Index
Contents: This Issue
Search CHNN
CHNN Home
Under the Red Flag
Keith Laybourn and Dylan Murphy, Under the Red Flag: A History of Communism in Britain, Sutton Publishing, 1999, pp. xx + 233, ISBN 0 7509 1485 8, £25.
If you try to buy this book on the Internet, you will find it listed as Under the Red Flap, making it sound like a pop-up book, a kind of Where's Spot? for the small children of labour historians. Spot the Mistake would be a better title, since the book is written with a breath-taking lack of care.
In the careless world of Under the Red Flap, Kevin Halpin becomes Kevin 'Halpen', Carrillo becomes 'Carillo', Rakosi becomes 'Rakovsi', Bob Rowthorn becomes Bob 'Rawthorne', Ivan Beavis becomes 'Ian' Beavis, Simon Barrow becomes 'Sion Barrow', Malcolm MacEwen becomes 'Malcolm MacEwan' and Emile Burns becomes 'Emilé Burns'. Johnny Campbell turns up as 'Jimmy', Douglas Springhall as 'David' and Bill Rust — rather improbably — as 'Willie'. The magazine Changes is retitled Change, the British Peace Committee is renamed the 'British Peace Commission' and the Yorkshire District CP is called variously the 'West Yorkshire District' and the 'Yorkshire Council'. Ivan Maisky is described as 'a member of the Russian Embassy' (rather than the Ambassador!) and Edward Thompson apparently contributed an essay to the Reasoner entitled 'The Smoke of Budapest'.
What a bad book this is! Poorly researched, badly organised, repetitive, carelessly written, unsympathetic to its subject, wholly unoriginal and apparently ignorant of recent scholarship. A sloppy, pointless, fruitless, lazy collection of second-hand anti-communist cliches disguised as labour history.
It is so bad it is almost comical. Did you know the Labour Party once ran a scurrilous 'anti-social' campaign against the CP? That the Dutts lived, not in Brussels, but in Amsterdam? And that the International Brigades included a number of 'political commissioners' in their ranks? There is something Pooterish about a book which solemnly claims to 'reveal through documentary evidence that, despite protestations to the contrary, the British Communist Party and its leadership were dominated by the Comintern' ...
It is just possible that the authors of Under the Red Flop do not realise how banal their thesis is, since their knowledge of other work on the history of the Party appears to be extremely patchy. For example, there is no mention of Francis King and George Matthews (eds), About Turn, or Andrews, Fishman and Morgan (eds), Opening the Books. On the other hand, however, Kevin Morgan appears to have a new book out subtitled Rupture and Constitution in British Communist Politics.
Having set out to prove that the Party was fatally isolated within the British labour movement because of its 'close association' with the Soviet Union, Under the Flip Flop pursues this thesis with a dogged tautology. Nothing is considered except the Party's relationship with the Soviets, the trades unions and the Labour Party. Under the Red Rug has nothing to say about the Party's anti-colonial struggles, its work in the Peace and anti-war movements, its pioneering work among women, or the role of Party members in the Forces during the Second World War. There is no reference to life in the Districts (although District Committees are wheeled on to suit the book's idea that Party Centre was constantly at war with the membership). The many published memoirs and autobiographies which might offer a richer, more interesting and lively picture of Party life and membership are ignored (except a little anti-Party pamphlet by Ruth and Eddie Frow, which is given a whole page). This is a narrative untroubled by any of the Party's many publishing and ideological initiatives or by the artistic and educational culture of the Party. There is nothing to be said, for example, about Unity Theatre, New Writing, the Left Book Club, ABCA and CEMA, the Folk Song revival, the Christian-Marxist dialogue, 'The Forward March of Labour Halted' (Gramsci is not even mentioned!). Laybourn and Murphy do not seem to have heard of the Sunday Worker, Left Review, Our Time or Modern Quarterly (and my own A Weapon in the Struggle does not, of course, even merit a dismissive footnote).
There is too, an irritatingly coy (and contradictory) political subtext running through Under the Red Frog. Laybourn and Murphy repeatedly sneer at the Popular Front as an exercise in 'class collaboration' (curiously, they seem to think that the Popular Front strategy was an attempt at an electoral accommodation with the Labour Party) at the same time as they reproach the Party for its supposed sectarianism — the fault, they seem to believe, of Hyndman rather than Lenin.
All is not lost, however, since Under the Fried Frog ends on a note of finely-judged evaluation, a scholarly judgement of such abrupt and memorable banality that an otherwise forgettable book is almost redeemed: 'Clearly there were some achievements to be proud of and at least the CPGB tried to improve and defend the position of the workers in British society.' Stunning.
