 July 1939,
Pontypridd Labour Party Records, 1897-1951 (microfilm, East Ardsley, n.d.).
12
Labour Party Annual Conference Report (hereafter LPACR), 1939 (London, 1939),
235.
13
Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC), Manchester [hereafter
LHASC], Communist party papers, CP/CENT/CONG/04/12, ‘Draft constitution of
the Communist Party of Great Britain’, n.d. [c. August 1939].
14
Monty Johnstone, ‘Introduction’, in About Turn: The British Communist Party and
the Second World War, ed. Francis King and George Matthews (London, 1990), 1349.
15
See e.g. Victor Gollancz (ed.), The Betrayal of the Left: An Examination and
Refutation of Communist Policy from October 1939 to January 1941, with
Suggestions for an Alternative (London, 1941); Michael Newman, John Strachey
(Manchester, 1989), 77-83; Noel Thompson, John Strachey: An Intellectual
Biography (Manchester, 1989), 168-84.
16
Walter Citrine, My Finnish Diary (Harmondsworth, 1940), 5, 192.
17
Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs 1931-1945 (London, 1957), 293; The
Political Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1918-40, 1945-60, ed. Ben Pimlott (London, 1986),
315.
18
Bodleian Library, Oxford [hereafter Bod. Lib.], Attlee papers, 9, National council
of Labour circular, ‘Help Finland’s Fight for Freedom!’, February 1940.
37
19
Labour party, Stalin’s Men, About Turn (London, 1940), 13, 24.
20
Ibid., 24.
21
D. N. Pritt, Light on Moscow: Soviet Policy Analysed (Harmondsworth, 1939), and
Light on Moscow: Soviet Policy Analysed, with a New Chapter on Finland
(Harmondsworth, 1940); idem., Must the War Spread? (Harmondsworth, 1940); for
his earlier ‘form’, see his pamphlet The Moscow Trial was Fair (London, 1936). For a
less unsympathetic view of Pritt, see West Sussex Record Office, Chichester,
LA/2MS 1/2/2, East Grinstead divisional Labour party [DLP], executive committee
27 March 1940.
22
Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years: Memoirs 1931-1945 (London, 1957), 293.
23
See e.g. Surrey History Centre, Woking [hereafter SHC], 2141/1, Epsom DLP,
executive committee 26 January 1940; Malcolm MacEwen, The Greening of a Red
(London, 1991), 68.
24
See e.g. Sheffield Archives, LP (B) 7, Sheffield Brightside DLP, executive
committee 21 October 1939.
25
British Library of Political and Economic Science, London [hereafter BLPES],
North Lambeth Labour party papers 1/3, North Lambeth DLP, meeting of party
members 1 September 1939.
26
See e.g. Lancashire Record Office, Preston [hereafter LRO], DDX 2100/3/1,
Blackpool DLP, executive committee 23 September 1939; Birmingham Central
Library [hereafter BCL], unclassified, Birmingham Deritend DLP, management
committee 15 October 1939; Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies [hereafter
WALS], D/LAB/1/8, Wolverhampton West DLP, party meeting 7 March 1940;
Nottinghamshire Record Office, Nottingham [hereafter Notts RO], DD/PP/6/4,
Broxtowe DLP, council meeting 11 November 1939.
38
27
National Library of Wales [hereafter NLW], Aberystwyth, Brecon and Radnor
Labour party papers 4, Brecon and Radnor DLP, general meeting 23 September 1939.
28
BLPES, North Lambeth Labour party papers 1/3, North Lambeth DLP, meeting of
party members 15 December 1939.
29
WALS, Wolverhampton West DLP, meeting 7 March 1940, D/LAB/1/8.
30
David Howell, Respectable Radicals: Studies in the Politics of Railway Trade
Unionism (Aldershot, 1999), 341.
31
Cambridgeshire Record Office [hereafter CRO], Cambridgeshire Labour party
papers, 416/0.20, Cambridgeshire trades council and DLP, annual report for 1939-40,
n.d. [1940].
32
Norfolk Record Office [hereafter NRO], Acc. 2001/145/1, South West Norfolk
DLP, annual meeting 6 April 1940.
33
Derby Local Studies Library [hereafter DLSL], DL 116/1/1, Derby DLP, special
executive committee 22 September 1939, executive committee 12 January, 16
February 1940.
34
Epsom DLP general committee 20 October 1939, 2141/1, Surrey History Centre,
Woking; MacEwen, Greening of a Red, 68.
35
Huddersfield DLP, general committee 20 September 1939, executive committee 28
November 1939, annual general meeting 2 February 1941, Huddersfield Labour Party
Records, c. 1890-1951 (microfilm, East Ardsley, n.d.)
36
NLW, LP Wales records 2, South Wales regional council of Labour executive
committee 6 February 1940.
37
Southwark archives, PC 324, Charlie Searson, election address for Southwark by-
election, 10 February 1940; LHASC, Labour party national executive committee
[LPNEC] papers, J. S. Middleton and G.R. Shepherd circular, ‘Disloyal attacks on the
39
party’, 25 January 1940; and see e.g. BLPES, Lambeth North DLP general committee
19 January, 9 February 1940.
38
Monty Johnstone, ‘The CPGB, the Comintern and the war, 1939-41: filling in the
blank spots’, Science and Society, 61 (1997), 27-45; Tower Hamlets Archive Office,
London, TH/8488/4, Communist Party of Great Britain leaflet, ‘The People Must
Act’, 21 June 1940.
39
See e.g. TUCCR, 1940, 271-83.
40
Howell, Respectable Radicals, 342.
41
NLW, Labour party Wales records 2, South Wales regional council of Labour
executive committee 6 February, 12 March 1940.
42
LHASC, LPNEC papers, Draft memorandum, ‘Subversive Movements’, July 1940.
43
LHASC, national council of Labour papers, circular from Sir Walter Citrine and J.
S. Middleton to secretaries of affiliated organizations, October 1940; see also TUC
Congress Report, 1940, 215.
44
LHASC, LPNEC papers, Labour party NEC organization sub-committee 19
February 1941; Churchill Archives Centre [hereafter CAC], Cambridge, Noel-Baker
papers, NBKR 1/107, Harry Russell to Philip Noel-Baker, 18 March 1941; Jill
Liddington, Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel: Selina Cooper (1864-1946)
(London, 1984), 433-5.
45
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC 20-21 January 1941; Lambeth Archives, Clapham
Labour party papers, IV/156/2/2, Clapham DLP, general management committee 30
March 1941.
46
TUCCR, 1940, 79-85.
47
See e.g. CRO, Cambridge Labour party papers, 634/08, Cambridge trades council
and DLP, monthly meeting 12 March 1941.
40
48
NRO, Norwich Labour party papers, SO 198/1/3, Norwich DLP executive
committee 8 July 1941.
49
The National Archives: Public Record Office, Kew [hereafter TNA:PRO], war
cabinet papers, CAB/65/18/41, war cabinet conclusions 23 June 1941.
50
MacEwen, Greening of a Red, 82; LHASC, LPNEC papers, executive committee of
the NEC, 16 July 1941.
51
LHASC, LPNEC papers, circular, ‘The British Labour Movement, the War and the
Communist Party’, 31 July 1941; TUCCR, 1941, 246.
52
Modern Records Centre [hereafter MRC], MSS 11/1/4, University of Warwick
Coventry DLP, executive committee 26 July 1941.
53
P. M. H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and
the Soviet Union, 1941-1945 (London, 1990), passim.
54
Andrew Thorpe, Parties at War: Political Organization in Second World War
Britain (Oxford, 2009), 125-44.
55
William Rust, Lift the Ban on the Daily Worker (London, n.d. [1942]); idem., Daily
Worker Reborn (London, n.d. [1942]).
56
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC elections sub-committee 15 October 1941; CAC,
Noel-Baker papers, NBKR 1/107, G. R. Shepherd to Harry Russell, 8 Apr. 1942.
57
TUCCR, 1942, 133.
58
CAC, Noel-Baker papers, NBKR 1/107,Noel-Baker to Russell 27 October 1941.
59
Parliamentary Archives, London, Stansgate papers, ST/104/3, Forrester Lord to
William Wedgwood Benn, 28 October 1941.
60
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC organization sub-committee 14 October 1941;
NLW, Labour party Wales records 3, South Wales regional council of Labour
executive committee 9 September 1941.
41
61
LPACR, 1942, 157-60.
62
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC organization sub-committee 30 June 1942.
63
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC organization sub-committee 30 June 1942; London
Metropolitan Archives, London Labour party papers, Acc. 2417/A/26, Conference of
London Labour parties, 12 September 1942.
64
Ibid., comments of Mr Banfield (Fulham).
65
LHASC, LPNEC papers, Labour party circular, ‘The Communist Party and
Subversive Movements: Statement by the National Executive Committee’, August
1942.
66
Bod. Lib., MS Attlee dep 8, 62, Syd Hawkins to Attlee, 26 April 1943.
67
TUCCR, 1942, 153-60, 302-5.
68
LHASC, LPNEC papers, joint meeting of NEC’s organization and international
sub-committees, 26 January 1943.
69
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC 27 January 1943.
70
Bod. Lib., Attlee dep 7, 198, George Ridley to G. R. Shepherd, 10 March 1943.
71
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC 24 February 1943.
72
Labour party, The Communist Party and the War: A Record of Hypocrisy and
Treachery to the Workers of Europe (London, 1943); and see e.g. DLSL, DL 116/1/1,
Derby DLP, executive committee 10 April 1943.
73
LPACR 1943, 9-18.
74
Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International
Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London, 1996), 204-11; Natalia Lebedeva and
Mikhail Narinsky, ‘Dissolution of the Comintern in 1943’, in Mikhail Narinsky and
Jurgen Rojahn (eds), Centre and Periphery: The History of the Comintern in the Light
of New Documents (Amsterdam, 1996), 153-62.
42
75
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC 28 May 1943; CAC, Noel-Baker papers, NBKR
1/107, Russell to Noel-Baker 25 May 1943; NRO, Norwich Labour party papers, SO
198/1/3, Norwich DLP executive committee 8 June 1943.
76
Lewisham Local Studies and Archives Service, A89/100/10, West Lewisham DLP,
general committee 16 February 1943. For straight rejections, see e.g. Denbighshire
Record Office, Ruthin, DD/DM/344/5, Wrexham TCBLP, council meeting 14 April
1943; Stockport Archives Service, Stockport [hereafter SAS] TCLP, B/MM/2/19A,
meeting 27 May 1943.
77
LRO, DDX 2100/3/2, Blackpool DLP, annual meeting 28 February 1943, general
committee 30 May 1943.
78
See e.g. Penistone DLP, executive committee 16 January 1943, Penistone Labour
Party Records, 1908-1951 (microfilm, East Ardsley, n.d.); Sheffield University
Library, MS 146/2, Batley and Morley DLP, annual meeting 31 January 1943; Notts
RO, DD/PP/6/4, Broxtowe DLP, council meeting 20 February 1943; NRO, SO
198/1/3, Norwich DLP, special executive committee 22 April 1943.
79
BLPES, North Lambeth Labour party papers 1/3, North Lambeth DLP, executive
committee 11 February 1943.
80
See e.g. Oxfordshire Record Office, O4/1/A/1, Henley DLP, general committee 2
May 1943.
81
LPACR, 1943, 117.
82
Ibid., 159-61.
83
Ibid., 162-5.
84
Ibid., 161-2.
85
Ibid., 165.
86
Ibid., 165-8.
43
87
For the AEU, see J. B. Jefferys, The Story of the Engineers, 1800-1945 (London,
1945), 252.
88
TNA:PRO, war cabinet papers, W.P. (43) 359, ‘Conviction of D. F. Springhall of
espionage: memorandum by the Home Secretary’, 3 August 1943. Morrison had been
assiduous in keeping the CP in the minds of his colleagues in the war cabinet: see e.g.
ibid., CAB/66/23/22, TNA ‘Communist party: memorandum by the Home Secretary’,
3 April 1942.
89
Notts RO, DD/PP/14/7/63, Labour party East Midlands regional organiser,
duplicated cutting from Time and Tide, 7 August 1943; ibid., DD/PP/14/8/4, Mary
Sutherland (Labour party chief woman officer) to Constance Kay (Labour party East
Midlands women’s organiser), 4 November 1943, re Jan Valtin [pseud. Richard
Krebs], Out of the Night (New York, 1940).
90
TUCCR, 1943, 337-9.
91
SAS, B/MM/2/19A, Stockport TCLP, executive committee 23 December 1943;
NLW, Labour party Wales records 4, South Wales regional council of Labour,
executive committee 13 December 1943.
92
Memorandum, ‘Kirkcaldy by-election: an inquiry respecting the alleged
irregularities in the nomination of a candidate’, n.d. [submitted to organization subcommittee 10 November 1943].
93
See e.g. South Shields DLP, party meeting 5 October 1943, South Shields Labour
Party Records, 1912-1951 (microfilm, East Ardsley, n.d.).
94
Notts RO, DD/PP/6/4, Broxtowe DLP, council meeting 26 February 1944; BCL,
unclassified, Birmingham BLP, meeting 12 April 1944.
95
TUCCR, 1944, 338; TUCCR, 1945, 216-17.
44
96
LHASC, LPNEC papers, joint meeting of NEC elections and organization sub-
committees, 5 July 1944, and ‘Memorandum drafted on the instructions of the
elections and organization sub-committees to facilitate discussion on the letter of the
Amalgamated Engineering Union advocating ‘left unity’ at a joint meeting on
Wednesday, July 5th, 1944’.
97
BCL, unclassified, Birmingham borough Labour party annual meeting 8 March
1944; DLSL, DL 116/1/1, Derby DLP, executive committee 11 May 1945.
98
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC 8 November 1944.
99
Andrew Thorpe, ‘“In a rather emotional state”? The Labour party and British
intervention in Greece, 1944-5’, English Historical Review, 121, 493 (2006), 10751105.
100
Harry Pollitt, The Crimea Conference: Safeguard of the Future (London, 1945), 1,
15.
101
Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester, 1993), 143-51; Neil Redfern, ‘Winning
the peace: British Communists, the Soviet Union and the general election of 1945’,
Contemporary British History, 16, 1 (2002), 29-50, at 42.
102
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/PEU/8-11, B. Gardner (AEU)
to Morgan Phillips, 8 March, 11 April 1945, Phillips to Gardner, 9 March, 26 April
1945; GS/PEU/1-2, 4-6, ibid., H. S. Richardson (FBU) to Phillips, 26 March, 18 April
1945, Phillips to Richardson 29 March, 25 April 1945; LPNEC papers, NEC minutes
25 April 1945, ibid. For the AEU, see Richard Croucher, Engineers at War, 19391945 (London, 1982), passim; for the FBU, see V. Bailey, Forged in Fire: The
History of the Fire Brigades Union (London, 1992), 64-5.
45
103
LPACR 1945, 81-2; see also LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers,
GS/PEU/29, J. Hallsworth (NUDAW) to Phillips, 14 May 1945; ibid., GS/PEU/27,
Mrs I. S. Rodmell (Coventry DLP) to Phillips, 15 May 1945.
104
Notts RO, DD/PP/14/7/5, J. T. Baxter, memoranda, ‘Mansfield’, 28 April and 4
June 1945; MRC, MSS 133/1/1/4, Warwick and Leamington DLP general committee
2 June 1945.
105
See e.g. BLPES, North Lambeth Labour party papers 1/3, North Lambeth DLP
management committee 16 February 1945; CRO, Cambridge Labour party papers,
634/09, Cambridge TCDLP executive committee 30 April 1945.
106
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC minutes, 31 July 1945.
107
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/PEU/15, Phillips to W.
Stephens (ETU), 28 September 1945.
108
The Times, 3 November 1945.
109
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC policy committee 11 May 1945, NEC minutes 20
August 1945; minutes of meeting between representatives of the Labour party and the
Co-operative party, 11 September 1945; NEC minutes, 26 September 1945.
110
LHASC, LPNEC papers, international sub-committee minutes, 18 September
1945.
111
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/PROS/32, Labour party
secretary’s department to Percy Allott, 30 October 1945; Denis Healey, The Time of
My Life (London, 1989), 74-6, 82-96; LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers,
GS/COM/23, K. Houdenberg (SDAP, Amsterdam) to Phillips, 28 January 1946;
GS/COM/25, Sven Andersson (Swedish Social Democratic party) to Phillips, 1
February 1946.
112
LHASC, LPNEC papers, NEC minutes, 28 November 1945.
46
113
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/COM/77, Draft leaflet,
‘Affiliation: A Lesson from Germany’, n.d. [March 1946].
114
LHASC, LPNEC papers, international sub-committee minutes, 15 January 1946.
115
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/COM/10, Pollitt to Phillips, 21
January 1946.
116
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/COM/64, Phillips to Pollitt, 23
January 1945; see also GS/COM/10, Phillips to Signalisa Woodward, 11 December
1945.
117
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/COM/82, Arthur Bax, ‘Why
not Trust the Communists? By a Labour Man’, n.d. [early 1946]; GS/COM/35, G. R.
Shepherd (national agent) to district and woman organisers, 1 March 1946.
118
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/COM/17, R. Rice (Chiswick)
Philips, 27 January 1946; GS/COM/37, R. G. Howard (AEU Wembley no. 4 branch)
to Philips, 6 March 1946.
119
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/COM/47, W. McCormack
(Lochore (Fife) branch, NUM) to Philips, 15 March 1946; GS/COM/61, Philips to H.
Riding (Typographical Association), 25 March 1946.
120
See e.g. LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/COM/44, Philips to
H. Murfett (National Union of Enginemen, Firemen etc., Willesden branch), 12
March 1946.
121
LHASC, Labour party general secretary papers, GS/COM/59, Philips to Bevin, 19
March 1946.
122
The Times, 23 March 1946.
123
Ibid., 23 April, 10 May 1946.
124
Ibid., 21 May 1946. The NUM had replaced the MFGB in 1945.
47
125
John Saville, ‘Lawther, Sir William (Will) (1889-1976), miners’ leader’, in J. M.
Bellamy and J. Saville (eds.), Dictionary of Labour Biography,Volume VII (London,
1984), 140-4, at 143.
126
Ibid.
127
Healey, Time of My Life, 75.
128
LPACR, 1946, 14.
129
Ibid., 169-72.
130
Ibid., 172-4.
131
See e.g. Healey’s report on Hungary, LHASC, LPNEC papers, international sub-
committee, 18 February 1947; also Denis Healey, Cards on the Table (London, 1947).
132
LHASC, LPNEC papers, International Socialist Conference, Bournemouth, 8-10
October 1946.
133
TUCCR, 1946, 416.
134
LPACR, 1948, 205-8.
135
House of Commons Debates, 5 series, vol. 448, col. 1705, Attlee, 15 March 1948;
TNA:PRO, cabinet papers, CAB/128/12/25 (48), cabinet conclusions 25 March 1948.
136
Eley, Forging Democracy, 301-2.
137
See e.g. William Rust, The Story of the Daily Worker (London, 1949), 83-96.
138
CAC, Noel-Baker papers, NBKR 1/107, Russell to Noel-Baker 16 October 1941.
139
LHASC, LPNEC papers, Draft memorandum, ‘Subversive Movements’, July
1940.
140
BLPES, North Lambeth Labour party papers 1/3, North Lambeth DLP general
council 15 March 1940.
141
CAC, Noel-Baker papers, NBKR 1/101, Noel-Baker to Russell, 19 Apr. 1940.
48
142
LHASC, LPNEC papers, Memorandum, ‘Condition of the party’, n.d. [to NEC 25
March 1942].
143
The Times, 29 June 1966.
144
Bernard Donoughue and G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician
(London, 1973), 466-8.