Weekly Worker 656 Thursday January 18 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

The next Stepney?

Lawrence Parker reviews Piratin's Our flag stays red, Lawrence and Wishart, 2006

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites the idea of changing the world has taken a battering. Retreat and demoralisation have bred a particular type of activist that would be familiar to most readers of this paper.

This type of leftist implicitly accepts that the project of large-scale change is off the agenda. Instead, they tell us that it is better to start off with small ideas - build a trade union, save a hospital, defend council housing, argue for more road humps (‘If you’re with them when they want their windows fixed by the council then they’ll be with you in the revolution.’) In other words, start small and you’ll get bigger.

These wise sages really ought to take the time to dwell on this little book and the circumstances that surrounded its original appearance in 1948 (partly drawn out by a thought-provoking new introduction by John Callow).

The Communist Party of Great Britain in pre-World War II Stepney (and other strongholds, such as the Rhondda, south Wales) had a record of community activism that in its breadth and dynamism was a thousand times stronger than anything our present-day localists can manage.

Stepney CPGB’s record on anti-fascism, leading rent strikes, campaigning for equality in civil defence during World War II (Piratin recounts episodes such as the invasion of the Savoy Hotel in 1940, and leading working class Londoners into the Underground when their use as bomb shelters was initially opposed by the authorities) meant that Piratin was able to enjoy a groundswell of support in his election as Communist MP for Stepney in 1945.

However, Piratin’s election also coincided with a rather benign set of political circumstances for the CPGB nationally. After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the party followed a respectable course of supporting the war effort in Britain, even if that meant pulling the plug on strike actions. Also, Russian resistance during World War II and the fact that the Soviet Union was Britain’s ally meant that ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin was popular among sections of British society (aided in some cases by liberal doses of Stalinist propaganda, helpfully broadcast by the BBC). The CPGB was thus more ‘popular’ than it had ever been (unless you wanted to strike).

By the time this book originally appeared in 1948, all this had changed - the CPGB began to feel the chill blast of the cold war, as the Soviet Union reverted to its traditional role as ‘enemy of civilisation’. Callow says: “… Piratin suddenly found himself politically isolated. He was no longer seen as the promoter of a popular front of all humanity against fascism, the patriotic raiser of funds for the war effort, the sturdy ARP Warden who had braved the Blitz; now he became an apologist for a rapacious and hostile foreign power” (pxviii). Piratin himself talks of the “intense and almost universal propaganda against the Soviet Union and the Communist Party” (p88).

Callow goes on to argue persuasively that the book “was the product not, as it might seem at first glance, of communist electoral hubris, but as a response to a changing, and increasingly unfavourable, political climate”. So Piratin is trying to rally the CPGB troops, to show them what is possible if you follow the Stepney example of effective community activism and give them a means by which to evade the ugly political clouds formed from the party’s defence of the indefensible in the shape of the Soviet Union. In a similar manner, our contemporary localists fail to face up to the left’s theoretical crisis, preferring to cling instead to ‘the issues’.

Unfortunately, Piratin’s rallying call was a failure. The CPGB’s willingness down the years to take up community questions was no shield from the cold war blast. Piratin lost his parliamentary seat in 1950 (not helped by boundary changes), his share of the vote falling to 12.5%. The high point of the CPGB’s electoral record was in 1945-46, when it gained two MPs (the other was Willie Gallacher in West Fife, also defeated in 1950) and had 215 councillors elected. By 1950, 97 of its 100 parliamentary candidates had lost their deposits, with local election results reflecting this adverse trend. The CPGB began a spiral into oblivion in electoral terms and the party never faced up to the fact that its support for brutal anti-democratic dictatorships in the eastern bloc crippled its effectiveness as any kind of progressive force on the left. The events of 1956 further shattered its morale, with its remaining activists sheltering from the raging storm by constituting themselves as ‘good trade unionists’ or effective community workers.

The CPGB clung onto some council seats in later years and Annie Powell even became mayor in the Rhondda in 1979 (after being elected as a councillor in 1961) but these were isolated pockets - one suspects that these comrades were elected due to their personal following rather than their political affiliation.

Piratin himself became relatively disengaged from the party in the 1960s, preferring instead to concentrate on building up a number of successful businesses. And, of course, we should not see him as necessarily disconnected from the CPGB’s Stalinism. On one hand, we have the author of Our flag stays red: dynamic, dashing and popular. On the other, we have the Piratin who is memorably satirised in Edward Upward’s novel The rotten elements: politically crippled by the monstrous amateur dramatics of British ‘official’ communism.

Anybody who wants to use this book as a means to a strategy by which the big political questions can be ducked in favour of ‘community issues’ is - unlike Phil Piratin, it must be said - doomed to obscurity.

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