ABSTRACT
Despite losing members as a result of the events of 1956, and failing to link up with the Bevanites in the Labour Party, the CPGB did reverse the decline, albeit temporarily, in the early 1960s. This occurred as it moved towards attempting to create an alliance of the Broad Left. However, from 1964 onwards the CPGB lost members constantly until it expired in 1991. Indeed, for most of the 1960s it was faced by two serious challenges which it never fully came to terms with. First, it had to deal with its industrial and trade union policy which was debased by the serious charges of ballot rigging in the early 1960s and by the constant failure to develop factory groups. Second, it was also faced with a serious challenge from the numerous Trotskyite organisations which proliferated amongst the students of the newly expanded university sector in the 1960s, who looked increasingly to China, South America, or the international community for ideas, direction and leadership rather than the Soviet Union. These Trotskyite groups were hijacking a new generation of socialist/Marxist-inclined students and this led the CPGB to contemplate the need for an even less sectarian approach to its political work. This found expression in a development of the CPGB’s Broad Left approach in political and economic work and even, despite the politics of the time, in its determined attempt to win the support of Labour supporters of the new Labour governments of 1964-70. However, the CPGB was never able to win the size of Broad Left support it craved and its problems were made intractable by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 which occurred at the height of student protest in Britain and throughout the world.
