“The Socialist Party of Great Britain, a young organisation
and an offshoot from the Social Democratic Party, is
spreading about London and challenging the older
organisations in such districts as Battersea and
Tottenham. The members are Marxians and
revolutionaries, preaching the Class War. The
catechumens of the party are put through a rigid course
of training in the principles of their creed, which they
must be prepared to defend at the risk of their liberty.
What is most remarkable and disquieting about this
dangerous organisation is the fact that the members are
u n q u e s t i o n a b l y h i g h e r - g r a d e
working-men of great intelligence, respectability, and
energy. They are, as a whole, the best informed
Socialists in the country, and would make
i n c o m p a r a b l e soldiers, or d e s p e r a t e
barricadists. As r e v o l u t i o n a r i e s they deserve no
mercy : as men they command respect.”
W. Lawler Wilson,
The Menace of Socialism, 1909, p.316.
“The split in the SDF was followed, two years later, by another.
In 1905, a section of the members, chiefly in London, broke
away under the leadership of Fitzgerald, and formed the
Socialist Party of Great Britain. Equally with the SLP, this body
denounced the compromising tactics of the SDF; but it drew a
rather different moral. In its eyes, political action as practised
by the other Socialist bodies was mere reformism, but it was
also of the opinion that Trade Union action was doomed to
futility as long as the capitalist system remained in being.
Strictly revolutionary political action alone would help the
workers and the only activity that was justifiable under existing
conditions was the persistent education of the working class
for its revolutionary task. As there were no candidates worth
voting for, the slogan of the SPGB was ‘Don’t Vote’”
GDH Cole, Working Class Politics, 1832-1914, 1941, p. 177.
“It is difficult to integrate the Socialist Party of Great
Britain into any account of wider working-class politics
because its policy of hostility to all other political groups,
and rejection as an organisation of participation in any
partial economic or social struggles, effectively excluded
it from association with other tendencies. But no account
would be complete without some reference to them.
Before the War, they were a substantial presence in the
area. Their Tottenham Branch had over 100 members, and
there were also effective branches in Islington and
Hackney. The SPGB also had a very high proportion of the
ablest open-air speakers, notably Alex Anderson of
Tottenham, who by common consent was the best
socialist orator of his day. The SPGB’s principled Marxism
had perhaps a wider influence than it would like to
admit”.
Ken Weller, ‘Don’t be a Soldier!’ The Radical Anti-War
Movement in North London 1914-1918, 1985.
“The Russian debacle is rather appalling but quite
explicable. Lenin and Trotsky appear to me
to be of the SPGB type or the wilder types of the SDP.”
Clement Attlee in a letter to his
brother Tom, 20 March 1918(quoted in ,
Clem Attlee. A Biography by Francis Beckett,
2001).
“The Socialist Party of Great Britain . . .
denounced the Russian Revolution as state-capitalist
within hours of hearing of it”.
David Widgery, The Left in Britain 1956-1968, 1976.
“Another pre-1914 organisation with influence on Socialist
thought in Battersea, particularly in the building trade unions,
was the Socialist Party of Great Britain. It was the Battersea
branch of the SDF which had become the springboard for the
attack on the Hyndman leadership that resulted in the SPGB
being formed. From 1904-05 Sydney Hall in York Road
became the centre of their activity and propaganda. It was
from amongst the bricklayers that several powerful and
erudite speakers and debaters came to the fore. The Irish
bricklayer, Jack Fitzgerald, was one outstanding example,
fearless in debate, he was so confident in his own party case
that he would take on anyone, be they small fry or big cheese.
His style as a debater was to treat his opponent, from
whatever party – Tory, Liberal, Labour, ILP or Communist – as
the exponent of the policy of their party. He invariably knew
more about the programme and published material of his
opponents’ party than did his actual adversary. To get to grips,
not with a brilliant speech but with the written word, was his
method, the apt quotation to clinch an argument. If
challenged, he would dive into his trunk of books to produce
the evidence. His audience loved it. Undoubtedly ‘Fitz’ was the
star, but there were others too, bricklayers and impressive
SPGBers (Sloan, Cadman, Foan and others). I believe each of
them, in their day, taught their craft at the Ferndale School of
Building, then sited in Brixton. Here, they pioneered or upheld
extremely high standards of craftsmanship. Direct labour, too,
was seen as upholding standards”.
Harry Wicks, Keeping My Head: Memoirs of a British
Bolshevik, 1992.
“The course of the SPGB is more interesting, for it
maintained a more or less constant membership of two
or three hundred throughout the inter-war years, the
same number as belonged before the First World War.
Like the SLP, the SPGB had split from the SDF at the turn
of the century over the parent body’s reformism. Its
membership was concentrated in London with a handful
of branches in Manchester, Glasgow and a few other large
conurbations. In both theory and practice the SPGB was
an extreme manifestation of the pre-1917 Marxist
tradition. Its function was to educate the workers in the
intractability of capitalism and the hopelessness of all
trade union action or reform: its medium was the streetcorner
pitch where speakers would harangue passers-by
and sell the Socialist Standard. Since prospective members
were examined for their knowledge of Marxism and
ability to speak in public, and since they prided
themselves on their ‘scientific socialism’, propagandists of
the SPGB enjoyed a reputation as formidable Marxist
purists.”
Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science, Marxism in Britain
1917-1933, 1980.
“The 1922 general election saw a fierce political contest in
North Battersea, where Saklatvala, the Indian Communist, was
chosen, with national Labour Party approval, to be the Labour
candidate . . . This brought my first election experience.
Delivering leaflets, one day on the Burns estate, I chanced
upon a friendly SPGBer I had met previously at the Marx
class. He was short, somewhat bow-legged, always wore a
bowler hat and sold the Socialist Standard. Maybe I was overexcited
by the election, because in a kindly manner he set
about deflating my high hopes. ‘You are wasting your time and
energy young man,’ he said, ‘Socialism, not reforms, is what is
necessary.’ To complete the shock, he told me that he intended
to write across his ballot paper in the election one word:
‘Socialism’”.
Harry Wicks, Keeping My Head: Memoirs of a British
Bolshevik, 1992.
“When I first began to question the CP line I still sold the
Daily Worker, but at Marble Arch I came into contact with
the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and a guy who was
then the Secretary of the SPGB called [K]ohn. He gave
me a terrible hammering one night on my ‘Leninism’, and
I spent the whole night reading, and when I went back the
following night he gave me a bigger hammering. For some
months after that I used to attend SPGB meetings, and
learned a great deal from the SPGB over the course of
the next eight or nine months. But then I came across
Trotsky’s pamphlet What Next for Germany? . . . ”
Jock Haston, future leader of the Trotskyist Revolutionary
Communist Party, talking about 1934 in Against the
Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1924-
38 by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, 1986
.
“But it should be noted that Marx and Engels and Lenin did
use the words Socialism and Communism interchangeably, at
other times making a distinction between Communism as the
highest stage of Socialism. For an able study on the use of the
words at different times by Marx, Engels and Lenin see The
Socialist Standard, August, 1936”.
CLR James, World Revolution 1917-1936, chapter 5,
footnote 4, 1937.
“Of all the sights and sounds which attracted me on my
first arrival to live in London in the mid-thirties, one
combined operation left a lingering, individual spell. I
naturally went to Hyde Park to hear the orators, the best
of the many free entertainments on offer in the capital. I
heard the purest milk of the world flowing, then as now,
from the platform of the Socialist Party of Great Britain .”
Michael Foot, Debts of Honour, 1980.
“Why Socialism? As Pandit Jauraharlal Nehru sees it.
Hindustan Publishing Co., Ltd, Rajahmundry (Andra), S. India.
This pamplet was evidently issued under the influence of the
small body of Socialist sympathizers within the Indian
Nationalist movement. We are by no means convinced that its
contents give expression to the views of the Indian
Nationalists, for the pamphlet consists of six articles
reproduced from working class periodicals, four of which
originally appeared in the Western Socialist. The two others
were taken from the Socialist Call (Chicago) and the Socialist
Standard (London) ”.
Western Socialist, journal of the Socialist Party of Canada,
March 1939.
“The Communist Party has NO dealings with murderers,
liars, renegades, or assassins. The SPGB, which associates
itself with followers of Trotsky, the friend of Hess, has
always followed a policy which would mean disaster for
the British working class. They have consistently poured
vile slanders on Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, told filthy lies about the Red Army, the
Soviet people and its leaders, gloated over the
assassination of Kirov and other Soviet leaders, applauded
the wrecking activities of Trotskyist saboteurs in the
Soviet Union. They have worked to split the British
working class, and are in short agents of Fascism in Great
Britain. The CPGB refuses with disgust to deal with such
renegades. We treat them as vipers, to be destroyed”.
(Letter from Secretary of the West Ham branch of the
Communist Party, 23 February 1943, reproduced in
Socialist Standard, May 1943).
“In 1905 another split took place in the SDF, when part of the
membership this time mainly centred in London formed the
Socialist Party of Great Britain, a body so sectarian that it
adjured both politics and trade union action, believing that
socialism would come when everyone was converted. Fifty
years later it was still a tiny sect, mainly concerned with
echoing propaganda hostile to the Soviet Union”.
AL Morton and G Tate, The British Labour Movement, 1770-
1920, 1956, p. 218).
“. . . those honest and genuine revolutionaries, the
Socialist League and the Socialist Party of Great Britain,
which broke away from the left of the Social Democratic
Federation . . . ”
Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council and
later Home Secretary in the post-war Labour
government, in Forward from Victory! Labour’s Plan, 1946.
“In the forties and fifties, Turner was the star turn of a cuddly
little organisation grandly named the Socialist Party of Great
Britain. Its approach was Marxist, but it believed there could
be no real change until enough people had seen the light. It
was Tony’s job to show them the light, and he blinded them
daily with the brilliance of his wit. His technique, though
simple, demanded an IQ of near-genius level. He would serve
up 15 or 20 minutes of glorious knock-about humour, in which
hecklers were crucial. Once he had drawn a large enough
crowd from neighbouring meetings, he would sock the
socialism to his admiring audience for five minutes or so. But
he rarely went on much longer. Soon he would return to the
fun, alternating laughter and sermons for up to 90 minutes or
more. I don’t know how many converts he made—my guess is
quite a lot. But he provided better entertainment than most
professional comics.”
Ian Aitken, Guardian, 26 February 1992.
“The Brussels International Conference (25-26 May
1947): The Communistbond Spartacus excluded the
bordigist Partito Communista Internazionalista of Italy,
which took part in elections . . . It invited, nevertheless,
also the SPGB, as ‘witnesses’, one week before the
conference, with a view to the formation of an
International Contact Bureau, even though this last
participated in the British elections of 1945, perhaps
because it rejected the October revolution as ‘nonproletarian’.
The Executive Committee of the SPGB did
not send delegates, but only a statement. The SPGB
mentioned the invitation to the Conference during
meetings of its Executive Committee. Some members
wished to send representatives to Brussels.”
Philippe Bourrinet, The Dutch and German Communist Left
(1900-1968), p. 400 and p. 403
continued next column
“In the English-speaking world – since Mattick’s Living
Marxism ceased – there is no other organ that in criticising all
the Labor and socialist ‘reformers’ (really defenders of
capitalism) at the same time could show the positive aims of
pure class fight. For in England the most radical socialism is
the S.P.G.B., that believes in ‘pure’ parliamentarism, and Left,
that thinks a United Socialist Europe should be the slogan.”
Anton Pannekoek (Letter to J. A. Dawson, 12 October
1947)
“Less sullied even than the ILP by the contamination of
practical politics was the ‘SPGB’ – the Socialist Party of
Great Britain. This was a group of non-violent Marxists,
who preached an undiluted gospel of class struggle and
poured an equal contempt on every other party, including
Labour and the Communists. They put up two candidates,
one in North Paddington (where they had previously
fought in 1945 and at a 1947 by-election) and the other
in East Ham South. Their propaganda had the austere
purity of perfectionism, offering, as they truly said, no
vote-catching promises. Their candidates had the selfeffacing
devotion of members of a monastic order. ‘One
thing we must warn you about’, they told their followers,‘Do not trust in leaders, trust in yourselves alone. Unless
you understand the cause and the solution of your
miserable condition no leader can help you, no matter
how honest and sincere he may be; if you do understand,
then you do not require leaders; you will know what you
want and how to instruct your delegates to get you what
you want’. Their 1950 intervention can hardly have
accelerated the revolution of their dreams. In East Ham
South they won 256 votes. In North Paddington the 1945
figure of 472 was more than halved, and reduced to a
mere 192”.
H. G. Nicholas, The British General Election of 1950, 1951,
pp. 253-4.
“It was in the 1960s, and a by-election was being fought in
Glasgow Woodside constituency. In those days, parties too poor
to afford posters still used the city’s traditional political
medium: chalk on the pavement: One day, walking up
Lynedoch Street, I found beneath my feet the following slogan,
written in large, precise white capital letters:
‘IF YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND AND WANT SOCIALISM,
DO NOT VOTE FOR THE CANDIDATE OF THE SOCIALIST
PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN.’
For sheer integrity, that slogan cannot be beaten. Its
authors, the SPGB, were and still are an austere Marxist
sect founded well before the Russian Revolution”.
Neal Ascherson,
Independent on Sunday, 22
September 1996.
“Some claim that the tiny Socialist Party of Great
Britain is anarchist in inspiration”.
(Demanding the Impossible:A History of Anarchism by
Peter Marshall, 1992,p.495).
“In this country, the ultra-orthodox Marxists, the Socialist Party
of Great Britain advocate the abolition of the wages system,
free access to the means of production, the abolition of the
state as anarchists do. But and an important but, they want to
abolish the state by capturing the state through putting an X
on a ballot paper. So it would seem they are anarchists in bad
health”.
Robert Lynn, Vote: What for?, 1991.
“Robert Lynn revelled in the forums, which he called the
University of Life. They certainly had their moments. I
remember one exemplary SPGB graduate speaking
mounting the platform, drawing a ten-shilling note from
his pocket and holding it dangling from his thumb and
forefinger for a quarter of an hour or so while delivering
a devastatingly witty attack on money. The audience of
thirty or so were spellbound. There was not a single
heckler, until he set fire to it”.
Stuart Christie, My Granny Made Me An Anarchist: 1946-
1964, 2003, p. 157.
“The Labour Party, Trades Council and the STUC . . . were
largely responsible for securing the biggest postwar
demonstration in Glasgow till then, at the start of the 1960s.
Incidentally, that was the demonstration that produced the
sectarian slogan to end all sectarian slogans. Just as we were
turning round the corner of Sauchiehall Street two grim
stalwarts of the Socialist Party of Great Britain were standing
heralding the march with a huge banner and slogan which
read: ‘This demonstration is useless – You must first destroy
capitalism.”
Janet and Norman Buchan, “The Campaign in Scotland”,
in The CND Story, edited by Hohn Minnion and Philip
Bolsover, 1983, p. 53.
“Actually,” Bird says, “I was a member of something called
the Socialist Party of Great Britain at school for a while.
You had to pass an exam, you know. You could not just
join”.
John Bird interviewed in Evening Standard, 3 December
1997.
“Those who taunt the so called‘abstenstionists’ with
SPGBism . . . ”Contribution to internal debate on the Common
Market within IS, forerunner of the SWP, IS Bulletin, July 1971, p. 60.
“In the coming r e v o l u t i o n a r y confrontations between
the working class and the bourgeoisie the role of the SPGB will be
indistinguishable from that of any of the other bourgeois parties”.
(World Revolution, organ of the International Communist
Current, July 1976).
“The SPGB has survived since 1904 as a proletarian
organisation. While its rigid sectarianism from the beginning
tended to inhibit any real contribution to the clarification of
the tasks of the working class, it nonetheless stood against
both world wars, attacking them as capitalist wars in which
the working class had no interest, denouncing anti-fascism for
the anti-working class movement it was. The SPGB also
recognises Russia and China as state capitalist, and sees
parties of the left and extreme left as parties of state
capitalism.”
(World Revolution, April 1977)
“The fact of the matter is that the credit for this
particular form of state capitalism should go back to the
Socialist Party of Great Britain who taught Jock Haston
his Marxism in the first place and had promulgated the
theory as far back as 1918. For it was Haston who first
raised the question of state capitalism within the
Revolutionary Communist Party, not only as a purely
Russian phenomenon but in global terms, both in the
group’s internal bulletin (War and the International, pp.
182-5) and in a series of articles in Socialist Appeal (mid-
August to mid-September 1947). In fact Cliff’s remit from
Mandel when he first came to Britain was specifically to
argue against these incipient ‘state capitalist’ heresies, and
what happened was that in the course of the dispute the
contestants changed sides. Anyone who wishes to make a
serious investigation of the whole topic should consult
the above sources, as well as the SPGB’s position, which
was reissued as a pamphlet in the same year as Cliff first
published his own, though we have to admit that Cliff’s
logic is inferior to theirs, since they dated Russia’s
capitalist revolution back to 1917.”
Revolutionary History, Autumn 1991, reviewing of SWP
member Alex Callinicos’s book Trotskyism.
“Students at the London School of Economics last night voted
strongly to apologize to Professor H. J. Eysenck for the incident
on Tuesday during which he was punched and kicked as he
started to address the school’s Social Science Society. But
although voting was about five to one at a mass meeting
attended by about 600 of the school’s students, a later motion
attacked Professor Eysenck’s views on race, heredity and
intelligence and said that those responsible for the attack
should be actively defended against any disciplinary action . . .
Moving the successful motion to apologize to Professor
Eysenck, Mr D. Zucconi, who said he was a member of the
Socialist Party of Great Britain and the World Socialist Society,
said: ‘An issue like this in general cuts across political
differences. The events on Tuesday were a disgrace and
discredit to socialism and a blow for fascism’. Responsibility for
the attack on Professor Eysenck has been attributed to the
Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist).”
Times, 11 and 17 May 1973.
“Sir Keith Joseph, the Conservative Party’s policy
overlord, used a debate in Streatham, London, yesterday
on ‘The Case for Capitalism’ to attack Mr Wedgewood
Benn’s plans to channel pension and insurance funds to
government-approved investment projects.
In the lunchtime debate in the crowded hall of the
Philippa Fawcett teacher training college, Sir Keith said
there were broadly three main ways of organizing society:
by mutual agreement, a family type of agreement suitable
for a large kibbutz; by a market system, with supply and
demand regulated by profit and loss under the pressure
of competition framed within humane social laws; and by
the command system adopted by all centralised societies
and dictatorships, in which prices were laid down by a
bureaucracy.
Sir Keith was challenged by an idealistic member of
the Socialist Party of Great Britain, Mr Edgar Hardy, aged
75. Mr Hardy believes that Marx got his economics right
and that Maynard Keynes diverted attention with his
‘disastrously mistaken theories’”.
Times, 25 April 1975.
“At the Barras market in Glasgow about 25 years ago openair
political meetings were not uncommon, and the best were
conducted by a fiery brand of working-class revolutionaries
called the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Founded about a
hundred years ago (and still going, I’m glad to say) and proudly
hostile to all other allegedly socialist or communist political
parties, they had several fine speakers and in those less
apathetic days could always raise a fair crowd of the
starvelings whom they hoped to rouse from their slumber.
Scorn for their hearers’ meek acceptance of poverty and
satire upon the quality of goods and services supplied to the
workers were prominent in their arguments, as when the
speaker would draw our attention to an evil-looking greasyspoon
caff and recite parts of the horrible menu, concluding
with Stomach pump free of charge. Once, when challenged by
a wee bauchle with scarce a backside to his trousers on the
grounds that ‘under socialism we widnae be individuals’, the
agitator on the soapbox paused from his remarks on the rival
attraction of ‘Jehovah’s Jazzband’ (a Salvation Army ensemble)
just down the street, fixed him with a baleful eye, and loosed
a withering tirade about how the questioner was obviously a
proud specimen of individuality, with your individual Giro and
your individual manky shirt and your individual football scarf
and your individual council flat and your individual Scotch pie
for your individual dinner . . .
It went on for ages, a tour de force of flyting”.
Kenneth Wright, Herald (Glasgow), 13 February 2001.
“The Socialist Party has reiterated its ban on people with
religious beliefs; it says they cannot share the materialist
philosophy of true socialists. The latest edition of the
party’s journal, The Socialist Standard, concludes a twopage
debate on the ban by saying that not even Jesus
could have joined. ‘We can’t think of a single thing
[Christianity’s] mythological founder is supposed to have
taught and done that would qualify him as a socialist.’
Labour supporters are also refused.”
Church Times, 12 April 1996.
“The SPGB has neither a leader nor a hierarchy of
committees, and it repudiates the principle of leadership.
Organised as local branches, the members of each electing
their own officers independently of Head Office (which serves
as hardly more than a clearing-house) and sending delegates
to the annual Conference, it works throughout on one person
one vote and simple majorities. Subject to a minimum of
procedural rules any branch can bring any issue before
Conference and Conference decisions bind the Executive
Committee (which, like the Party Officers, is elected annually
by vote of the whole Party). Any six branches can call a Party
poll, and any member expelled can appeal to the annual
Conference. All meetings of the Executive Committee and the
branches, Delegate Meetings and Conference, are open to all
members (and in fact to the public). These are not just
aspirations or entries in the Rule Book; unlike other parties the
SPGB really does function in this way. A majority of the
members controls the organisation and its officers.”
George Walford, Angles on Anarchism, 1991, p. 53.
Photos in this section from SPGB rally, Metropolitan
Theatre, Paddington 1946