ABSTRACT
Despite official Labour Party opposition, united Left campaigns continued in various forms until 1939. Whatever the consequences for the other participants, there can be little doubt that the Communist Party benefited in strength and influence from these joint activities. At the Party’s Fourteenth Congress, held at Battersea on 29 May 1937, Pollitt reported that membership had increased to 12,500, nearly twice that at the previous Congress in 1935.1 The average circulation of the Daily Worker had risen from 30,000 to 70,000 in the same period, while at weekends and on special occasions sales of over 100,000 had been achieved. The ‘sectarian mistakes’ of the past were being overcome. The Party was even making some slight electoral progress. Fifty-four members had been returned to local councils while in certain local authorities, notably the Rhondda Urban District, the Communist vote had approached that of the Labour Party. While the electoral strength of Communism was still infinitesimal in contrast to that of the Labour Party, it was greater than for the past decade. In the London County Council elections of 1937 the Party ‘went all out to secure a Labour victory’.2 Communist offers of help were accepted by many local Labour Parties, though Herbert Morrison and the London Labour Party made considerable efforts to discourage them. In the November election of 1937 the Communists declared that ‘certain seats are being contested independently, but nowhere where so doing would endanger Labour seats’.3 In this election Phil Piratin secured election to Stepney borough council-the first Communist to be elected in the Metropolitan area since the ‘Labour-Communist’ candidates of the early 1920s.
