ABSTRACT
During the general election campaign of 1945, Labour’s NEC had rejected overtures from the Communist Party, the ILP and Common Wealth for formal “unity on the Left,” in part because it recognized that Labour finally had an opportunity to become the single major progressive political party in Britain. Afterwards, successful beyond their dreams, Labour’s leaders faced a party bulging with former members of those militant socialist organizations who had abandoned them because they believed, as Fenner Brock way put it, that “the best work for socialism and for peace could be done within the [Labour] Party” and not elsewhere. Was any church broad enough to contain so disparate a membership? In the aftermath of the general election, inner party divisions which had been healed or glossed over during the war reopened. New disagreements emerged. These were not only between the party leadership and its left-wing critics. The various Lefts of the Labour Party, augmented by the new recruits, likewise rediscovered their differences. During the postwar period “Keep Left” was only one, and not the most militant, albeit the most prominent, of the radical pressure groups within the parliamentary party. It is now time to focus upon the others and their members, the “lost sheep,” as Labour Party General Secretary Morgan Phillips disarmingly (and misleadingly) termed backbenchers on the extreme Labour Left. 1
