The Party and Into “The Party”: British Wartime Communism and the 1945 Election’

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‘Away from the party and into “the party”: British wartime communism and the 1945 election’

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Citation for published version (APA): Morgan, K. (2010). ‘Away from the party and into “the party”: British wartime communism and the 1945 election’. Socialist History, 37, 80-102.

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Away from party and into ‘the party’: communism in Britain and the election of

1945

For decades Labour’s electoral breakthrough in 1945 appeared as one of the keys to its history, evoked as a sort of golden age by both politician and academic.1 In the 1990s, however, the appearance of new Labour had its historiographical counterpart in the emergence of an avowedly revisionist approach to the ‘Attlee years’, seen as already presaging the constraints of the radical centre.2 Stressing the gulf between an activist minority and the ‘confusion, apathy and cynicism about the political system’ of the majority of British people, the new account depicted Attlee’s parliamentary landslide, not as a mandate for radical social change, but as a modest rejection of Conservatism in which Labour fell short of an absolute popular majority.3 Though this latter point had never been in doubt,4 distinctive claims were also advanced as to the merely negative or tactical motivations of many of Labour’s own electors. Not popular partisanship but the glum predicament of Hobson’s choice was the hallmark of the election.5

Constructions of revisionism and counter-revisionism tend to reduce complex or volatile issues to somewhat abstract and schematic dichotomies.6 Notably in this respect, the ‘new’ political history, like much of the ‘old’ political science, urged a separation between ‘ordinary’ people and political activists that appeared as a virtual historical constant and counterposed constructs of ‘politics’ and ‘people’ that seemed beyond the variables of time and place.7 In unguarded moments, ideas of the

‘ordinary’ and even the ‘normal’ functioned in a circular definition as a sort of antonym of (implicitly abnormal) activism or political engagement, as in the ‘self- contained’ and even stultifying exclusions of the ‘normal’ working-class world centred on family, home and recreation.8

A number of complicating factors stand out. One was that of how ‘ordinary’, instrumental concerns might be politically articulated and legitimised as public goods, and how these articulations in turn helped shape ‘ordinary’ expectations and ambitions. Another was that of the slippages constantly occurring between ordinariness and activism, whether over a lifetime or the working week, on whose varying incidence the intrinsically relative notion of radicalisation largely depends.

This in turn suggests the need for precision in distinguishing between the ordinariness or otherwise of particular historical moments. Ross McKibbin, for example, has characterised the war years as one of ‘a probably unprecedented politicization of the population’, expressed less in the conversion to new political discourses than the wider social legitimacy of established ones.9 Whether this was so matters for more than just the 1940s. Political scientists have latterly used the notion of path dependency to recognise the lasting significance of watershed moments when a basic choice of paths is made that helps constrain or determine future choices.10 To some extent, the whole idea of a post-war consensus or social-democratic ‘settlement’ rests implicitly on such a notion. Appropriate criteria for gauging the apathies and commitments of the 1940s thus require particularly careful specification

This article addresses these issues from the activists’ end of the telescope, namely the activists who made up the British communist party (CPGB). The CPGB, as we shall see, experienced its own frustrations that are suggestive of the limits to the scope and duration of wartime progressivism.11 Nevertheless, the years following

Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 also saw peaks of communist membership

2 and influence that do provide comparative indices of radicalisation coinciding with what is widely regarded as a political ‘sea change’ between 1940 and 1943.12 By the end of the war, Andrew Thorpe has recently argued, the older forms of party seemed as entrenched as ever.13 It nevertheless offers about the peculiar limitations of the

Labour Party when the vitality of political outsiders contrasted markedly with the plumetting membership and levels of activity of the established parties.

The present article explores both the movement away from party in the middle years of the war, and the returning prospect of peacetime politics culminating in the

1945 election. Though it is primarily the story of an activist minority, the communists’ electoral performance in 1945 may also shed light on the views of Labour’s wider public. With polling techniques in their infancy and Mass-Observation providing an often impressionistic source, the voting behaviour of some hundred thousand communist electors across a national spread of constituencies provides us with a signal body of evidence. In a longer perspective, the election marked the consolidation of the remade two-party system that had been emerging between the wars, and polling evidence indicates that potential electoral support for the CPGB was already tailing off. Even so, the party achieved what was arguably the strongest UK-wide fourth- party showing of the twentieth century. The argument here is that this was not primarily a ‘deviant’ phenomenon, to be explained in its own peculiar terms, but the symptom of a broader shift of opinion by which a significant segment of Labour’s electorate was prepared, when the opportunity allowed, to support an unelectable and imperfectly differentiated party to Labour’s left.

The specificity of the moment needs to be recognised. The radical mood was already dissipating; the communists, unlike Labour, did not consolidate their more modest electoral advances; and the two-party contours of the Butskell era soon

3 prevailed, with Conservatism in the 1950s once more in the ascendant. On the other hand, that may itself be a token of Harold Laski’s good sense when he warned in 1943 of the ‘high mood’ which the left had to grasp before it gave way to post-war fatigue and inertia.14 Perhaps it is precisely on how well they seize those moments, and shape legislative and ideological frameworks for years or decades to come, that radical political projects, whether of left or right, have finally to be judged.

Into the party 1941-3

Following the Soviets’ entry into the war and the communists’ adoption of a pro-war stance, the CPGB’s membership leapt in barely a year from under 20,000 to an all- time high of around 55,000. By 1942 literature sales and income had risen tenfold, and when a national fund was set at eight times the figure for 1940 it was oversubscribed.15 Neither membership nor financial contributions necessarily represented a high degree of politicisation. Thousands were said to have joined the

CPGB on the strength of immediate policies, and as pamphlets were hawked

Salvation Army-style round pubs Harry Pollitt himself warned that ‘it was not selling literature if someone gave you 2d to get rid of you’.16 Already twice before, during the

1926 miners’ lockout and 1931 unemployed agitations, the CPGB had recorded impressive but short-lived membership increases which did not survive the passing of the temporary crisis. If the relapse on this occasion was less dramatic, there was still a considerable membership turnover, and the overall figure fell back to around 45,000 by the end of the war. Even so, such a figure has no parallel in the history of the extra-

Labour left, and was achieved in wartime conditions that seriously disrupted both

Labour and Conservative party organisation. Though claims have repeatedly been

4 made of a ‘substantial’ increase in the Labour Party’s membership, demonstrating renewed ‘impetus’ and ‘vitality’, these actually refer to its affiliated membership and do not account for either the slump in individual adhesions or the decline even in the proportion of eligible trade unionists affiliating to the party.17 Largely unaffected by the electoral truce, the CPGB’s active membership briefly bore comparison with the

Labour Party’s and even its registered membership reached a quarter of the corresponding figure. Potentially this might provide an important campaigning force in an election in which organisation was to be said to count for a good deal.

In the meantime, a flourishing communist party with its unorthodox mores and priorities epitomised the drifting away from mainstream party politics. Signs of volatility included a series of independent by-election upsets, the popular enthusiasm for Russia, the emergence of Richard Acland’s Common Wealth organisation and the return to favour of the mercurial Stafford Cripps, who on at least one occasion dismayed more orthodox colleagues by speaking at a communist-promoted Second

Front meeting.18 This ‘movement away from party’ has been well captured by Steven

Fielding, in an account which rightly attends to the 5,000 or so active members of

Common Wealth.19 Britain’s 40,000 new communist recruits had at least as great a significance. In May 1942, George Orwell wrote that current political discontents represented a demand, not so much for socialism, as for ‘more social equality, a complete clean-out of the political leadership, an aggressive war strategy and a tighter alliance with the USSR’.20 Nothing could have better described the current appeals of

British communism.

Both the policies and the augmented membership of the CPGB thus had a somewhat contingent character. Dramatic policy innovations included support for the cross-party coalition, opposition to strikes, campaigning for Tory by-election

5 candidates and identification with the conventional myths and symbols of nationhood.

Even so, from one aspect these were but the most extreme of the short-term tactical shifts for which the communists were by this time notorious. Campaigns were directed exclusively to immediate ends, like the opening of a Second Front and the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker, and thoughts as to the longer term were explicitly discountenanced as a diversion from the pursuit of victory. ‘Not elaborate blue prints for post-war construction, but a fighting policy to win the war this year’,

Pollitt insisted in May 1942; while according to D.N. Pritt, like Cripps an expelled

Labour MP, but one who functioned as a figurehead for communist causes, the New

Jerusalemers and their ‘dreamy planning of post-war heavens’ were a potentially reactionary distraction from immediate ends.21

Though they eschewed strategic goals, James Hinton has shown that these campaigns continued to be informed by anti-capitalist or anti-management rhetoric, and a sense that concessions made were for the war’s duration only.22 Consequently,

Labour’s emerging post-war programmes were dismissed not only as a diversion but as inadequate to the anticipated possibilities for post-war socialist advance.

Communst publicist J.R. Campbell urged the labour movement to reject ‘all specious propositions that will prevent it attacking the main strongholds of capitalism once the menace of Fascism is removed’.23 Pollitt himself insisted privately that communists should not ‘trample’ on the wartime swing to the left by continuing to advocate the

‘same kind of national unity’ as presently existed.24 Doubtless communists squirmed with embarrassment as they feted Tories or concluded meetings with God Save the

King, and this contributed to a mild boost in recruitment to the anti-war Independent

Labour Party (ILP).25 Nevertheless, the lack of too much overt dissension suggests that most communists found at least a degree of continuity in the party’s tones of

6 crisis and expediency.26 As late as 1944, isolated cases can even be found arguing that the communists were ‘using’ Churchill for their own immediate objectives, ‘and at the end of the war would revert to the class struggle’.27

Nothing illustrated these continuities better than the concerns for the Soviet war effort which touched one of the deepest chords of the communists’ identity while luring them into novel and incongruous entanglements. ‘The highest stage the class war has ever reached’, the communist MP William Gallacher described the Russian front, and in the month after its reappearance in September 1942 the Daily Worker devoted its main or only editorial to the Soviet war effort in twenty-one of its twenty- five issues. The longstanding front organisation the Russia Today Society (RTS) enjoyed a new lease of life. By March 1942 it had some 150 groups, three-quarters of them newly formed, and by the following year there were a further hundred, with pamphlets selling as many as 200,000 copies.28 Such activities had never before attracted such wide support and past devotees remarked on the ‘sudden rise into respectability’ of Stalinist panegyrics.29 In Bristol, for example, an Aid for Russia

Council had the support of local MPs, the churches and voluntary and labour movement organisations, as well as businesses, the chamber of commerce and the city’s Ministry of Information office. Included in the city’s ‘Anglo-Russian Week’ were a women’s meeting, a children’s dancing display based on Russian fairy tales, a university symposium on Soviet science, a festival of Russian drama, poster exhibitions, displays in local co-operative stores and the screening of Russian films to local children.30 Despite the breadth of support, careful observers noted that working people especially were inclined to pro-Soviet attitudes. From Lancashire, the journalist J.L. Hodson reported how they first thought of the Russians as ‘our great

Ally’, while the well-to-do thought of the Americans.31 According to the same

7 region’s government information officer, ‘derogatory comparisons’ with the Russians were routinely made at the Americans’ expense.32 Though communists typically worked behind the scenes or through ‘front’ organisations, concern at the advantage they derived from these sentiments was not the least of the inducements to the organisation of preemptive official campaigns.33

For communists such respectability was potentially disconcerting. The veteran

RTS secretary Albert Inkpin, twice in the 1920s a ‘class-war prisoner’, consorted benignly with the sitting member in Windsor Conservative Club, glaring at disruptive elements in the audience.34 The Daily Worker editor William Rust distinguished himself on an all-party platform as the only speaker not to address the audience as

‘comrades’.35 Pollitt later in the war insisted that communists were not ‘a crowd of streetcorner boys’ at a meeting that got underway with a performance of light arias.36

A Birmingham brochure even carried a stock image of the ‘slum proletariat’ – dressed like a B-movie navvy, with cigarette dangling from mouth – to castigate popular apathy about the Second Front. Fittingly or ironically, it was accompanied by the

‘great maiden speech’ of one of the local Tory MPs who so often proved the beneficiaries of such supporters.37

There were tensions here that had a distinct bearing on the communists’ later electoral performance. Although the CPGB attracted increasing numbers of middle- class and professional adherents, even among its new recruits the ‘overwhelming majority’ were said to be drawn from industry, particularly engineering.38 Not infrequently, the CPGB’s wartime priorities sat uneasily with the trade-union cultures in which these activists were grounded, and which were now sometimes stigmatised in terms of craft prejudice, sectional conservatism and a ‘narrow view’ of workers’ interests.39 Production at this point was the key. While younger communists formed

8 Stakhanovite ‘shock brigades’, bearing names like the Dunkirk Avengers, experienced militants saw this as ‘playing at cowboys and Indians’ and demurred at making of

‘unconditional’ concessions to the employers.40 The canny old syndicalist Jack Owen, who had a regular Daily Worker column, sanctioned discreet individual increases in production, but not ‘tearing things up’ – ‘You know the name we have for that sort of individual in the shop’.41 Subsequently Owen also expressed disquiet at the CPGB’s failure to support the grievances of striking workers. A convenor like Fred Elmes, in the London ‘factory fortress’ of Napier’s, was even tolerant of the anathematised

Trotskyists on grounds of ‘TU democracy and procedure’.42 This sensitivity to workplace conventions and resistance to the excessive intrusion of party concerns would make for particular difficulties in mobilising factory-based activists for a communist election campaign that might be seen as at odds with the ethos of working- class unity.

An integral part of the Labour movement?

In this respect, the 1945 campaign represented a new approach to the CPGB’s old dilemma of its relations with the Labour Party. In the ‘Class Against Class’ election campaigns of 1929-31 the CPGB had fought as widely as possible on an anti-Labour programme, particularly targetting the seats of Labour leaders. It was hardly a great success. In 1929, several candidates polled barely a single percentage point; even in

1931, with mass unemployment and the collapse of a despised Labour government, results remained distinctly unimpressive. In other periods, by contrast, the shifting

Comintern line dictated that communists almost efface themselves in their support for

Labour. As long as it remained possible in the 1920s, they ran under official Labour

9 auspices, typically playing down their communist allegiances.43 In 1935, with the return to a rhetoric of working-class unity, they restricted themselves to just two candidacies, achieving substantially increased votes in both of them. The paradox was that the more the communists affirmed their identification with Labour, the greater were their prospects of independent parliamentary success.

Each approach, within its limits, was at least internally consistent. The 1945 campaign, on the other hand, was without precedent in implicitly reaffirming the

CPGB’s independent political role, but on the basis of commitment to a Labour victory and a programme which even communists saw as ‘not so very different’ from the Labour Party’s.44 Even though the CPGB withdrew more than half of its original candidates in the interests of unity, the resulting slate of twenty-one was still of a similar order to the years of so-called independent leadership. How little potential there was in such confusing and contradictory signals was to be confirmed by the post-war years of electoral decline, when communist candidates experienced failure more comprehensive even than in 1929-31. The distinctiveness of 1945 was that the

CPGB combined this confusing message with its best ever electoral performance.

The basis for this approach lay in a comprehensive reassessment of the

CPGB’s basic role and structures during the final phase of the war. For this there were a number of possible contributory factors. One was Stalin’s dissolution of the

Comintern in May 1943, and the registering of ‘deep differences’ of national development which Pollitt and others took as the signal for a post-war programme and further domestic acclimatisation.45 At the same time the CPGB was already beginning to reorientate itself to post-war problems. In November 1942 the Second Front campaign had reached an abortive climax with the cancellation of a ‘National

Deputations Day’ due to the launching of Montgomery’s Egyptian offensive.46 The

10 lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker two months earlier had settled another major campaigning issue which the CPGB had used as a rallying point.47 The lack of immediate oppositional campaigning issues was compounded by the threat of rival groupings like Acland’s Common Wealth party, founded in July 1942 and impossible to dismiss merely as an incubator of fascist tendencies.48

Even as Pollitt and Pritt urged ‘first things first’, concern thus began to be expressed at the communists’ unrelenting focus on military issues. According to a communist Mass-Observer in May 1942 many now thought it necessary ‘to begin to teach what the party stands for, & what it intends to do’.49 As public interest in the

Russians began to abate, there was also an easing off the pro-Soviet motif in communist propaganda, and by the spring of 1943 the same Mass-Observer could record that ‘the great fillip which Russia gave to the Communist Party is subsiding’.50

Even the RTS turned increasingly from Russian military exploits to constructive achievements in welfare, planning and the other social questions exercising the minds of New Jerusalemers. Some months before the Comintern’s dissolution, the CPGB issued a first tentative declaration on reconstruction and set in place arrangements for a national party congress, previously discountenanced as a political distraction. When eventually this was held in July 1943, its business included rewriting the party’s rule book and an outline domestic programme, ‘Britain Today and Tomorrow’.51

On the one hand, the CPGB therefore staked out its claim as an independent political actor which would certainly want to put its case in an election.

Simultaneously, however, in campaigning for affiliation to the Labour Party it seemed to lay claim to a more limited role as the vehicle for ‘active Socialist workers’ within the labour movement. In correspondence with Beatrice Webb, Palme Dutt likened this function to that at one time performed by the Fabians, ‘but corresponding to the

11 changed conditions and tasks of a period no longer of educational propaganda but of the struggle for power’.52 Even these embellishments were presently abandoned and

Dutt spoke less of transforming the Labour Party than of recovering its distinctive federal identity.53 Undaunted by a Labour conference vote for affiliation showing no advance on the three to one defeat recorded in 1936, the CPGB busied itself with the disinherited socialist society role, combining the campaigning functions of the early

ILP with a strategic policy-making ambition akin to the Fabian Society’s. Usually obsessed with anniversaries, it made little of its own jubilee in the month of the post- war election, except to present itself with some audacity as from its foundation ‘an integral and integrating part of the whole labour movement’.54 The implications of such claims in respect of the election itself were anything but straightforward. The

Fabians had never presumed on an independent electoral role, while the ILP’s affirmation of its prerogatives had culminated in its exclusion from an increasingly centralised Labour Party in 1932. The withdrawal of some thirty communist candidates, leaving twenty-one still in place, merely exposed the CPGB’s basic dilemma.

Unlike the ILP, the CPGB was a highly disciplined and centralised party founded on Leninist organisational principles. Nevertheless, the potential for divided counsels and forms of action widened in this period as the party sought to adapt its structures to the scale and character of its new ambitions. In new rules adopted in

1943 no mention was made of democratic centralism and a provision regarding

‘breaches of Party discipline’ was modified to ‘breaches of Party Rules’ and conduct detrimental to its interests.55 Large discretionary powers remained the prerogative of higher party bodies; and without provisions for district representation even a free vote for the party executive led to easy victories for the best-known functionaries.

12 Moreover, though the rules stated members had ‘not only the right but the duty’ to take part in the formation of party policy, fixations with ‘leftism’ and ‘Trotskyism’ continued to reinforce deep-rooted instincts of control. In the flourishing London district, party branches might well be described as ‘the main place in which all members democratically participate in the formulation of Party policy’, but in the

Midlands they were seen as a place for monitoring the ‘moods and tendencies’ of the people where ‘bourgeois, reformist and “leftist” influences [had] constantly to be combatted’.56

Even so, there was a greater appearance of opennness and accountability, particularly at a local level, and by 1945 some were even proposing the election of local functionaries and the active promotion of internal controversy.57 The communist weekly World News and Views hosted genuine debates on issues affecting the party’s basic identity: scepticism was possible towards conventional marxist language and symbols; even the History of the CPSU (B) could be described as ‘dry and tedious’, though not yet as a stalinist imposture.58 Branch resolutions printed before the 1945 party congress included criticisms of the leadership of a sort previously unimaginable.

On campaigning issues demanding not just acquiescence but active implementation – like involvement in an election campaign – the scope for a degree of independent judgement was as wide as it had ever been.

Particular tensions arose from the disbandment of the factory groups which had represented one of the CPGB’s main organisational achievements of the war years.59 Although the low level of factory group life was given as one of the principal reasons for the decision, critics believed the real issue was a precipitate conversion to the ward and constituency demarcations of conventional politics.60 There were clear parallels here with Earl Browder’s attempt to reshape the US communist party.

13 Although Browder’s idea of a non-partisan ‘political association’ met with a cool response in Britain, his looser conception of communist organisation sat easily with the CPGB’s traditional labour movement orientation. Thus the CPUSA anticipated its

British sister party by over a year in launching a new drive to organisation in residential units, and its disavowal of ‘special organizational forms’ sounds just like

‘the liquidation of fractions and the fraction mentality’ later advocated for the

CPGB.61

In this spirit the party’s erstwhile industrial bureaux were reincarnated as broader bodies geared to the advancement of constructive policies for industry and the social services. Associating them with ‘methods of working which cause a misunderstanding in the Labour Movement’, it was noted in August 1943 that bureaux correlating to particular unions or industries helped perpetuate the ‘“economist” and sectional outlook of many of our Trade Union comrades’ at the expense of ‘wide questions affecting the interests of the people as a whole’. Like a microcosm of national unity, ‘consultative’ committees were thus proposed which would also embrace professional workers, consumers, local authority representatives and even small employers.62 Several such committees were constituted, like those for transport and building, and by the end of the war several had issued thoughtful and responsible- looking policy memoranda. Retrospectively, the health advisory even likened itself to

‘a sort of government departmental body’ concerned with questions of parliamentary policy and administration.63

What became of the functions of the old industrial bureaux is not entirely clear. Even the metal advisory came forth with responsible utterances on the engineering industry, and concerns were expressed that no organisation now existed to

‘carry through the decisions of the various Advisory Committees’. 64 In the American

14 case, Maurice Isserman has expressed scepticism as to whether Browder really intended jeopardising his party’s industrial assets and surmised that reorganisation not only made for good public relations but freed leading industrial workers from accountability to rank-and-file communists in the same union.65 The paradox nevertheless remained: that in purportedly adapting its structures to electoral politics, the CPGB jeopardised its ability to mobilise for its own candidates the factory-based networks that might have provided their most distinctive asset.

Instead the attempted normalisation of its activities was reflected in the increasing professionalisation of communist politics. On the basis of a substantial but often inactive dues-paying membership, together with an expanded pool of wealthier supporters, the CPGB established a policy and publicity apparatus which briefly bore comparison with the established parties. In 1943 the party’s reported national income was nearly three-quarters that of the Labour Party; in 1942, it actually exceeded it, with literature receipts some four times greater. In 1943 it issued forty-seven pamphlets and memoranda, forty more than the Labour Party, with an aggregate circulation of 2.4 million.66 With its expanded offices, central departments, daily newspaper, cultural ancillaries, and prolific literature output, the CPGB thus advanced a plausible claim to supply a want neglected by the modern Labour Party; while in thirty-two towns and cities, as well as dotted round London, ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ or ‘people’s’ bookshops provided a visible focal point for this public presence. Much of Labour’s energy, of course, was channelled into official structures, both national and local, and its exposure to the public ear did not depend on penny pamphlets.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to sustain the view that the CPGB lacked a ‘civic presence’ in this period.67 Geoff Eley has even suggested that it ‘represented better

15 than any other single political tendency the radical version of the British people’s desire for a different postwar future’.68

This, in any case, was Pollitt’s partito nuovo: in its own perception open, constructive, modern and responsible, not challenging the emerging post-war order but projecting itself as one of its foundations and aspiring to the electoral breakthrough which would set the seal on its political respectability. This, of course, did not happen, and Andrew Thorpe has even described the CPGB’s election results as ‘dismal’.69 By comparative European standards, they were certainly unimpressive.

Nevertheless, however limited and ineffective the intervention appears, it casts an unfamiliar and revealing light on Britain’s overall voting patterns. It is not just that these polls cannot necessarily be deployed as an argument against wartime radicalisation, as John Callaghan has pointed out. On the contrary, they provide a signal body of evidence in its favour.70

Voting as red as you could?

In its twenty-one contests in 1945, the CPGB secured around 100,000 votes, winning just two seats, West Fife and Stepney Mile End, with Pollitt edging Labour close in

Rhondda East. To these one might reasonably add Pritt’s victory as an independent in

North Hammersmith, for Pritt was an unswerving supporter of communist causes whose electoral machine and supporting speakers were all, with the conspicuous exception of J.B. Priestley, provided by the communists. Indeed, the communist candidate withdrew in nearby Acton so that Pritt derived what benefit there was from the party’s West London ‘factory fortresses’. Securing nearly two-thirds of the poll

16 and inflicting Labour’s one lost deposit of the campaign, his victory over the main party machines would hardly have been possible without such an organisation.71

Modest as it appears, the communist vote is difficult to explain on any other basis than that of a relatively radicalised Labour electorate. Methodologically at least, this is consistent with the so-called revisionist account of the election. The view that patterns of party competition to Labour’s right and left can tell us a good deal about

Labour’s own electorate is thus implicit in Fielding’s argument that an

‘unquantifiable’ number of Labour voters identified more strongly with the Liberals or even Tories. According to this view, these voted Labour more out of scepticism as to the Liberals’ chances or the lack of a Liberal candidate than from any firm commitment to Labour itself. As evidence Fielding cites the last-minute squeezing of the Liberal vote, which according to Gallup polls slumped from fifteen to ten per cent in the month before the election.72 Paradoxically, even audaciously, the collapse of the political centre is presented as evidence of a low level of partisanship.

Voters’ actual behaviour where a communist stood cannot, as we shall see, be reconciled with such a view. Indeed, even the polling data used by Fielding suggests a rather different reading of the movement in the Liberal vote. Although it is true that polling on the eve of the campaign showed Liberal preferences standing at fifteen per cent, over the two years in which voting intentions had been recorded the figure had consistently been in the range of ten-twelve per cent. Given that in 1945 the Liberals contested fewer than half the available seats, an actual poll of nine per cent therefore suggests relatively little erosion of their long-term support. More significantly, what squeezing there was cannot necessarily be attributed to the Labour Party. In rejecting popular-front ideas before the war, Labour had with good reason expressed some scepticism as to the disposition of the Liberal electorate. Labour’s two minority

17 governments, in 1924 and 1929-31, had been formed as the result of relatively strong

Liberal performances inflictin more damage on the Tories than on Labour itself.

Conversely, the squeezing of the Liberal vote, as in 1924, had generally worked to the

Conservatives’ advantage. Already Ramsay MacDonald had observed that in the vast majority of cases ‘Labour benefits from the running of an independent Liberal candidate’.73 Equally in 1945 Hugh Dalton was confident that Liberal candidacies would act as a drain on Conservative votes, while G.D.H. Cole was to surmise that on a two-ballot system Liberal votes would have transferred to the ‘Churchillites’.74

Subsequent negotiations between the Liberals and Tories, and the suggestion that even in 1945 the former broached the idea of an electoral compact, confirm this impression.

Liberals in this period are most plausibly regarded as ‘subaltern anti-Socialists’, and not – as the communists themselves suggested – as instinctive anti-Conservatives.75

The evidence of the Gallup polls is unambiguous. As the Liberal vote was squeezed just prior to the election, Labour’s support increased by just two per cent, that of the Conservatives by eight per cent. On the admittedly simplistic assumption of a direct redistribution of votes, four-fifths of Liberal defectors would therefore have plumped for the Tories when confronted with the logic of a two-horse race. Over a slightly longer period, as ‘others’ and ‘don’t knows’ were resolved into practicable voting preferences, it was again the Tories who profited: in the two months before the election their share of the polls rose by seventeen percentage points, and Labour’s by just five.76 The Gallup polls were accurate to within a percentage point of the actual result. Hence, these figures also suggest that assumptions of the relative ineffectiveness of the Conservative campaign, and of the simultaneous hardening of

‘pre-existing Labour inclinations’, also need revision. Labour sympathisers were not, on this evidence, ‘more likely to turn out and vote than potential Conservatives’.77

18 If this analysis underlines the narrowness of the radical majority in 1945, it also confirms the relative solidity of the Labour vote, Labour’s clear identity as a party of the left and the significance of its victory as a positive expression of support.

Together with the Conservative recovery and the perceived liability of the Liberals’ failure to ‘provoke or challenge’,78 it suggests that the degree of partisanship expressed at the polls was greater than has sometimes been allowed. This is borne out by the communists’ results, for it is only on the assumption of a radicalised pool of

Labour voters one can explain communist polls averaging some fourteen per cent in the constituencies contested, and, with Pritt included, adding up to over a third of the aggregate Labour vote in those seats. Despite the vagaries of CPGB policy, particularly its misjudgement of the popular mood in initially proposing the continuation of a form of coalition, it clearly was not perceived by potential electors as a centrist alternative to Labour. Communists urged voters to ‘vote as red as you can’, and a greater proportion did than in any other election in recent British history.

There can of course be no simple extrapolation from such a limited number of contests. In national polls, the communists had never enjoyed the voting preferences of more than four per cent of those surveyed, and by 1945 this had fallen to two per cent. To some extent, the higher polls actually achieved in 1945 therefore reflect the weighting of communist candidacies towards the tiny minority of genuine party strongholds, in two of which nearly forty per cent of the vote had already been obtained in 1935. On the other hand, national polls are themselves likely to mislead in the case of parties which do not or cannot sustain national election contests. The distortion is unlikely to have been a uniform one. For the Liberals, well-established in electoral politics, Gallup will have recorded positive voting intentions that the lack of a Liberal candidate meant that there was to be no possibility of acting upon. For the

19 communists, on the other hand, the question of voting for the party would have appeared as a dramatically different proposition when, in nearly every case for the first time, the opportunity of actually recording such a vote existed. In two of the CPGB’s strongest constituencies, Hornsey and East Rhondda, witnesses at the count noted how the forces’ vote tilted the balance from the communists towards Labour. ‘I have no doubt that had they been present here they would have been as influenced as the people who voted for Jones [the communist candidate]’, recalled a Hornsey party worker, doubtless a little too confidently.79 Nevertheless, the fact all but one of the communists’ polls exceeded the party’s most recent Gallup reading indicates the responsiveness of at least some voters to having preferences shaped as well as accommodated by the electoral process.

In any case, the communists’ constituencies were not nearly as unrepresentative as a more electorally calculating party’s might have been. Concerns with maximising the communist vote were thus set against the desire to present the party as a ‘national’ political force and the need to avoid jeopardising possible Labour gains. Several of the CPGB’s prospects were consequently hopeless even by its own standards. In Sevenoaks, according to its agent the party had virtually no membership or organisation, but used the election as a platform for its agricultural policies.80 It was here that it achieved its lowest poll of under 2 per cent. On the other hand, even in

Abingdon, also chosen to promote communist agricultural policy, the assistance of the nearby Oxford party branches helped the communist candidate achieve 4.4 per cent of the poll – more than had ever been predicted for it in a national poll.81 In Birmingham

Sparkbrook, Dutt took on the reactionary Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, in an electorally quixotic campaign focusing on Indian rights and recalling the lowly polls obtained by the Meerut prisoner Shaukat Usmani in 1929 and 1931. Though

20 Dutt obtained a much more credible 7.6 per cent of the vote, in the same year’s municipal elections his vote was nearly matched in a single Sparkbrook ward by the local community activist Mollie Barrow.82 The polls achieved in the general election were not necessarily the highest attainable even in the constituencies selected.

The issue of wasted Labour votes was a particular concern, mentioned in post- election reports from eight of the constituences the communists contested.83 That the issue loomed so large offers insight into where Labour itself saw the main threat to its own electorate. In Birmingham Handsworth, for example, Labour’s literature was notable for its avoidance of a generalised anti-communism and its stress on tactical considerations. ‘Let us be realistic’, ran an appeal to ‘Every Socialist in Handsworth’.

‘A vote cast for the Communist candidate, with all due respect to her, is a vote for

Tory reaction, in so far as the vote is taken from Labour.’ Nationally, given the paucity of candidates to Labour’s left, party strategists were naturally more concerned with wavering Liberals or Conservatives, and Labour’s manifesto Let Us Face the

Future specifically addressed the former in warning of the Tories creeping in.84

Locally, however, the appeal to socialists was matched by no similar message to supporters of the Liberal candidate.85 As it turned out, the communist, Jessie Eden, polled miserably, though again in the municipal elections she gained over twice as many votes in a single ward on returning to the council estates on which she was well- known as a tenants’ leader.86 Handsworth had been second only to Edgbaston as a

Birmingham Tory stronghold, remaining firm even in 1945, when eleven of the city’s constituencies swung to Labour. Presumably it was to avoid jeopardising winnable seats that Eden was relocated to this most unpromising of Midlands constituencies.

The CPGB’s response to split-vote arguments was convoluted. Nationally it argued that there was ‘no fundamental difference’ between communist and Labour

21 policy, and wherever it had no candidate worked for a ‘smashing’ Labour majority.87

‘Strengthen Labour’s Arm – Vote Communist’, urged one candidate, who had no easily comprehensible answer to the question ‘Where Labour and Communists differ’.88 In the Rhondda, the local newspaper trumpeted the communists’

‘bewildering inconistency’ in streets and even a constituency-straddling household where electors were given conflicting voting instructions.89 Matters were further complicated in this case by the tortuous position of Arthur Horner, a member of both the CPGB and South Wales Miners’ executives who had endorsed the candidatures of both the official Miners’ nominees and their one credible challenger in the shape of

Pollitt. Three times Horner had himself stood as local parliamentary candidate before making way for Pollitt in 1935. Even at this stage he had caused dismay within the

CPGB leadership with his non-committal stance that ‘Pollitt is not a miner and stands as much chance as the next man’.90 Disconcerted ten years later to be sounded out about the communists’ intentions by the de facto Tory campaign manager, Lord

Beaverbrook, Horner even claimed in his memoirs to have urged the withdrawal of all communist candidates.91

The ambiguous character of the CPGB’s industrial presence was thus sometimes less than conducive to its electoral success. In many areas communists willingly crossed constituency boundaries to help their ‘own’ candidate. On the other hand, Horner was not the only communist reluctant to campaign for his party in seeming defiance of its appeals for Labour and progressive unity. Coventry East, unlike Handsworth, seemed ideal terrain for any candidate able to draw on the significant communist presence in the Midlands engineering industry. Nevertheless, the communist candidate, who like Pollitt in the Rhondda came from outside the constituency and its principal industry, achieved a mere seven per cent of the poll.

22 Canvass returns had suggested a much higher poll, but for ‘the pull of Labour wanting to defeat the Tories’, assisted by Labour canvassers specifically visiting homes displaying communist literature.92 Equally, however, the ‘pull of Labour’ was felt by local communists, who, as Richard Croucher has put it, functioned in many ways as the Labour Party’s ‘industrial arm’.93 Even at the height of its wartime expansion, the

CPGB’s Coventry organiser had complained of ‘a tendency to regard the Party as a militant force in the Trade Unions and nothing more’.94 The corollary in 1945 was that it proved ‘difficult to get factory workers to work in their localities’, while ‘some leading industrial comrades thought [the] election did not concern them’.95 Richard

Crossman, one of the city’s successful Labour candidates, recalled its pro-Soviet shop stewards providing a sort of ‘praetorian guard’ for Labour candidates.96 The result in

Coventry was probably the CPGB’s worst in relation to their membership base.

Nevertheless, similar disaffections were reported in other industrial seats such as

Sunderland, Sheffield Brightside and as many as a third of the constituencies the party contested. In Kirkcaldy, there were five resignations over the issue, and in Greenock the split in the left-wing vote was held responsible for ‘many of the members not rallying’.97

Neil Redfern has speculated as to whether even the party’s own members necessarily voted communist.98 Much no doubt depended on the constituency. Seats in which communists achieved the most impressive results tended to be those in which they had built up a presence outside of the factories on the basis of local campaigning.

Phil Piratin’s success in Stepney Mile End was the most obvious example.99 Another was the Westminster Abbey constituency, where the communists campaigned among

West End night-workers and Peabody residents, achieving nearly eighteen per cent of the vote in a seat in which Labour’s poll had never much exceeded a quarter.100 Most

23 striking was the result in Hornsey. This was a staunchly Conservative dormitory constituency in which the communists had built up an active campaigning presence, initially based on defections from the ILP, and had consciously prioritised local issues over national and district demands. After successfully resisting King Street’s instructions to withdraw in the interests of unity, the candidate G.J. Jones obtained the

CPGB’s highest ever poll in England, of some 10,000 votes.101 Though this was clearly exceptional, in the subsequent borough elections right across London communist candidates were said to have averaged over a quarter of the poll102

Due to the complexities of multi-party politics, and the greater than usual changes in the electoral register, it is difficult to use the voting figures themselves to assess the susceptibility of Labour’s supporters to rival appeals. Fortuitously, however, the London borough of Hackney provides an intriguing sample of three seats, two Labour-held, one Conservative-held, where there had been straight fights between the two main parties in 1935. In each of them now a third party intervened, in two cases the Liberals, and in the third the communist William Rust. Where the

Liberal intervened, Labour suffered no obvious damage, but on the contrary saw its share of the vote increase by roughly thirteen and sixteen per cent respectively. Where the communists intervened, in striking contrast, the Labour vote actually fell by nearly eight per cent. In Hackney, bordering on the East End, the communists admittedly polled better than the Liberals. Nevertheless, the general picture is confirmed if one considers the Conservatives’ fortunes in the same constituencies. Where a Liberal intervened, the Conservative vote fell very sharply: by twenty-six and thirty percentage points respectively. In communist-contested Hackney South, however, where a Churchill-supporting ‘National Liberal’ functioned unambiguously as a subaltern Tory, his vote fell by only 16.5 per cent as compared to the Conservatives in

24 1935. This differential, of some 10-13 per cent, is remarkably close to the ‘missing’

Liberal share of the vote, which in the other Hackney constituencies was 10.6 and

13.3 per cent respectively. Fortuitous as that may be, the overall trend indicates clearly enough that, in Hackney at least, the main electoral movements were between Liberal and Tory on the one hand and Labour and communist on the other.103

Such crude figures are no more than suggestive of patterns of party competition which will have varied widely according to locality. Even so, the

Liberals’ immediate post-war trajectory – perhaps, the cynic may now suggest, as late as 2010 – is consistent with what the Hackney figures tell us. Perhaps this also confirm the political horse sense of Herbert Morrison, who in January 1945 abandoned Hackney South, ostensibly to take Labour’s challenge to the suburbs.104

Morrison in fact could have stayed put and won. Nevertheless, in Hackney, and perhaps inferentially in many other places, Labour’s electorate in 1945 was clearly more disposed to peel off towards the communists than towards the Liberals. The

‘people’ were more polarised than is sometimes suggested – and perhaps also less susceptible to sweeping generalisation.

For the CPGB as an electoral force, 1945 was as good as it got. By 1950, when the communists put up a hundred candidates, all were defeated, all but three lost their deposits, even their votes fall massively, and Pritt and the Labour ‘Independents’ went the same way. Labour’s vote, by contrast, was consolidated at a level far higher than ever before even after the post-war relapse. Consideration of communist politics during the war underlines the significance of the movement away from party in expressing the so-called ‘sea change’ in wartime politics, but equally that it was

Labour that almost inexorably proved the main beneficiary of radicalisation once the normal political routines were resumed. The Conservatives were in no doubt as to the

25 role played in Labour’s victory by militant shop stewards.105 Political histories of the war need to be able to take account of the same complexities.

1 See for example K. O. Morgan, Labour in Power 1945-1951, (Oxford, 1985) pp. 1 ff. 2 See notably S. Fielding, P. Thompson and N. Tiratsoo, ‘England arise!’ The Labour Party and popular politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995), esp. pp. 60-8; also S. Fielding, ‘What did “the people” want?: the meaning of the 1945 general election’, Historical Journal, 35, 3 (1992), pp. 623-39; N. Tiratsoo (ed.), The Attlee years (Leicester, 1991). For the analogy with New Labour, see S. Fielding, ‘“New” Labour and the “new” labour history’, Mitteilungsblatt des Instituts für soziale Bewegungen, 27 (2002), pp. 35-50. 3 Fielding, ‘“Don’t know and don’t care”: popular political attitudes in Labour’s Britain, 1945-1951’ in Tiratsoo, The Attlee years, p. 107. 4 See e.g. G.D.H. Cole, A history of the Labour Party from 1914 (London, 1948), pp. 422-41. 5 Fielding, ‘What did “the people” want?’, pp. 630-2, 639. 6 For a discussion see K. Morgan, ‘The trouble with revisionism or communist history with the history left in’, Labour/Le Travail, ???????********* 7 For a useful introduction, see L. Black, ‘ “What kind of people are you?” Labour, the people and the “new political history”’ in J. Callaghan et al, eds, Interpreting the Labour Party (Manchester, 2003), pp. 23-38. More recently McKibbin himself has criticised Fielding’s adoption of an ‘exceptional standard of politicization’, urging that the ‘non-political does not have to exclude the political’ 8 Fielding et al, ‘England Arise!’, p. 10. 9 R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures. England 1918-1951 (Oxford, 2000 edn), p. 531; see also McKibbin, Parties and People (Oxford, 2010), pp. 127-9 for a restatement of this views addressed to the present context. 10 Paul Pierson, ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics’, American Political Science Review, xciv (2000), pp. 251-67. 11 For fuller accounts of the 1941-5 period see N. Branson, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1941-1951 (London, 1995), chs 1-9; N. Redfern, Class or Nation: communists, imperialism and two worlds wars (London, 2005), chs 4-5. 12 P. Hennessy, Never Again. Britain 1945-51 (London, 1992), p. 66 13 A. Thorpe, Parties at War. Political organisation in Second World War Britain (Oxford, 2009), p. 12 and passim. 14 Fielding et al, ‘England Arise!’, p. 82. For this emphasis see S. Brooke, ‘The Labour Party and the 1945 general election’, Contemporary Record, ix (1995), p. 18. 15 Report of CPGB national literature conference, Sharpening our weapons (London, 1943), p. 3; I. Cox, WNV, 24 Jan. 1942, p. 55; Unity and victory, CPGB 16th congress report (London, 1943), p. 60. For the similarly healthy position of the Daily Worker, see K. Morgan, ‘The Communist Party and the Daily Worker 1930-56’ in G. Andrews et al, eds, Opening the Books. Essays on the social and cultural history of the British Communist Party (London, 1995), pp. 142-59. 16 WNV, 20 Mar. 1943, p. 95; Sharpening our weapons, pp. 4-5. 17 Morgan, Labour in Power, pp. 31-2; T. Mason and P. Thompson, ‘The political mood in wartime Britain’ in Tiratsoo, The Attlee Years, p. 56. 18 At the Empress Hall, Earl’s Court, 20 Apr., 1942; seeTom Harrisson Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex (henceforth M-OA), TC 25/8/K. 19 Fielding, ‘The Second World War and popular radicalism: the significance of the “movement away from party”’, History, dxxx (1995), pp. 38-58. 20 Orwell, ‘London letter to Partisan Review’, 8 May 1942 in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds), The collected essays, journalism and letters of George Orwell. Volume 2: my country right or left 1940- 1943 (Harmondsworth, 1970 edn), p. 241. 21 Pollitt, WNV, 9 May 1942, pp. 225-6; Pritt, ‘First things first’, Labour Monthly (hereafter LM), June 1942, p. 171; for the New Jerusalemers, see C. Barnett, The Audit of War (London, 1986), ch. 1. 22 J. Hinton, ‘Coventry communism: a study of factory politics in the Second World War’, History Workshop, x, 1980. 23 Daily Worker, 25 Nov. 1942.

24 National Archives (henceforth NA), KV 2/1041/568, report of CPGB political bureau discussion, 10 Dec. 1942. 25 P.J. Thwaites, ‘The Independent Labour Party 1938-1950’ (London School of Economic, PhD, 1976), pp. 25-6, 128. 26 See Redfern, Class or Nation, pp. 121-2. 27 Comrade Powell, London railwayman, cited ‘Progress report’ on Trotskyism, 27 Oct. 1944, Labour History Archive and Study Centre (hereafter LHASC) CP/Cent/Org/12/1. 28 WNV, 14 Feb. and 7 Mar. 1942, pp. 111 and 158; Party Organisation - Weapon for Victory, (London, 1943), pp. 10-11; report on YCL meeting, 26 Apr. 1942, MO-A TC 25/9/I. 29 C. and A. Williams-Ellis, ‘Planning and propaganda’, LM, Feb. 1942, p. 49. 30 H. Bourne, WNV, 27 Dec. 1941, p. 824. 31 Hodson, Home front (London, 1944), p. 24, entry for 5 May 1942. 32 NA INF 1/292 B, Home Intelligence report on ‘Home-made socialism’, 24 Mar. 1942. 33 Paul Addison, Road to 1945, (London, 1977 edn), pp. 134-140. 34 WNV, 18 Oct. 1941, p. 668; John Procter, New Statesman and Nation, 8 Nov. 1941, pp. 409. 35 RTS meeting, Coliseum Theatre, London, 7 Feb. 1943, MO-A TC 25/8/K. The other speakers were George Latham (Labour), T.L. Horabin (Liberal) and Robert Boothby (Conservative). 36 NA HO 45/25574, report on meeting of 9 Jan. 1944. 37 The people’s needs. A fighting policy for the Midlands (Birmingham, n.d. but 1943), p. 9. 38 D.F. Springhall, ‘Fifty thousand communists’, LM, May 1942, pp. 149-50; Peter Kerrigan, WNV, 20 Jan. 1945, p. 23. 39 An urgent memorandum on production (London, 1942), p. 6. 40 M. Bennett, Battle for youth (London,. 1942); J. Susman, Shock brigades for victory (London, 1942); J. Douglas (Northumberland miner), WNV, 29 Nov. 1941, p. 762. 41 J. Owen, ‘How to increase war production’, LM, Sept. 1941, pp. 392-3. 42 WNV, 17 Nov. 1945, p. 369; ‘The fight against the Trotskyites and their allies’, n.d., LHASC CP/Cent/Org/12/1. On these themes, see N. Fishman, The Communist Party and the trade unions 1933- 1945 (Aldershot, 1995), pp. 293 ff. 43 See K. Morgan, Labour Legends and Russian Gold. Bolshevism and the British left part 1 (London, 2006), pp. 174-7. 44 P. Piratin, Our Flag Stays Red (London, 1948), p. 79. 45 For the resolution of dissolution, see WNV, 29 May 1943, pp. 169-70; LHASC CP/Cent/Org/2/1, ‘Problems of party organisation’, early 1944 (?); NA KV2/1040, log on Pollitt, notes of 10, 11 and 15 June 1943. 46 Daily Worker, 31 Oct. 1942, 3 and 4 Nov. 1942. 47 See the editor Rust’s comments cited New Statesman and Nation, 4 July 1942, p. 5. 48 For the initial attempt however see the original draft of Dutt’s ‘The Common Wealth movement’ (WNV, 12 Sept. 1942) in British Library Cup. 1262 K4, dated 1 Sept. 1942; also R.P. Arnot, What is Common Wealth? (London, 1943) and A. Calder, ‘The Common Wealth Party 1942-1945’ (Sussex, PhD, 1968), pp. 170-1 for the the withdrawal of Arnot’s pamphlet under threat of legal proceedings. 49 M-OA diarist B5256, 10 May 1942. 50 M-O A diarist B5256, 6 Mar. 1943. 51 Guiding lines on questions of post-war reconstruction, CPGB central committee memorandum, Dec. 1942; British Library Cup. 1262 K4, Dutt, statement on ‘National party conference’, 27 Mar. 1942. Neil Redfern has suggested the persistence of anti-reconstruction sentiments throughout 1943 but this seems to rest on a misdating of Pollitt’s critical response to Labour’s declaration The Old World and the New (in March 1942 rather than 1943); Redfern, ‘Winning the peace: British communists, the Soviet Union and the general election of 1945’, Contemporary British History, xvi (2002), pp. 31-2. 52 Dutt to Webb, 9 June 1942, British Library Cup. 1262 K4. 53 R. P. Dutt, The road to Labour unity (London, 1943), p. 12. 54 R. P. Arnot, ‘Twenty-fifth anniversary of the Communist Party’, LM, Aug. 1945, pp. 236-8. 55 Unity and victory, CPGB 16th congress report; ‘Draft party rules’ in Organise to Mobilise Millions, CPGB pamphlet (London, 1943), pp. 21-4. 56 T. Bramley in Sharpening our weapons, pp. 12-13; Some guiding points (a) on the work of branch committees and secretaries; (b) on building the party in the factories (Birmingham, n.d.), p. 3. 57 Contributions of Pat Devine and John Gollan, ‘Meeting of the organisation commission’, 16 Apr. [1945], LHASC CP/Cent/Org/1/1. 58 A. Wilson, WNV, 8 Apr. 1944, p. 119.

59 See for example Pollitt’s later ‘self-criticism’ in his Communism and Labour. A call for united action (London, 1949), pp. 37-9. 60 CPGB EC statement on ‘Party organisation’; ‘Memorandum of the Executive Committee on party organisation’, Mar. 1945, LHASC. 61 J. G. Ryan, Earl Browder. The failure of American communism (Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1997), pp. 122-3, 129-30; M. Isserman, Which side were you on? The American communist party during the Second World War (Middletown, Conn., 1982), pp. 177-8, 200-1. 62 LHASC CPGB executive committee minutes, ‘Suggestions for reorganising the work at the centre’, discussed 15 Aug. 1943. 63 LHASC CP/Cent/Org, ‘Future work of the HAC’, 19 Mar. 1948. 64 Engineering Prospects and Wages (London: CPGB, 1945); Bradley, ‘Meeting of the Organisation Commission’. Documents for the Midlands district congress in February 1945 held by the Modern Records Centre suggest that in this critical industrial centre the party did not at this point have a specified industrial organiser. 65 Isserman, Which Side, pp. 177-8. 66 Figures calculated from Unity and Victory, CPGB sixteenth congress report (London, 1943), pp. 60- 1; Victory, Peace, Security, CPGB seventeenth congress report (London, 1944), p. 63; Report of the Executive Committee to CPGB seventeenth congress (London, 1944), pp. 12-13; Labour Party Report of forty-third annual conference (London, 1944), pp. 28-9, 44-51. 67 Fielding, ‘England Arise!’, p. 54; 68 G. Eley, ‘From cultures of miltancy to the politics of culture: writing the history of British communism’, Science & Society, 61, 1, 1997, p. 123. 69 A. Thorpe, The British Communist Party and Moscow 1920-1943 (Manchester, 2000), p. 272. 70 J. Callaghan, ‘Common Wealth and the Communist Party in the 1945 General Election’, Contemporary Record, 9 (1995), p. 77. Redfern, ‘Winning the peace’, pp. 43-8, offers a more positive assessment but the discussion is focused on campaign themes rather than results. 71 Pritt papers 1/8 and diary, 15 Mar. 1942; Modern Records Centre, Etheridge papers, CPGB EC, ‘Letter to all branches where no Communist candidate is standing’, 1945. On the other hand, the existence of several crypto-communists among Labour’s successful candidates (Redfern, ‘Winning the peace’, p. 47) is obviously not relevant to the present discussion. 72 Fielding, ‘What did “the people” want?’, pp. 630-1. 73 Ramsay MacDonald, Wanderings and Excursions (London, 1925), p. 109. 74 B. Pimlott (ed.), The political diary of Hugh Dalton 1918-40, 1945-60 (London, 1986), p. 360; Cole, A history of the Labour Party, p. 432. 75 E.H.H. Green, ‘The Conservative Party, the state and the electorate, 1945-64’ in J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, Party, state and society. Electoral behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 191- 2. 76 G. H. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup International public opinion polls. Great Britain 1937-1975. Volume one: 1937-1964 (New York, 1976), pp. 107-10. 77 Fielding et al, ‘England arise!’, p. 66. Michael Kandiah has acknowledged the steady Conservative recovery in the polls without modifying the seemingly inexplicable statement that their campaign was to ‘misfire badly’; see his ‘The Conservative Party and the 1945 General Election’, Contemporary Record, ix (1995), pp. 30-6, 39. 78 R.B. McCallum and A. Readman, The British General Election of 1945 (Oxford, 1947), p. 267. 79 Barney Barnett, interview with author; report from Hornsey in LHASC CP/Cent/EC/1/3 and from Rhondda East in LHASC CP/Ind/Poll 80 Betty Matthews, interview with author. A seventy-two page programme for a post-war government, Agriculture – Planned and Prosperous, was published by the CPGB in May 1945. 81 In Sevenoaks the party actually secured a rural district councillor two years later; LHASC CP/Cent/Org/4/4, CPGB Kent district congress report, Oct. 1947. 82 Election literature in Birmingham Central Library; CP/Cent/Org/2/5, CPGB Midlands district report to party centre, Mar. 1945-Oct. 1946. Barrow obtained 1796 votes or a third of the poll compared to Dutt’s 1853. 83 Except where otherwise stated, information in this section is derived from reports on the election in LHASC CP/Cent/EC/1/3. 84 See also D. Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 33-4. 85 At least to judge from the election literature in Birmingham Central Library on which this paragraph draws.

86 CPGB Midlands district report, Mar. 1945-Oct. 1946. Eden obtained 3.4 per cent of the poll in the general election, 23 per cent in the municipal election. 87 J.R. Campbell, Trade Unions and the General Election (London, 1945), p. 10. 88 Oxford Mail, 15, 23 and 27 June 1945. 89 Rhondda Leader and Gazette, 7 July 1945. 90 LHASC microfilms, CPGB political bureau minutes, 21 November 1935. 91 A. Horner, Incorrigible Rebel (London, 1960), pp. 174-5; J. Mahon, Harry Pollitt (London, 1976), pp. 305-10. 92 Margaret Cohen , interview with author; LHASC CP/Cent/EC, report from Coventry East. 93 R. Croucher, Engineers at War (London, 1982), pp. 351-6, 370-1. 94 J. Cohen, WNV, 7 Mar. 1942, p. 155 95 LHASC CP/Cent/EC/1/3, election reports, 1945 96 R. Crossman, ‘Introduction’ to G. Hodgkinson, Sent to Coventry (London, 1970), pp. xiii ff. 97 LHASC CP/Cent/EC/1/3, election reports, 1945. 98 Redfern, Class or Nation, pp. 184-5. 99 Piratin, Our Flag Stays Red. 100 Gabriel Carritt, interview with author. Carritt had stood in the same constituency in 1939 as an independent progressive supported by Richard Acland. 101 See Calder, ‘Common Wealth Party’, p. 266. 102 WNV, 24 Nov. 1945, pp. 380-1. 103 The figures are as follows: Hackney Central (1935) Labour 15,332 (51.6%), Conservative 14,375 (48.4%); (1945) Labour 14,810 (67.2%), Conservative 4889 (22.2%). Liberal 2348 (10.6%); Hackney North (1935) Conservative 15,000 (51.9%), Labour 13,920 (48.1%); (1945) Labour 17,337 (65.0%), Conservative 5771 (21.7%), Liberal 3546 (13.3%); Hackney South (1935) Labour 15,830 (59.3%), Conservative 10,876 (40.7%); (1945) Labour 10,432 (51.6%), Liberal National 4901 (24.2%), Communist 4891 (24.2%). 104 B. Donoughue and G.W. Jones, Herbert Morrison. Portrait of a politician (London, 1973), pp. 335- 6. 105 See the report to Beaverbrook cited Croucher, Engineers, p. 351.