Some
members of the Labour Party disapproved
of the electoral truce between the main political parties during the
Second
World War and
on
26th July 1941 members
of the 1941 Committee led
by Richard
Acland,
Vernon Bartlett and
J.
B. Priestley
established the socialist
Common Wealth Party. The party advocated the three principles of Common
Ownership, Vital Democracy and Morality in Politics. The party favoured
public ownership of land and Acland gave away his Devon family estate
of 19,000 acres (8,097 hectares) to the National Trust.
The
party won by-elections against Conservatives
at Eddisbury, Skipton and Chelmsford. However, in the 1945
General Election only one of its twenty-three candidates was successful
- at Chelmsford, where there was no Labour contestant.
The
Common Wealth Party was dissolved in 1945 and most members joined
the Labour Party.
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Last updated: 7th January, 2002
(1)
Tom
Hopkinson,
Of
This Our Time (1982)
In July 1942, the 1941
Committee merged with a band of Richard Acland's supporters known
as Forward March to form a new political party under the name Common
Wealth, and almost the only members of the committee who stayed on
were Vernon Bartlett, Tom Wintringham and J. B. Priestley, who became
chairman. Before autumn, both Priestley and Bartlett had resigned.
Common Wealth never succeeded in its aim of becoming a mass movement,
probably because under Acland's direction its drive was more towards
encouraging moral revival than to attracting public support; but in
the curious circumstances of the time-in which the main political
parties, being in coalition, could not oppose each other at by-elections
- it did succeed in winning three by-elections against Conservative
candidates, giving it, including Acland himself, a total of four Common
Wealth MPs.
(2)
Hugh
Dalton,
diary
entry (14th September, 1944)
Kirn Mackay comes, at his
own request, to propose the affiliation of Common Wealth to the Labour
Party, and to ask whether I thought such a suggestion would be accepted.
I said that there would be some opposition, since we are rather against
affiliating odds and ends, and it might be felt that it would be more
difficult to refuse the Communists if we had already accepted Common
Wealth. I said a simpler plan, to which no effective objection could
be taken, would be to dissolve Common Wealth and tell all its members
to join the Labour Party.
(This, I said, was what I had proposed to Maisky once about the British
Communists, and he had said it was "an interesting and novel
idea" and he would report it to Moscow. Though nothing more had
happened about it.) Mackay said that this would indeed be more logical,
but that he was not sure whether all their members, many of whom,
he said, were very useful and intelligent middle-class people, and
their regional organisers, of whom there were seventeen or eighteen,
would follow such a lead. But he was very humble and non-aggressive
and obviously felt that he had nothing much to offer. They would not,
he said, want to have any separate programme of their own. They would
never run a candidate against a Labour candidate (Acland had at once
withdrawn from Waterloo when we adopted a Labour candidate, though
there had been none in the field when he
went there), they had been taking an interest in 180 constituencies,
where either there was no Labour candidate or where they felt that
they had a better chance of winning than we had.
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