AHC : Have a strong Communist Party in interwar/post-war Britain.

[LSCatilina]

A pretty much straight-forward objective : how can a strong enough Communist Party could have existed in Great-Britain during the interwar and/or immediate postwar period?
Not necessarily as important and influential as were the French, German or Italian communist parties, but at least comparable to the parties in Czechoslovakia, Netherlands, Belgium, etc. that is able to gather at least 10% of the electorate in more than one election or having an equivalent political influence.

 

[Nyvis]

A pretty much straight-forward objective : how can a strong enough Communist Party could have existed in Great-Britain during the interwar and/or immediate postwar period?
Not necessarily as important and influential as were the French, German or Italian communist parties, but at least comparable to the parties in Czechoslovakia, Netherlands, Belgium, etc. that is able to gather at least 10% of the electorate in more than one election or having an equivalent political influence.

I think your best hope is to not have the vast majority of organized labour welded to the Labour Party already. If you could get the unions to adopt something like France's federations on ideological lines rather than craft/industrial groupings based on domains, you'd have union blocks able to swing behind different parties depending on their level of radical thought.

There's other means but picking that fight without the unions is going to be an uphill struggle.

An alternative could be something like the split of the communists from the SPD. An unpopular war Labour's more moderate leadership end up supporting, causing the left to split off with some of the unions and joining the 3rd internationale when it's still healthy? But they'd be just as likely to remain an independent force without the communist label since even the Labour Left wasn't really aligned that way.

 

[OwenM]

If STV is somehow introduced you will likely have more significant and lasting Communist representation but 10% still seems a bit of a tall order

 

[Time Enough]

If STV is somehow introduced you will likely have more significant and lasting Communist representation but 10% still seems a bit of a tall order

I could see with STV a Communist Party in Britain that has like under ten MPs.

Now it wouldn’t be a Communist Party, but per-say in a different Post War period where the Liberal party doesn’t splinter and implode and the Labour Party falls under the leadership of Lansbury leading to a Labour - Communist alliance and a splinter of the Social Democratic Labourites. Of course this requires a lot to go wrong and probably leads to the eventual Socialist Party being a third party.

 

[Nyvis]

I could see with STV a Communist Party in Britain that has like under ten MPs.

Now it wouldn’t be a Communist Party, but per-say in a different Post War period where the Liberal party doesn’t splinter and implode and the Labour Party falls under the leadership of Lansbury leading to a Labour - Communist alliance and a splinter of the Social Democratic Labourites. Of course this requires a lot to go wrong and probably leads to the eventual Socialist Party being a third party.

Imagining a socialist or independent labour party that contains only the OTL labour left and further left while being welcoming to communist members is a lot easier than imagining a proper 3rd internationale party, I guess. If the moderate end of the labour movement remains with the liberals it would go a long way towards explaining why it remains a third party rather than becomes one of the big two.

The internal dynamics of having communists in the party but not being outright communist only would be fascinating. I could see a lot of angry noises from Moscow's most doctrinaire voices telling them to make their own party and the British communists knowing that's just a quick way into irrelevance, ironically leading them to more long term longevity by putting some distance with the soviets.

 

[Comisario]

Not enough attention is put on the Leeds Convention of 1917 and the United Socialist Council that instigated it. The BSP and ILP were on the trajectory of a merger and could’ve become a single party that was at least partly communist in leadership and support.

 

[AlfieJ]

Not enough attention is put on the Leeds Convention of 1917 and the United Socialist Council that instigated it. The BSP and ILP were on the trajectory of a merger and could’ve become a single party that was at least partly communist in leadership and support.

big Ralph's favourite.