ABSTRACT
The Edinburgh Labour Party Conference decision did not deter the supporters of ‘Unity’, though it ended the campaign for Communist affiliation for the next three years. Despite a Labour Party circular of 12 January 1937, warning against joint activities with the Communists, the Socialist League decided four days later to take part in a Unity Campaign with the Communist Party and the ILP. Stafford Cripps, who had occupied the leading position in the League for the past four years, was particularly enthusiastic about the proposed campaign. However the League conference at which the decision was made was seriously divided. Opposition to the proposed Campaign received 38 votes to the 56 for the successful motion. Opponents were concerned with the future of the League, rather than with the ideological implications of working with the Communists. A Trotskyist group, led by Reg Groves, was particularly afraid of ‘sacrificing the Socialist League’s position in the Labour Party’1, thus repeating the objections to working in the United Front which had been made by leaders of the League in past years. To a large extent the Unity Campaign was passing out of the control of the Socialist League into that of the Left Book Club and the weekly Tribune, founded by Cripps in January 1937. The formal agreement of the League was, however, necessary as it gave the campaign a much closer connection with the Labour Party than if it had appeared as a personal crusade by Cripps. Without the organization and membership of the three parties to the Unity Agreement, the Campaign could not hope to make any more impression than previous actions of the same sort. Maxton saw the Agreement as ‘the answer of the three most politically conscious and informed workers Parties in the country to a very widespread demand for unity that has been felt by every working class spokesman who has faced audiences during the last two years’.2 By formalizing agreement between ‘the three organisations representing the most advanced Socialist workers’3 it was intended to make clear that the Campaign was a continuation of the United Front on a sounder basis. It was not, as its critics asserted, meant to presage an alliance between the Left and the Liberals.
