Young Communist League (Great Britain)

In August 1921, two of Great Britain's leading radical youth organisations, the Young Workers' League and the International Communist Schools Movement, gathered at a special conference held at Birmingham.[3]^: 45 The assembled delegates to this Unity Conference passed a proposal calling for the two standing groups to merge under a new name, that of the Young Communist League.[3]^: 45 This proposal was taken to the rank-and-file of each group, and the proposed unified constitution and organisational rules ratified in a referendum of branches held in October.[3]^: 45

Logo of the Young Communist League as it appeared in 1923.

The YCL was the youth wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which exercised oversight over the group. The YCL modeled itself upon the adult party and, in the estimation of historian Thomas Linehan, "functioned as a younger version of it."[3]^: 45 In 1954, the YCL supported 'The Red Scout' Paul Garland who had been dismissed from his local Scout Group in Bristol following his dual membership – a controversy with wide media coverage and a debate in the House of Lords.[4] While formally independent, the group was always closely linked to the CPGB and its activities and fortunes broadly followed those of its parent organisation.[5] As with the adult party, the YCL saw itself as part of a unified world movement, and took its ultimate direction from the Young Communist International (CYI), with headquarters in Moscow.[3]^: 45

The YCL was seen as a recruiting school for activists in the adult party, and the organisation's structure, internal relationships, and tactical activities closely paralleled and followed those of the CPGB.[3]^: 45-46 This was in turn a reflection of the structure and practise of the Russian Communist Party (later known as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).[3]^: 46 Similarly, the Young Communist International, which formally stood at the head of the YCL's decision-making process, was closely modelled upon the adult Communist International, which itself was shaped by Russian Communist Party practice.[3]^: 46

The fledgling YCL published its own official monthly periodical, known as The Young Communist[3]^: 45; it was replaced by Challenge in 1935, which continues to be published today.[6]

In 1923 the YCL founded their Red Sports Clubs, aiming to rival the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.[7] The YCL was very successful in using sports to organise young people politically against imperialism and poverty, and by 1932 the British Workers' Sports Federations were dominated by members of the YCL.[7]

Between 1936 and 1939 over 35,000 men and women, from over 50 countries, left their homes to volunteer for the Republican forces of the Spanish Civil War within the British Battalion. More than 2,300 of these came from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, with as many as 80% being members of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Young Communist League. The volunteers came from overwhelmingly working-class backgrounds, with large numbers hailing from cities such as London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Only a small number were unemployed with large numbers involved in industrial occupations, such as labouring, construction, shipbuilding and mining. The average age for the volunteers from Britain was twenty-nine.[8]

Volunteers included John Cornford; a poet and Young Communist League member from Cambridge who was also the great-grandson of Charles Darwin,[9] and Charlie Hutchison; chair of the Young Communist League branch in Fulham and the only black British volunteer to join the International Brigades.[10]

The YCL was known to have enjoyed close contacts with the London branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress, led by communist activist and pioneer of Black civil rights in Britain, Billy Strachan.[11]

During the 1960s, the Young Communist League actively supported the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) and the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War.[12] They supplied large quantities of Blood plasma, as well as collecting funds to buy over one hundred bicycles, many of which were donated to the Vietnamese at the 9th World Festival of Youth and Students in Bulgaria, 1968.[13]

Young Communist League, Vietnam campaign lorry, 1968

A recruitment drive started in 1966 around the slogan "The Trend - Communism" associated the group with wider cultural trends in society;[5] "The Trend" campaign emphasised the power of music in social change (Irish folk singer Luke Kelly was also a member in the 60s).[14][15] Throughout this period, YCL membership grew to over 6,000 members and a generation of young members, led by Barney Davis (national secretary), George Bridges (London secretary) and others challenged the political approach of the parent party.[16] The League continued engaging in new musical cultures through the late 1970s, as young communists participated in a Camden squat along with the punk band Scritti Politti.[17]

The YCL took a lead in condemning what it defined as the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia[5] (the Party called it an "intervention" at the time), but the position was only adopted by a 60:40 vote. Some members who favoured a pro-Soviet line, including John Chamberlain (Jack Conrad), left the YCL to join the New Communist Party of Britain in 1977.[5] Chamberlain was to become head of the NCP's youth section; however, shortly after this, he attempted to rejoin the CPGB.

1968 proved the start of a long decline in membership, characterised by competition between different tendencies. The leadership tended to be eurocommunist, but opposition to it was stronger than in the CPGB .

During the early 1970s the Young Communist League supported the African National Congress by supplying volunteers, later known as the London Recruits, for secret missions against South Africa's Apartheid system. Young white members were chosen as they could move freely around South Africa at the time. Due to the Suppression of Communism Act, 1950, people were legally not allowed to hand out ANC leaflets in the street, so devices known as leaflet bombs were set off in a number of different cities and locations, promoting the ANC and letting the African people know that they were still around regardless of the state suppression against them.[18]

In 1979, its congress adopted a new programme, Our Future, which did not commit the group to Marxism and removed the policy of democratic centralism. The new programme exacerbated divisions in the group, and in 1983, with membership down to 510, democratic centralism was re-imposed.

In 1985, Mark Ashton became General Secretary of the YCL, having co-founded Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners to raise funds supporting the National Union of Mineworkers during the year-long strike of 1984–1985. By the end of the strike, eleven different LGSM groups had emerged throughout the UK, with the London group alone raising £22,500 by 1985 (equivalent to £69,000 in 2019) in support.[19] The events of Mark Ashton and LGSM have since been dramatised in the 2014 film Pride.

However membership in the League continued to decline due to its slide to Eurocommunism, and by 1986 the league had fewer than 300 members.[20]