Tony Benn MP pays tribute to the contribution of dedicated communists, such as the late Fred Westacott, to the labour movement. (this article first appeared in the Morning Star 12.04.2001)
On Wednesday last week, in Chesterfield, there was a crowded memorial meeting for Fred Westcott, who, well into his eighties, died recently after a lifetime of dedicated services to socialism.
Fred was a lifelong communist, once a full-time organiser for the party and an inspiration to everyone who knew him, and certainly to me since I first came to the town nearly 20 years ago.
His death and the response that it has evoked encourages me to pay tribute not only to him but to all those who worked in the Communist Party over the years and who made a tremendous contribution to the trade union, labour and peace movements, as well as the pensioners' movement to which he devoted himself in recent years.
It is time that this was recognised and recorded, since communists have been denounced and reviled by the British Establishment, and by most Labour Party leaders, since the Russian Revolution, which they supported.
And during the cold war here, and the witch-hunt launched by Senator McCarthy against the left in the US, all members of the Communist Party were systematically blacklisted by every employer and kept under automatic surveillance by the security services as potential traitors and subversives.
One unexpected side-effect of this was to frighten off, or weed out, from the party anyone whose main ambition was to get on in politics or the trade union movement, leaving only the most dedicated to carry on for no reason other than their commitment to the cause.
Yet, despite all these diffculties, the CP, banned as it was from affiliation to the Labour Party, remained a university of socialism, working in the trade unions and thus influencing the thinking of the unions that were affiliated to Labour and keeping Marxist ideas on the political agenda.
Moreover, during the 1930s, it was the Communist Party that played a leading role in fighting fascism, supporting the Spanish workers in their war against the Franco dictaorship and in the Unemployed Workers Movement in Britain.
The main charge levelled against the CP, that it was just the unthinking agent of the Kremlin, was based upon a misunderstanding of its view that worldwide support was necessary if the USSR was to survive the attacks from its many enemies.
And how true this was for Britain during the war, since it was the immense courage of the Russioan people who bore the brunt of the German armies and gave us the breathing space that we needed to win.
It is true that the British party made a mistake in 1939 when it opposed the British declaration of war against Germany and only changed its policy when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.
But the charge that it uncritically supported all the excesses during the Stalinist period conveniently forgets that those escesses were not widely known even in the Soviet Union until Khrushchov's famous speech which disclosed them.
Less intelligible to many was the passionate ideological hatred by the CP of anyone, and everyone, who had a good word to say about Trotshy, who is entitled to his place in history and who has inspired some of the younger activists on the left today.
The greatest damage done to the CP came from inside with the emergence of the post-modernists, expressed through the pages of Marxism Today, which began to erode both the unity and the influence of the CP, some of whose revisionists found themselves attracted by the democratic centralism preached by the commissars in the Millbank Tower.
But, happily, the likes of Fred Westacott, and many others in the Communist Party of Britain, kept faith and have made a tremendous contribution to the left at a moment when more and more people are looking for a better explanation of what has gone wrong than the conventional wisdom.
This convention lays all the blame on those who have not modernised their thinking to get us to love global capital and surrender our democratic rights to Brussels commission, the European Central Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund.
When I look back at those who have worked hardest for peace and the pensions, for trade union rights, full employment and democracy, many of them were communists and though, as a lifelong Labour Party member, I would have preferred to have them inside the Labour Party, they were not allowed in and were not prepared to make the sacrifice of principle that would have been involved in giving up their faith to join us.
Looking ahead to the next decade, it is certain that the broad left will need to think of ways to make its influence felt more strongly, and that must mean winning the labour movement to socialism a second time, as Keir Hardie did 100 years ago.
And, in making this possible, we shall need more communists like Fred Westacott.