The Plan to Capture the British Labour Party and its Paradoxical Results, 1947-91

Abstract

The Communist Party of Great Britain consistently supported a trade union strategy after the second world war designed to eliminate the Labour Party. Yet by the 1990s leading members of the Party claimed that the organization’s last major contribution to British politics, before it dissolved itself in 1991, was to help rescue Labour from the left-wing ghetto into which it had been consigned during the 1980s. This article explains communist strategy in the postwar decades and the paradoxical outcomes to which it led.