Anti-Communism in Britain
The other month the General Secretary of the RMT, Mick Lynch, appeared in a series of media interviews as the railway workers union went on what some called the biggest rail strike in three decades. In one particular interview with Good Morning Britain, Lynch was asked whether he was a Marxist – reviving the trope of the left-wing trade unions threatening the British economy and society, led by communists and Marxists. Likewise, a few months ago, another threatened RMT strike on the London Underground had the Telegraph questioning whether the union had connections with Putin and Russia.
The background to this scaremongering is the hysteria about the left in Britain over the last decade, heightened during the years that Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party. ‘Comrade Corbyn’ became a folk devil for the right, who was going to transform Britain into a socialist dystopia. The Labour Party’s social democratic platform at the 2017 and 2019 elections was portrayed as an extreme left-wing agenda that would nationalise industry, tax millionaires and wreak havoc upon the economy. Corbyn was viewed as surrounding himself with communists and there was a fear that the Labour Party was full of ‘Trots’, reminiscent of the discourse around Militant in the 1980s. Even after Corbyn’s resignation as leader, the Corbynite left inside the Labour Party has been dogged by the media, commentators and other politicians to distance themselves from this previous agenda.
And, of course, this panic about left-wingers, Trotskyism and communism reaches far back in a history of anti-socialism and anti-communism in Britain that has existed since before World War One. Anti-communism has had a constant presence which ebbed and flowed with perceived crises of the state and the capitalist economy. This piece will trace the history of anti-communism in Britain and explore some of the episodes that have shaped British politics since, as well as some that have been forgotten in popular memory.
With the formation of organised trade unions in the late Victorian era and the establishment of the Labour Party in 1900, the political establishment became increasingly worried about the prospect of socialism. The Conservatives in particular portrayed socialism as a threat to the British Empire and to capital, with even the Liberals’ 1909-10 budget that extended welfare in Edwardian times being dismissed by the Tories as a form of socialism and a precursor to the nationalisation of land and industry. While in opposition, the former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour wrote the preface to a book titled The Case Against Socialism, published by the London Municipal Society in 1908. Socialism in its various guises in the early twentieth century, from the Social Democratic Party to the Independent Labour Party to the Fabians, were all seen as threats to the British way of life. The book claimed that socialism, in either its revolutionary or reformist form, would undermine religion and personal freedoms, while making the entire population destitute.
After the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, the British government was opposed to the Bolsheviks seizing power – especially as they pushed for peace with Germany. This led to British intervention in the Russian Civil War and efforts to root out ‘Bolshevism’, both domestically and internationally. As the Irish Revolution began in 1916 with the Easter Rising, the British saw Bolshevism and Sinn Féin as twin threats that were closely intertwined. For example, in the House of Lords in 1920, the Duke of Northumberland declared that ‘Bolshevism has thus taken Sinn Fein under its wing’.
The formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, also in 1920, led to a heightened state of anti-communist hysteria. From the very beginning, the security services (MI5) and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch kept surveillance on Communist Party members, monitoring any connections made between activists in Britain and Moscow, as well as with the Communist International. Extensive files were kept on these activists and their comings and goings were closely observed, alongside their correspondence and in-person conversations. Travel in and out of the country was also monitored, with internal discussions within government circles about whether communists should have access to passports.
This concern about communication between Moscow and the communists in Britain was behind one of the most infamous incidents in British politics in 1924 with the ‘Zinoviev Letter’. In October 1924, the Daily Mail published a supposedly intercepted letter from leading Bolshevik Grirgori Zinoviev to British communists, instructing them to undertake seditious activities and lay the groundwork for a revolution. The publication of the alleged letter was four days before the General Election and the Conservatives used it as part of a scare campaign against the sitting Labour government, who were seen as too soft on communist revolutionaries. Despite being generally regarded as a forgery, the letter helped the Tories assert their anti-socialist credentials and stoked the fear that communists were lurking – ready for revolution. Some have suggested that the Zinoviev Letter also played upon older anti-Semitic tropes and tapped into fear of the Jewish-Bolshevik that was promulgated in right-wing circles in the 1920s.
One of the reasons that Labour was seen to be too lenient on communism was the halting of a sedition case against J.R. Campbell, editor of the CPGB’s Workers Weekly, who allegedly incited mutiny amongst troops in the newspaper. After the Labour government was removed in 1924, the incoming Conservative government renewed its campaign against the Communist Party and 12 leading members of the CPGB were arrested and jailed the following year. The offices of the CPGB were raided and a selected number of internal party documents were published by the government to publicise the party’s alleged seditious crimes.
The prosecution of communists and broader anti-communist campaigns did not just occur in Britain itself, but also throughout the British Empire. The combination of communism and anti-colonialism was a major concern for the British and there were crackdowns upon suspected communists in various colonies. One of the most infamous was the Meerut conspiracy trial, in which a number of trade unionists, including members of the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of Great Britain, were put on trial by a Labour government for acting as agents of the Comintern. The trial lasted for four years and resulted in the jailing of a number of Indian communists as the independence movement in India was growing.
Anti-communism was a constant on the right of British politics throughout the inter-war period. Alongside the focus of the state on the communists, events such as the 1926 General Strike and the Great Depression led to the emergence of several anti-communist groups that believed that liberal democracy was ill equipped to deal with the looming ‘Red Menace’. Inspired by Fascist Italy (and later Nazi Germany), anti-communism (often combined with anti-Semitism and defence of the British Empire) drew together sections of the upper and middle classes, particularly those with military experience, to offer an authoritarian alternative. Some of these were explicit fascist parties, while others were looser groupings with a paramilitary and strike-breaking bent. Even as fascist and radical right groups grew during the 1930s, the authorities seemed to be more concerned with the Communist Party and others on the left.
With the beginning of World War II and the CPGB denouncing the conflict as an ‘inter-imperialist war’, there was suspicion that communists would undermine the war effort. While the Communist Party was not banned in Britain during the war, the Daily Worker was in January 1941 and this ban would remain in place until August 1942, a year after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the CPGB declaring support for the ‘people’s war’ against the Axis powers. At the same time, the British authorities were also concerned about the Trotskyist group, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and their role in strikes during the war. Although tiny, the security services kept a close eye on the RCP in the latter stages of the war.
The Cold War that developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s is arguably the height of anti-communism in Britain, as paranoia about Soviet invasion and nuclear war abounded, as well as the advent of the decolonisation process within the British Empire. The Labour government under Clement Attlee maintained the surveillance of communists in the post-war era and when the World Peace Congress was supposed to be held in Sheffield, the Attlee government refused visas for several delegates for having communist links. As John Newsinger has shown, in the Attlee years, communists were pursued with particular vigour in the empire, especially in Malaya where there were crackdowns on the labour movement before the Malayan Communist Party launched its guerrilla offensive in 1948.
The Conservatives returned to power in 1951 and launched several initiatives to combat communism both domestically and internationally. Under the Tories, there was a blacklisting of suspected communists from the civil service and from institutions such as the BBC, with screening by MI5. The government also set up the Information Research Department that assisted the monitoring of communists in Britain and overseas, but was also dedicated to the production of anti-communist propaganda to be disseminated worldwide. As the peace movement grew in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Conservatives, as well as sections of the media, were willing to describe the movement as being run by communists for promoting ‘peace’ on communist terms.
Throughout the Cold War period, there was also a concern about communists in the labour movement that was vocalised by both Labour and Conservative politicians. In 1966, the Prime Minister Harold Wilson suggested that a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ were behind a strike by seamen and further claimed that the Communist Party were seeking to influence major strikes in various industries across the country. Over the next decade, as the number of strikes grew, these fears of a communist-led labour movement were heightened. In particular, the government and the security services worried about the role of communists in the National Union of Mineworkers, who had led strikes in 1972 and 1974.
Alongside the strike wave of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this period also saw an explosion of wider protest and radicalism, now popularly known as the ‘1968’ moment. In Britain, there was a large movement against the Vietnam War, a radical student movement, the beginnings of women’s liberation and gay rights, and the Black Power movement, as well as the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and expressions of solidarity with national liberation movements across the world. Many of these movements were interrelated and the British authorities, as well as the press, often portrayed these as forms of communist or Marxist subversion. This was particularly the case regarding the persecution of Black radicals in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s, such as the British Black Panthers and the Black Unity and Freedom Party, who were seen as communists radicalising Britain’s Black communities – a trope that returned with the characterisation of the Black Lives Matter movement as ‘Marxist’.
The anti-Vietnam War movement in particular generated large numbers taking part in demonstrations and after one in London that moved past the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square in October 1968, the authorities responded by setting up the Special Demonstrations Squad (SDS), which alongside MI5 and the Special Branch, conducted surveillance on and infiltrated many groups and movements considered to be subversive. The SDS continued for several decades and as the recent Undercover Policing Inquiry has shown, the scope of those considered ‘subversive’ by the British state was incredibly broad, often viewing innocuous and ordinary political organising as indicators of radical Marxism.
In 1974, strikes brought down the Heath government and Labour came to power. Although a ‘social contract’ had been established between the Trades Union Congress and the Wilson government, this did not end the strikes and they continued to be an issue throughout the rest of the 1970s. Margaret Thatcher, now Opposition Leader, called trade unionists ‘extremists’ and warned about the ‘dangerous duplicity of socialism’. Reviving the tropes from earlier in the Cold War, the Conservatives perpetuated the stereotype that a minority of left-wing militants were running the trade unions (and influencing the Labour Party), and in the process, running the British economy into the ground. For the Tories, who won the 1979 election, the left – in the trade unions, Labour Party and elsewhere – had to be confronted.
Before this confrontation with the trade unions that resulted in the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85, there were other areas of conflict in Britain during the early 1980s. In 1981, riots exploded in Brixton in April and then across the country in July. While they were largely spontaneous uprisings against police harassment against a backdrop of socio-economic hardship, the tabloids (and some politicians) blamed the involvement of the left. For example, the Daily Mail railed against the ‘lunatic message’ of ‘Red Ted Knight’, who they described as ‘the Marxist leader of Lambeth council’, when he criticised the police for provoking violence in Brixton. In July 1981, the same newspaper claimed that the ‘extreme Left’ egged on rioters in Southall and Toxteth. One of Thatcher’s advisors drew up a list of the various left-wing groups that existed at the time and suggested that these groups were exploiting the situation for their own ends, which justified both the continued surveillance of the left that had begun in the late 1960s and attacks upon the Labour Party, which was thought to be beholden to the radical left.
The Miners’ Strike itself was seen as a battle against the extremist left that allegedly drove the trade union movement (and the Labour Party), against which anti-communist/anti-left attitudes abounded. When the National Union of Mineworkers requested financial aid from abroad, including the Soviet Union, it was seen in Britain by many on the right that the NUM were doing the bidding of the Soviets. Arthur Scargill was also criticised for allegedly taking money from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.
At the same time as this industrial struggle was being played out, politicians and the media lambasted the ‘loony left’ that was running local councils. Some, such as the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, was seen as promoting fringe social issues, such as feminism, anti-racism and gay rights, while others, such as the Labour dominated councils in Liverpool and Sheffield, were viewed as sites of resistance to Thatcher’s economic policies.
In many of these battles against the left in the 1980s, the Conservatives and the right-wing media were often joined by the Labour right which sought to distance itself from the left inside and outside the Labour Party. In the early 1980s, a number of left-wingers joined the Labour Party – including many who had previously belonged to the International Marxist Group. This became a base of support for Tony Benn, who challenged Denis Healy for deputy leadership of Labour in 1981. There was also the Militant Tendency, which was a long-standing Trotskyist entryist group inside Labour. The left-wing membership of the party was blamed for Michael Foot’s defeat in the 1983 election. Many years later, Roy Hattersley, Healy’s successor as deputy leader, labelled the left as ‘Trotskyites, one subject campaigners, Marxists who had never read Marx, Maoists, pathological dissidents, Utopian, and… sentimentalists.’ Despite this stereotype of Foot’s Labour, it was under him that the party machinery began to root out Militant which was first proscribed in 1982 but then gathered momentum under Neil Kinnock. Colloquially known as ‘the witch hunt’, Kinnock sought to confront Militant’s alleged influence inside the party – particularly in Liverpool – and there were many expulsions of Militant members throughout the mid-1980s.
The Kinnock leadership were also wary of the ‘loony left’ represented by the GLC and other London councils, but also the activist movements that were associated with it. Gay rights were seen as an issue that did not resonate with British voters and the homophobia that surrounded Peter Tatchell’s Bermondsey byelection campaign in 1983 showed that the Labour Party harboured many with anti-gay views. Kinnock and Hattersley also opposed the Labour Party’s Black Sections, which was to represent African-Caribbean party members.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the hysteria over communism somewhat faded but there was continued anxiety about different forms of activism in the 1990s and 2000s – such as the rise of the anti-globalisation movement. When the May Day demonstrations in London in the year 2000 led to episodes of disorder, there was media and politician concern about anti-capitalists and anarchists as the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square was vandalised.
The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 perhaps signalled a change in perception towards the left, who had been dismissed through much of the Major and Blair years as irrelevant, even as the left was a significant influence on the anti-Iraq War movement in 2002-03. The financial crisis made the media and politicians wary of an angry leftist presence in Britain which never really materialised.
And after years in the wilderness, the British left in many ways had a resurgence under Corbyn, which led to four years of sustained outrage amongst sections of the British media and political landscape. While Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, as mentioned above, brought many media stories about the communist revolution that he was to usher in, there was also the development of an anti-leftism that we might describe nowadays as ‘anti-woke’. Issues like Black Lives Matter, trans rights, climate activism and countering far right speakers were all seen as part of a radical agenda by left-wing, progressive or ‘woke’ youth, who were under the influence of ‘cultural Marxism’ or left-wing professors at universities. Progressive political activists have been compared to Stalinists, Maoists and the Khmer Rouge, regurgitating the left-wing stereotypes of past decades.
Now, as the Tory leadership battle heats up and the British political class brace for a summer of strikes, evoking the communist bogeyman is likely to be further resurrected. British politics across the twentieth century shows that in times of political and economic crisis, anti-leftist rhetoric becomes heightened – with both the media and politicians playing a role in the demonisation of the left in Britain since the days of the Russian Revolution. This current anti-communist panic then has a much longer history.