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Common Wealth Party | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Abbreviation | CW |
| Founded | 26 July 1942 (1942-07-26) |
| Dissolved | 1993 |
| Merger of | 1941 Committee, Forward March |
| Ideology | Socialism Common ownership Syndicalism Left-libertarianism |
| Political position | Left-wing |
TheCommon Wealth Party (CW) was asocialistpolitical party in theUnited Kingdom with parliamentary representation in the House of Commons from 1942 (the middle of the Second World War) until 1946. Thereafter CW continued to function, essentially as apressure group, until 1993.
Common Wealth was founded on 26 July 1942 inWorld War II by the alliance of two left-wing groups: the1941 Committee – a think tank centred onPicture Post ownerEdward G. Hulton and its 'star' writersJ.B. Priestley and Spanish Civil War veteranTom Wintringham;[1] and the neo-ChristianForward March movement led byLiberal PartyMember of Parliament (MP) SirRichard Acland, along with independents such as the industrialist and designerRobert Dudley Best[2] and former Liberals who believed that the party had no direction. It aimed to be more appealing to Labour's potential voters than those leaning towards Conservatism.[3][4]
Common Wealth stood for three principles: Common Ownership, Morality in Politics and VitalDemocracy.[1] Disagreeing with theelectoral pact established with other parties in the wartime coalition, key figures in the 1941 Committee began sponsoring independent candidates in by-elections under the banner of theNine Point Group.
Following the electoral success ofTom Driberg with this support in 1942, the Committee, a social movement, proposed becoming a political party through a merger with Forward March, though many preferred movement status. Through pressure from Priestley and Wintringham, 'Party' was never formally part of Common Wealth's name. The group was led by Acland (MP),Vernon Bartlett, J.B. Priestley, and Tom Wintringham. Its programme of common ownership echoed that of the Labour Party but had more idealistic perspective, later termed "libertarian socialist". It came to reject the State-dominated form of socialism adopted by Labour under the influence ofBeatrice andSidney Webb, aligning itself instead withco-operative,syndicalist andguild socialist traditions. A party proposal became that personal income, by taxation, should have an upper limit.[3]
Though the party was initially chaired by Priestley, he stepped down after just a few months, unable to reconcile himself with the politics of Acland – who as a sitting MP he viewed as exerting undue influence. Wintringham was the natural successor but deferred to Acland, despite very real political differences between them.
Acland himself had a less easy-going approach. In his bookThe Forward March he had claimed that in Britain under a Forward March government:
[it is] the community as a whole which must decide whether or not a man shall be employed upon our resources, and how and when and in what manner he shall work ...[the community will] run camps for shirkers on very tolerable conditions.
Acland went on to say of these camps:
[Hitler] has stumbled across (or has needed to make use of) a small part, or perhaps one should say one particular aspect of, what will ultimately be required of humanity.
These differences, which led to Priestley stepping down from the leadership and his gradual withdrawal from the party (though he continued to support and endorse individual candidates), were a source of continued tension between former 1941 Committee and Nine Point Group members on one side and Forward Marchers and Christian Socialists on the other.
These differences in approach within Common Wealth were highlighted in a 1944 booklet by Tom andKitty Wintringham entitledFellowship or Morality?. Wintringham encouragedC. A. Smith to become party chairman, the two having been brought together for the journalLeft, after quitting their respective Marxist parties (theCommunist Party of Great Britain and theIndependent Labour Party) for their support for the war, and Smith's election in 1944 strengthened the party's syndicalist, libertarian vision.
The war administration was an all-party coalition government incorporating theConservative,Labour, andLiberal Parties, who agreed that their MP vacancies should be filled unopposed. Common Wealth intervention allowed a radicalising electorate to return socialist candidates in Conservative seats: inEddisbury,Skipton andChelmsford.
In February 1943, the party contested and lost four by-elections: on the tenth inAshfordCatherine Williamson against the Conservative by 5,000 votes; the next day, Wintringham inNorth Midlothian against that party's candidate by 869 votes; on the sixteenth and twenty-third against others inNorth Portsmouth andWatford by more than 2,000 votes.[4]
In April,John Eric Loverseed amounted to the first winning candidate returned to the Commons, by winningEddisbury.[4] In November 1944, he left the party and joined Labour in May of the next year.[5] In the1945 general election, voters deserted Common Wealth for Labour – only Chelmsford (not fought by Labour) was held. In 1946 after Wintringham left the party, that MP,Ernest Millington, crossed the floor to join the Labour Party.
The inability to maintain a Parliamentary presence created a crisis for Common Wealth. At theHastings conference in 1946, the party split. Two-thirds, including the original leadership, defected to Labour but were unable to persuade the remainder to disband. Tom and Kitty Wintringham left and Tom joined the Labour Party, though kept friendly with CW members and kept an active interest the party and the development of its theory and stance until his death, Kitty remained informally involved withThe Libertarian until she died in 1963. Many of the new leadership then elected had joined when in the armed forces among which prominent figures of theCairo Forces Parliament.
During the 1950s, the party made preparations to contestOxford, with Douglas Stuckey as prospective candidate, but these were never brought to fruition. For the remainder of its existence it became,de facto, a pressure group, its organisation evolving, and generally contracting, as old age took its toll of the leading figures.
In the postwar period, CW was active in some domestic and international campaigns; it developed worldwide contacts. For Israel and the less-than-state of Palestine, it advocated two internationally recognised states. At home, it helped to form theIndustrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM) and co-campaigned for small parties to be allowed to make party political broadcasts. Through the latter campaign it developed close links withPlaid Cymru (sharing a syndicalist tradition) and theScottish National Party.
The active collaboration led to the joint publication in 1956 ofOur Three Nations. This advocated very greatdevolution in the United Kingdom: a 'confraternity' of self-governing states. CW also favoured regional government in England and was sympathetic toMebyon Kernow. Members such as Banks joined theWessex Regionalists. Executive Committee members played an active, at times leading, role in these movements, especially during the 1980s. Others were active in nascent environmentalism, including its then main political party, theEcology Party.
In 1992, surviving members and political associates met in London for a 50th anniversary lunch. Weeks later, the death ofW.J. 'Buck' Taylor, for many years the Secretary, called into question the ability to continue. Common Wealth resolved to dissolve at a Cheltenham meeting the next year.
The archives are kept by theUniversity of Sussex. The early history was the subject of the doctoral thesis ofDrAngus Calder.
Detail of the party's formation and by-elections can be found in a biography of Wintringham,The Last English Revolutionary.[6] The tussle between Acland's didactic Anglican-rooted Christianism and Wintringham's syndicalist Marxism is inSocialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth.[7]
Primary source contemporary chronologies are in periodicalsThe Libertarian and thenCommon Wealth Journal.[8]
Common Wealth's later political philosophy was heavily influenced by a notion that a newmode of production, known asmanagerialism, was replacing the archetypal forms of capitalism. This idea was drawn from works such asJames Burnham'sThe Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham (a formerTrotskyist Marxist turned pioneeringneoconservative) argued that the rise of asalaried managerial class, accompanied by the withdrawal of shareholders from active running of big businesses, was creating a split between the (legal) proprietors of organisations and a class of non-proprietorial professionals who were responsible for the day-to-day management of those organisations. CW used this to develop a modified Marxist analysis — this saw managerialism as a historical stage between capitalism and socialism.
This, per Common Wealth, characterised theAttlee government's post-war programme ofnationalisation. The party set out its critique of managerialism in a pamphlet entitledNationalisation is not Socialism (1948). In essence, this critique suggested that: many features of theLabour Party's programme had not been approved by voters; this confirmed the theory that power, in "socialised" economies as much as market ones, was in the hands of a largely unaccountable managerial class, which served theowners of capital at arm's length; most private ownership was continuing; shares were being replaced byloan stock at inflated valuations, the interest on which was paid from the profits of state-run industries; ministers refused to answer questions in parliament on operational matters, meaning that the management of nationalised industries were not subject to meaningful democratic control; worker representation at board level was either token or non-existent and often justified by stereotyping that workers did not yet have the skills required (unconvincing in CW's view given the record of the co-operative movement, the trade unions, and the Labour Party itself), and; a growing cult of "experts" (i.e.technocracy) and a drift towards authoritarianism, as in oft-appointed ex-military officers running such industries.
Worker-controlled organisations were also promoted by CW, which publicised successful real-world examples, such as the chemical manufacturerScott Bader Commonwealth. While CW was critical of communist dictatorships, it expressed limited support for the system ofworker self-management inYugoslavia underJosep Tito (seeEconomy of SFR Yugoslavia).
Although sympathetic to thenon-aligned movement, CW was critical of its inclusion of dictatorships from various part of the political spectrum. Some members of CW were active inAmnesty International.
Other influences during this era included humanistic psychology. Noted psychologists DrDon Bannister and DrJames Hemming were CW members, and via Hemming and Wintringham so did their friendErnst Schumacher make contributions to party thought. CW enthusiastically adopted the 'executive-sensory nexus' model of organisation, derived from left/right brain theory. Under this, the Executive Committee, responsible for current decision-making, is shadowed by a scrutiny panel, known in CW as the Sensory Committee, whose role is monitoring and review, research and longer-term development. CW's interest in optimising social organisation consistent with its principles also led it to develop close links with the School of Integrative Social Research atBraziers Park,Oxfordshire.
| Name | Constituency | Term | Later | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Richard Acland | Barnstaple | 1942–45 | Labour Party | |
| Vernon Bartlett | Bridgwater | 1942–45 | Independent Progressive | |
| John Loverseed | Eddisbury | 1943–45 | Fellowship Party | |
| Hugh Lawson | Skipton | 1944–45 | Labour Party | |
| Ernest Millington | Chelmsford | 1945–46 | Labour Party | |
Left 1942-1947Town and Country Review 1943-44Common Wealth Review 1944-49Common Wealth News 1949The Libertarian 1950-1988Common Wealth Journal 1989-1990