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UNDERMINING LABOUR
In the ideological sphere, the period from 1956 to 1968 was a miserable time for the CPGB. In 1956, Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin and his suppression of the Hungarian rising were body-blows to King Street's pretensions and influence. The rise of CND was an enormous embarrassment; the CP only came out in support of unilateralism late in the day and gleaned only meagre pickings from its change of line, and its influence in the trade unions on this issue was not enough to prevent them swinging back to Gaitskell & Co. in 1961. This influence had in any case suffered from the exposure of the CP's ballot-rigging in the ETU, a scandal which actually began in 1956 but only climaxed in 1961. In international affairs, the Sino-Soviet split was a further embarrassment, and the CP gained little or nothing from the Vietnam war since, in deference to Moscow's ultra-cautious attitude, it was forced to content itself with calling merely for peace and was easily outflanked by the Trotskyist-inspired 'Victory to the NLF" slogans. Finally, as if all this was not enough to put up with, 1968 delivered two further blows to King Street's influence and morale with the May events in France, in which the initiative was clearly held by the Ultra-Left and the Communists' role was unequivocally conservative, and Brezhnev's suppression of Dubcek's quasi-liberal experiment in Czechoslovakia.
It says something for the sheer dogged tenacity of the Gollan-Ramelson generation in the CPGB's leadership that they stolidly kept plodding away through all this. And this persistence was rewarded, for in 1969 something at last turned up. What turned up was not the election of Jack Straw to the NUS presidency, which only subsequently acquired any significance, but Barbara Castle's attempt to rationalise the enormous industrial power which the working class had built up over 25 years of full employment, In Place of Strife. If anything revived the CPGB's fortunes, this did. At long last, the extensive network of influence which the party had built up and managed to preserve over the years throughout the trade union movement could be vigorously mobilised without reservations to 'kill the bill'. By helping to kill the bill, and by helping to foment the ensuing 'wages explosion', the CPGB helped to ensure Labour's defeat in the 1970 general election, and transformed its own prospects in the process.
Between 1970 and 1974 the CPGB exercised a degree of leadership within the organised working class's resistance to the Heath government of a kind it had not enjoyed since the 1930s. It was the CP-led Liaison Committee for the Defence of the Trade Unions (LCDTU) which spearheaded the trade union movement's opposition to the Industrial Relations Act. It was Communists who led the 'work-in' at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971. It was the CP which provided much of the effective organisation and planning which underlay the successful miners' strike of early 1972. It was Communist dockers who brought the National Industrial Relations Court into disrepute in mid-1972. And it was Communist influence which helped to torpedo Heath's bid to secure trade union agreement to an entirely new, and immeasurably enhanced, role for organised labour in the running of the economy in the Tripartite Talks of August-September 1972, and which prompted the NUM to launch a second offensive against Heath's government in December 1973.
But the ground had been prepared for this development some years earlier. The LCDTU had been set up by two CP members, Kevin Halpin and Jim Hiles, its first chairman and secretary, in 1966, the year the Wilson government introduced the six-months statutory wage freeze, and the year Wilson denounced 'tight-knit groups of politically motivated men' (i.e. the CP) for fomenting the seamen's strike which precipitated the government's austerity measures. The Labour government's successive attempts to introduce incomes policy were the original cause of the revival of the CP's industrial influence. The CP was determined to sabotage any and every kind of incomes policy, because it was determined to exploit traditional wage militancy to undermine the Labour Party's position as the political wing of the labour movement and its claims to have become 'the natural party of government' and to be pursuing socialist policies. Preserving traditional trade union practices in order to maximise the scope for wage militancy in order to subvert the Labour Party's conception of democratic socialism was the CPGB's grand strategy in a nutshell. And because Wilson's Labour Party did not have it in it to wage a real fight within the unions in defence of its policies, the CP had made a massive amount of headway by 1970.