If they were asked to recognise the name of Luke Akehurst most sensible people of voting age in the United Kingdom would struggle. How I envy them their Eden-like innocence. Unfortunately for me, I’m one of those people who, without wanting to, seems to possess a perverse desire to keep abreast of every single development of the infighting within the Labour Party forevermore. It is not good for your health. For those of you don’t know Akehurst, he is a figure on the right wing of the party who sits on its NEC whose responsibilities seem to be chiefly to boil the piss of everyone to the left of Liz Kendall. He’s the secretary of a group called ‘Labour to Win’ which is ironic given that his extreme factionalism is likely to steer the party to an even greater electoral disaster than the one Jeremy Corbyn delivered in 2019.
Why even mention the man at all? Distressingly, it’s because earlier this year I found myself in the frankly uncomfortable position of being in agreement with him. Ruined my day to be honest. To elaborate, he had been asked what his problem with the hard left was. Among his reasons was the following:
“…silly exaggerated left rhetoric drives voters away from Labour.”
He’s right. If you’re on the left there are words you’ll use and love. Words such as ‘comrade’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘class struggle’. The problem is, most people who don’t view themselves as left wing- and that’s most voters in the country- loathe this type of thing. The workers of the world may have nothing to lose but their chains but they won’t vote for you in the United Kingdom if your language is couched in socialist tradition. Polling showed many of the policies of Corbyn’s Labour were popular but in no way would many people want to associate themselves with a group whose idea of a good time is a hearty chorus of ‘The Red Flag’.
Where myself and Mr Akehurst differ however is that while I do think ‘left language’ is ill advised when courting the floating voter I think the actual concepts of comradeship, solidarity and class struggle are important for a democratic socialist party. I’m not sure the Secretary of Labour to Win could stretch to that.
At this point you’d be forgiven for wondering what all this has to do with Francis Beckett’s book ‘Enemy Within- The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party.’ In the first Covid-19 lockdown when I started this project I needed a single volume history of the CPGB to help make sense of all the security files and letters I was poring over. I immediately went for ‘A Centenary For Socialism-Britain’s Communist Party 1920-2020’ which was published by the current version of the party to coincide with its anniversary celebrations. It would be an understatement to say I found it hard going. Having to wade through sentences such as, “Lenin gave added expression to this paradigm of oppression by nations and national colonialism as part of the general struggle of the working class and working people against imperialism” and the general uncritical, almost hagiographic approach to its subject was alienating and exhausting. Perhaps I’m being unfair. After all, it’s hard to write about the CPGB without this kind of language and to be fair the companion volume , ‘Red Lives – Communists and the Struggle for Socialism’ is superb.
After this disappointment my brother recommended Beckett’s book which first came out in 1995 shortly after the CPGB wound up earlier that decade. The contrast was stark. Beckett seems to have achieved the impossible – a book about the far left which is also a pleasure to read. Sympathetic where it’s justified – Harry Pollitt’s activities during the Spanish Civil War and critical when needed – the CPGB’s inability to be independent of Moscow. It is engagingly written throughout and shot through with a dry wit. The history of the CPGB is labyrinth subject but Beckett helps you understand why people were drawn to the Party while also exploring the tragedy at the heart of it. Having read little else other than books on communism over the last couple of years I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book alongside Raphael Samuel’s ‘The Lost World of British Communism’ as necessary starting points.
Below is an extract from the book describing Bob Stewart at the conference where the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in 1920.
There was the first stirring of a debate which was to cause a lot of trouble over the next seventy-one years. Did the CP stand for armed revolution or not? One excited delegate proclaimed ‘the historic and revolutionary value of a gun in the hands of a man of the working class’, only to be magisterially rebuked by Bob Stewart of Dundee: ‘A great many people talk about guns who would run away when they saw one. I am more interested in folks having brains in their heads.’ Bob Stewart had spent several years in prison for opposing the First World War, and knew more about hardship and violence than most. He led the smallest and oddest of the groups which formed the CP, the Socialist Prohibition Fellowship. After the main resolution was carried, the stout sincere man with a sober moustache walked solemnly to the platform to ask the new Party to come out in favour of suppressing the manufacture of alcoholic drinks. Few thought much of the idea, but they liked Bob Stewart, so they referred it to the executive for action. In seventy-one years no action was ever taken.
Yet banning the demon drink struck a chord with many Communists. Many hard, poverty-stricken lives were tolerable only through a haze of beer. Three Scottish founder-Communists, Stewart, Jack Murphy and Willie Gallacher, remembered their deprived childhoods being blighted further by drunken fathers. They not only abstained all their lives, but saw abstaining from alcohol as part of their socialism.
(Francis Beckett, Enemy Within, Merlin 1998 pages 14-15)
Alan Stewart.
Breaking the Fetters 