Common Wealth Party

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about a left-wing party during World War II. For the inter-war land and taxation reform party, see Commonwealth Land Party (UK).
This article is about the political party. For the book by
Common Wealth (book)
.

Common Wealth Party

The Common Wealth Party (CW) was a

pressure group
, until 1993.

The war years

Common Wealth was founded on 26 July 1942 in

Member of Parliament (MP) Sir Richard Acland, along with independents such as the industrialist and designer Robert 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 Vital

electoral 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 the Nine Point Group.

Following the electoral success of

guild 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 book The 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 and Kitty Wintringham entitled Fellowship or Morality?. Wintringham encouraged C. A. Smith to become party chairman, the two having been brought together for the journal Left, after quitting their respective Marxist parties (the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Independent 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 the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal 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: in Eddisbury, Skipton and Chelmsford.

In February 1943, the party contested and lost four by-elections: on the tenth in Ashford Catherine Williamson against the Conservative by 5,000 votes; the next day, Wintringham in North Midlothian against that party's candidate by 869 votes; on the sixteenth and twenty-third against others in North Portsmouth and Watford by more than 2,000 votes.[4]

In April,

John Eric Loverseed amounted to the first winning candidate returned to the Commons, by winning Eddisbury.[4] In November 1944, he left the party and joined Labour in May of the next year.[5] In the 1945 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.

Post–war development

The inability to maintain a Parliamentary presence created a crisis for Common Wealth. At the Hastings 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 with The 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 the Cairo Forces Parliament.

During the 1950s, the party made preparations to contest Oxford, 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 the Industrial 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 with Plaid Cymru (sharing a syndicalist tradition) and the Scottish National Party.

The active collaboration led to the joint publication in 1956 of Our Three Nations. This advocated very great

Ecology Party
.

In 1992, surviving members and political associates met in London for a 50th anniversary lunch. Weeks later, the death of W.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.

Archives and key accounts

The archives are kept by the University of Sussex. The early history was the subject of the doctoral thesis of Dr Angus 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 in Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth.[7]

Primary source contemporary chronologies are in periodicals The Libertarian and then Common Wealth Journal.[8]

Later platform

Common Wealth's later political philosophy was heavily influenced by a notion that a new

neoconservative) argued that the rise of a salaried
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 the

loan 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.

Economy of SFR Yugoslavia
).

Although sympathetic to the

non-aligned movement, CW was critical of its inclusion of dictatorships from various part of the political spectrum. Some members of CW were active in Amnesty International
.

Influences in philosophy

Other influences during this era included humanistic psychology. Noted psychologists Dr

Ernst 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 at Braziers Park, Oxfordshire
.

Members of Parliament

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

Bibliography

Forward March books

  • Unser Kampf
  • Forward March (both by Richard Acland)

Nine Point Group

  • The Nine Point Plan

Common Wealth

Pamphlets – First series 1943

Magazines and Journals

Left 1942-1947 Town and Country Review 1943-44 Common Wealth Review 1944-49 Common Wealth News 1949 The Libertarian 1950-1988 Common Wealth Journal 1989-1990

Archives

Large library collections

  • University of Sheffield
  • National Library of Scotland
  • London School of Economics

See also

References

  1. ^
    ISBN 9781849085496
    (p. 227).
  2. ^ Robert Dudley Best, My Modern Movement, EnvelopeBooks 2021
  3. ^ a b http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/commonwealth-party-tf/ [dead link‍]
  4. ^
    S2CID 158931370
    .
  5. ^ F. W. S. Craig, Minor Parties at British Parliamentary Elections
  6. ^ The Last English Revolutionary, Hugh Purcell and Phyll Smith
  7. ^ Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth, Vincent Geoghegan.
  8. ^ Series compiled and edited by John Banks (activist)
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