Communist Party of Britain
The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) was formed in 1988 by a disaffected segment of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), including the editorship of the party controlled newspaper, The Morning Star. The founders of the CPB blamed what they saw as a domineering clique in the CPGB's leadership for precipitating a dramatic decline in the party's fortunes by introducing a new party constitution. The youth wing of the CPGB, the Young Communist League, had collapsed, and The Morning Star was losing circulation.
The next year, the leaders of CPGB formally declared that they had never been Marxist-Leninists, and abandoned the party's programme "British Road to Socialism". Members of the CPB perceived this as the CPGB turning its back on socialism.
Since then, the CPB has worked constantly on the fringes of the labour and trade union movement in Britain. It is an important player in the Stop the War Coalition, one of the movement's directors being a Communist Party of Britain member.
Due to the Registration of Political Parties Act 1998, the Communist Party of Britain is the only political party in Britain legally entitled to use the hammer and sickle as an electoral symbol, although to indicate the party's commitment to peace, the hammer and dove is the most commonly used CPB symbol, whilst the New Communist Party uses the hammer and sickle with the NCP initials underneath.
The Communist Party of Britain consists of branch organisations, and districts. It also encompasses the Communist Party of Wales and the Communist Party of Britian (Scotland). The Communist Party of Scotland is an unrelated organisation.
A few years ago an internal dispute within the CPB spilled over into the Morning Star where journalists went on strike against "management". This very messy affair resulted in many of the original founders of the CPB leaving the organisation. It has approximately one thousand members. Despite claims, mainly stemming from long-time rival the Socialist Workers Party that it consists singularly of elderly Stalinists, at a recent Party congress, half of the seventy delegates were aged under thirty-five years.
