The Downfall of the Communist Party of Great Britain

The algorithm served me The Evil Decline of Britain’s FAILED Stalin by JimmyTheGiant. It’s a solid piece of work - a detailed history of Harry Pollitt, the long-serving General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1929 to 1956. Pollitt was the face of British communism for a generation: a genuine working-class leader from Lancashire who tried to build a mass communist movement while navigating the impossible contradictions of loyalty to Moscow. Jimmy gets the contradictions, understands the pressures, treats the subject fairly.

But the video ends with the party’s dissolution in 1991, and that’s where Jimmy gets some things wrong. Not wildly wrong - the broad strokes are right. But the details matter. The details tell you something important about what happened to the British left, about how a revolutionary party chose to liquidate itself, about where all that energy and money ended up. So for anyone who stumbles across Jimmy’s video and wants to know more: this is what actually happened.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

By the 1970s, the CPGB was in freefall. Membership had peaked at around 56,000 in the mid-1940s, but the Hungarian uprising of 1956 had started a hemorrhage that never stopped. By 1964, they were down to 34,281 members. By 1979, just over 20,000 remained. The decline accelerated through the 1980s: 18,458 in 1981, 12,711 in 1985, 7,615 in 1989. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, only 6,300 members were left.

This wasn’t just about Soviet tanks in Budapest or Prague. The decline was generational - the working-class militants who’d joined in the 1930s and 1940s were ageing out, and younger workers weren’t replacing them. The party’s industrial base was crumbling along with British manufacturing itself.

Into this crisis came the New Times movement. Its intellectual origins lay in Eric Hobsbawm’s 1978 Marx Memorial Lecture, published in Marxism Today that September as “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Hobsbawm argued that the working class’s central role in society was declining, that capitalism had strengthened itself while the working class had fragmented, and that the left’s inevitable rise to power - the assumption that had sustained communist parties for decades - was no longer guaranteed. This was heresy, delivered by one of the party’s most respected intellectuals.

Centered around Marxism Today and its editor Martin Jacques, along with cultural theorist Stuart Hall, the New Times movement developed Hobsbawm’s insights into a full theoretical programme. Traditional class-based politics were finished, they argued. Society was moving from Fordism to post-Fordism - from mass production and big factories to flexibility, diversity, and multiple identities. The working class wasn’t going to be the agent of change anymore because “the working class” as a coherent political force no longer existed.

The movement was formally launched with a special issue of Marxism Today in October 1988, and became a “Manifesto for New Times” in 1989. It argued for embracing identity politics, building broader coalitions, and accepting that people’s political choices weren’t determined by their “material interests” but by complex intersections of identity and culture. As Stuart Hall put it, people have multiple identities - so which identity determines their politics?

This was, to put it mildly, controversial. A. Sivanandan famously called New Times “a fraud” that “palms off Thatcherite values as socialist” - essentially “Thatcherism in drag.” The accusation was that the Eurocommunist faction around Marxism Today had given up on socialist transformation and were trying to dress up accommodation to neoliberalism as theoretical sophistication.

The opposition came primarily from the traditionalist wing of the party - the “tankies,” as they were called, because of their continued support for the Soviet Union even after 1968. This faction coalesced around the newspaper Straight Left, which began publishing in 1979. Led by figures like Fergus Nicholson (who wrote under the pseudonym “Harry Steel”), they argued the party should focus on trade union work rather than social movements like feminism and environmentalism, and return to a pro-Soviet stance with disciplined working-class organisation. They supported Soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. The faction operated semi-secretly - meetings weren’t publicly announced, writers used pseudonyms.

But here’s the thing: while membership collapsed, Marxism Today’s circulation increased from 3,500 to 15,600. The magazine was read far beyond the party’s dwindling membership, particularly by Labour modernisers around Neil Kinnock. The ideas that couldn’t save the CPGB would later be absorbed into New Labour.

The Democratic Road

To understand what happened next, you need to understand Eurocommunism. This was a movement that emerged in the 1970s among Western European communist parties - primarily in Italy, France, Spain, and Britain. The core idea was independence from Moscow. Eurocommunists argued for a democratic road to socialism, achieved through parliamentary means rather than revolution. They rejected the Soviet model, abandoned the concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and insisted that democracy wasn’t just a means to socialism but essential to socialism itself. As Spanish communist Manuel Azcárate put it: “Without freedom, without democracy, socialism is not socialism.”

The movement peaked in 1977 when the leaders of the Italian, French, and Spanish parties met in Madrid to establish common principles. In Britain, the CPGB’s leadership increasingly embraced these ideas through the 1970s and 80s. For traditionalists who’d spent decades defending Soviet intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, this was betrayal. For the Eurocommunist faction, it was the only way forward for a communist party in a Western democracy.

Temple’s Ascent

The factional war came to a head in the 1980s under the rising influence of Nina Temple. Born into a communist family in 1956, she joined the Young Communist League at 13 and became its General Secretary in 1979. She was a committed Eurocommunist from the start, part of what the traditionalists called the “revisionist tendency.” She joined the CPGB executive in 1979, the Political Committee in 1982, and served as Press and Publicity Officer from 1983.

From 1984 onwards, the Eurocommunist leadership - with Temple as a key figure - began a purge. They expelled Morning Star supporters and anyone who held to traditional Marxist-Leninist positions. The editor Tony Chater was expelled in January 1985, along with assistant editor David Whitfield. The Executive Committee dropped the requirement that party members support the Morning Star. Ken Gill, the general secretary of the Technical and Supervisory Section of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, was expelled. Branches were dissolved. Members were driven out.

The membership figures from this period tell the story: from around 18,000 in 1981 to 7,615 by 1989. This wasn’t just natural decline - it was systematic destruction of the party’s remaining base in the trade union movement.

In 1988, the anti-Eurocommunist faction had seen enough. They split to form the Communist Party of Britain, taking much of what remained of the party’s working-class membership with them. The CPGB’s final congress in 1991 recorded just 4,742 members.

In January 1990, at age 33, Nina Temple became the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The Final Vote

The end came at the 43rd Congress in November 1991. By this point, only 4,742 members remained - less than a tenth of what the party had been even a decade earlier. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The ideological justification for a separate communist party had evaporated. The Eurocommunist leadership, under Temple, proposed dissolution.

The debates were fierce. On one side, the older trade unionists and traditional Marxists who’d survived the purges of the 1980s - they argued that the party’s role wasn’t finished, that working-class organisation still mattered, that dissolving was capitulation. On the other side, younger members who’d joined during the Marxism Today years, educated middle-class activists more interested in identity politics and cultural theory than industrial struggle. For them, the party was an anachronism. The future was NGOs, think tanks, influencing Labour from the outside.

The generational split was obvious. The younger cohort saw dissolution as honest recognition of reality - the party had failed, communism was finished, time to move on. The older members saw it as betrayal of everything they’d fought for. But the Eurocommunists controlled the delegate selection process. They’d spent the 1980s ensuring that.

The vote was two-to-one in favour of dissolution. A third of those remaining still believed a communist party was necessary, still thought there was something worth preserving. But they lost. The party that had existed since 1920 simply ceased to be.

The Afterlife of Assets

The party’s assets - its property, its archives, its money - were transferred to a new organisation called Democratic Left. Not a political party, but a “left-leaning political think tank.” Temple proclaimed that “The internationalism of the 1990s will be as much informed by Greenpeace and Oxfam, as communism once was by Marx and Engels.”

Democratic Left operated through the 1990s as the ideas of New Times found their true home: not in a communist party, but in New Labour. The “Third Way,” the embrace of market economics with a progressive social veneer, the identity politics, the move away from class analysis - this was the Manifesto for New Times implemented by Tony Blair and people like Peter Mandelson, who’d briefly been in the Young Communist League in 1971 before deciding the Labour Party offered a better route to power.

In 1999, Democratic Left became the New Politics Network, shedding even the pretence of being “left.” Temple became its first director. The NPN positioned itself as “politically independent” and committed to working “across the political spectrum” - the kind of language that means you’ve stopped having actual politics.

Their campaigns were revealing. They ran Tacticalvoter.net during the 2001 election, claiming to have changed results in two seats and “successfully showed the weakness of the present voting system.” They launched Party Watch, tracking political donations. They campaigned for votes at 16, for House of Lords reform through the “Elect the Lords” campaign, and for proportional representation through the Make Votes Count coalition. Constitutional reform, democratic procedures, voting systems - technical fixes that avoided any question of economic power or class.

In 2007, it merged with Charter 88 to form Unlock Democracy, a constitutional reform campaign group. The organisational thread from the Communist Party of Great Britain to a single-issue pressure group was complete. Seventy years of working-class struggle, tens of thousands of members, all that history - it ended up funding a campaign for proportional representation.

Unlock Democracy’s greatest effort came in 2011, when they joined the “YES! To Fairer Votes” campaign for the Alternative Vote referendum. They sat on the board alongside the Electoral Reform Society and other constitutional reform groups. The campaign outspent the opposition - £3.4 million to £2.6 million - most of it from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. They lost catastrophically. 67.9% voted No on a 42% turnout. The decades-long dream of electoral reform, the culmination of all that CPGB money and assets, went down to one of the most decisive defeats in British referendum history.

Nina Temple’s trajectory mirrored the organisation she’d dissolved. After Democratic Left, she moved to the Social Market Foundation in 2005, serving as head of development and communications until 2008. The SMF describes itself as “cross-party” but it’s centrist at best, founded by people close to David Owen’s SDP, gravitating to the Conservatives post-Thatcher, then moving toward New Labour. Its mission is to “marry a pro-market orientation with concern for social justice” - which is to say, accept capitalism, tinker at the edges. Temple left in 2008. By then she’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She later retrained as a counsellor.

Mourning What’s Gone

I’m not a communist. Never have been. The 43rd Congress happened in November 1991, two years before I was born. I have no nostalgia for the CPGB, no romantic attachment to what they represented. But something died in that dissolution that I think we should mourn.

A whole tradition of working-class self-organisation, of building power through unions and communities, of understanding politics through class rather than identity, of believing that another world wasn’t just possible but necessary - all of that got liquidated. Not defeated in struggle, but voluntarily dissolved, its assets transferred to organisations that wouldn’t threaten anyone’s power.

The Communist Party of Great Britain was always flawed, always compromised by Moscow, always struggling with the contradictions of being a revolutionary party in a reformist political culture. But it represented something: the idea that working people could organise themselves, build their own institutions, fight for fundamental transformation. When Nina Temple gavelled the 43rd Congress to a close in November 1991, that possibility died with it. What emerged was something smaller, safer, more respectable. Something that could get meetings with ministers and grants from charitable trusts. Something that would never, ever frighten the people who actually hold power.

The video I watched got the details of the dissolution wrong. But maybe the details don’t matter. Whether it was New Times or Soviet collapse or generational change, the result was the same: a communist party chose to stop being communist. They called it realism. They called it adapting to new times. In the moment its leadership decided that power was impossible, that transformation was a fantasy, that the best we could hope for was better voting systems and more inclusive institutions, something irreplaceable was lost.

The CPGB’s assets eventually funded a campaign to change how we count votes. Seventy years of struggle, and that’s what it came to.

And yet. The Senedd passed votes at 16 in 2020 - the biggest franchise extension in Wales since 1969. Tactical voting is now completely normalised, with websites and apps telling people how to vote strategically in every election. Constitutional reform remains a live issue. The things Democratic Left and its successors campaigned for - these incremental reforms actually happened. Maybe this reformist, cross-party approach was more effective at achieving concrete changes than seventy years of revolutionary rhetoric ever was.

Maybe they had a point.