the defection of 10,000 members (30 per cent of the total) from the British Communist Party in 1956–58 is already described as “the revolt of the intellectuals”; sometimes by those same historians who claim that the intellectuals formed only a tiny minority of the CP’s membership!
The contradiction is obvious. The bulk of the dissenters were industrial workers, though their dissent was more articulately expressed by those intellectuals (John Saville, E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, etc.) who were determined that the Party must abandon its blind loyalty to the Soviet leaders. In industrial West Fife the CP admitted a drop of 25 per cent in membership. Not the least of King Street’s crimes was the fact that most of them vowed “never again”, and disappeared from political life. Others believed that the CP’s betrayal of Socialist principles made the need for a genuine Socialist organisation all the more urgent. They looked at the Labour Party and, in West Fife at least, could not see any possibility of its being won for a Socialist programme.
In most areas it was aged and declining. Young people would simply not join it. It was firmly in the grip of a Right Wing which supported NATO and the Bomb. Its MP, W. W. Hamilton, had drafted for it the only constituency party resolution on the 1954 Labour Party Conference agenda supporting German rearmament. Economy cuts were enforced by Labour-controlled local authorities to help Attlee’s increased armaments programme in 1951, and after.