The Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain (CPB) won 10,915 votes (0.44% of the total vote) in last week’s Greater London Authority (GLA) list elections and claimed an increase of 24.2 per cent on its 2021 vote of 8,787 (0.3% of the total vote). The CPB was outscored by the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, which didn’t stand in the list section but picked up 15,216 votes in various London constituencies. The CPB is no further ahead in public consciousness than any other section of the far left and the working-class electorate treats it as it does similar organisations – as marginal sects unworthy of much attention.
The CPB knows this of course and is generally very careful not to over-inflate and over-hype its electoral activity, which has always been modest in terms of results, even by the historically low standards of the British far left. However, it seems as if the construction of its GLA list may have been a tad over-hasty. Sources tell me there have been some pink faces at the CPB’s Croydon HQ when executive committee (EC) members highlighted that some of the names listed as candidates were, in their view, also members of other parties in the form of Keir Starmer’s Labour and the CPB’s far-left rivals.
The potential fall-out and embarrassment that this claim could cause has apparently stalled any proper investigation – after all, the London CPB, it is alleged, put comrades from groups classed (in unreconstructed CPB rhetoric) as “Trotskyite” and “ultra-left” on its electoral list. According to my sources, the CPB GLA list was constructed on the basis of “last-minute arm-pulling” as the London region scratched around for names. This is not a new problem for the CPB. In 2006, it was complaining that its comrades were unwilling to stand in elections, for a variety of reasons.[i] There is no suggestion whatsoever that the CPB was acting in any way improperly – it was honestly trying to construct its list from comrades whom it believed were only members of its organisation.
It is fairly obvious that lots of CPB members joined the Labour Party a few years back to support Jeremy Corbyn. Some did so without bothering to cancel their CPB membership. General secretary Rob Griffiths tried to stop this fundamentally healthy instinct of his rank and file by offering to help the Labour Party’s witch-hunters weed out any CPB members who had stepped over.[ii] But many CPB/Labour members simply ignored him. There are thus bound to be comrades who haven’t lapsed their Labour Party membership. As to the far left, I’ve certainly heard of one or two ex-Trotskyists who have joined the CPB and sold the Morning Star (that’s been happening for a while) but this is the first time I’ve heard of opponent organisations working inside it. Whether this is EC members merely getting twitchy about ‘outsiders’ after a period of recruitment remains to be seen.
[i] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/628/ever-decreasing-circles/
[ii] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1116/which-side-are-you-on/
Lawrence Parker 