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Doris Lessing |
Ex-comrades
everywhere. . .
LORD Denis Healey, a former Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, was once asked which was the biggest party in the House of Lords. He replied sharply, “Ex-members of the British Communist Party, including myself.”
Even Peter Mandelson, one of our European Commissioners, served his communist apprenticeship in the Hampstead Garden Suburb Young Communist League. Our Blairite ex-home secretary John Reid was a militant member of the party on Clydeside in the 1970s.
The party’s influence in the 1930s and the early 1970s was enormous. But post-1945 it had only two MPs. This political failure sank into irrelevance matched with the power it wielded in the trade unions and on the shop floor.
Raphael Samuel, in a collection of essays entitled The Lost World of British Communism, points at the “religious fervour” and fervent devotion and determination which people gave to the party. Schooled to defend the Soviet’s experiment, many followed blindly.
Samuel’s former genetically communist credentials are impeccable. Born in 1934, he died in 1996. He left the Communist Party in 1956, because of the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution, but throughout his personal and professional life he was always there for his former comrades.
Communism flourished in north-west Camden when he was a zealous young communist. He writes about leaving the “airy heights of Highbury for the cellars of Kentish Town”. After the Second World War, the Tories had three million members, the Labour Party one million, and the Communist Party 60,000. This was a time of Right and Left, and nothing in between.
Samuel admired the Communist Vanguard, particularly the working-class ones, all subscribing to the words of Liu Shao-chi: “A good Communist is the first to suffer, the last to enjoy.” Doris Lessing wrote in her “Golden Notebook” about the pain of leaving friends after the revelations about Stalin’s blood period.
In earlier days, less notable women were expelled or excommunicated. One Mrs Kingston, from St Pancras, was thrown out for challenging the theory of materialism – she preferred idealism. Another, Mrs Conrad, did not believe that she should be dictated to by the Communist International. Two Desperate Housewives shown the door because their deviation could not be tolerated.
The pleasure of this unfinished book is the way Samuel himself was trying to find a way forward, as so many on the Left still are. I suspect he pined for a time when faith and hope might reassert itself. In one sentence, he is fair to his former comrades: “At a time when socialism was a worker’s faith, communists were the most fearless practitioners of it”.
The noble Lord Healey I’m sure would agree.
ILLTYD HARRINGTON
• The Lost World of British Communism. By Raphael Samuel.
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