In ‘“The most fruitful period in the history of the British left”[1]?: Communists and the Popular Front in the 1930s’, John McIlroy and Alan Campbell introduce a brace of recent articles examining the Comintern, the British Communist Party (CPGB) and the Popular Front in Britain, France and Spain between 1935 and 1939.

The Popular Front policy which was put together through 1934 and formally adopted by the Comintern at its Seventh – and final – World Congress in 1935, constituted a path-breaking phase in the unfolding story of global Stalinism. In sharp contrast to the preceding, ‘ourselves alone’, leftist line of the Third Period of ‘Class Against Class’, the new initiative prescribed alliances in every country. They were to be forged not only between Communist parties and their hitherto ‘social fascist’ working-class competitors based on curtailment of criticism, but, in a rupture with the Comintern’s previous approach to Marxism, pacts with radical bourgeois parties and between the Soviet Union and capitalist states whose national interests predisposed them to oppose ascendant fascism. In Europe, in France and Spain, Popular Front governments were formed on this basis and insurgent mass movements developed in response, while in South America there was a Popular Front government in Chile.

The excitement of the ‘explosion’ of 1936 in France was kept alive in popular memory and the iconography of the left, and the idea returned to practical politics in the ‘Common Programme’ alliances between Communists and Socialists in the 1970s and 1980s. In Spain, where the election of the Popular Front administration provoked military intervention and civil war, despite the eclipse of the Communists by the Socialist Party, the ‘Pact of Forgetting’ and the reconciliation initiatives that followed the death of Franco, the events of 1936–1939 remain a significant and divisive issue in memory, culture and historiography. In Britain, the project achieved considerably less. But the Popular Front was remembered by Communists as a fertile period in their party’s history and that of the left in general and until the CPGB’s demise was held up as a model for future socialist progress. It still pops up. In 2019 the then Jeremy Corbyn supporter and media pundit, Paul Mason, pronounced the impending general election unwinnable and, deploying a garbled account of the 1930s, advised Labour activists that the only way to defeat the Conservatives was via ‘a Popular Front’ with the Liberal Democrats and Greens.[2]

The 1935–1939 episode has been accorded major significance by historians of the left. In his magisterial survey of European socialism, Geoff Eley explained the meaning of Popular Front politics:

In contrast to the short-term and instrumental strategies of the 1920s, this was a new departure. Alliances had to be principled because alliances to deceive one’s partners … were self-defeating. To achieve them, Communists should be willing to relinquish their ‘leading’ role … Only exceptionally could CPs entertain seizing power alone … coalitions might pass beyond existing democracy to the groundwork of socialist transition. Popular Frontism recast socialism as the highest form of older progressive traditions rather than their implacable opponent and this affirming of universal humanist values also implied a different politics for culture … The Popular Front was a huge departure … The left was to build the new society in the frame of the old.[3]

If this underestimates the intimate, expediential relationship of the Popular Front policy to the instrumental, and what history by 1939 validated as the short-term, needs of the Soviet Union, takes too much of the self-interested rhetoric of Stalinism as good coin, accepts the exegesis of subsequent Communist commentators at face value, and runs the danger of conflating the planting of seeds in the 1930s with their distinctive flowering in response to very different circumstances in later decades, there can be little doubt that the policy embodied an important shift. In time, it would have an enduring impact on the ideology and practice of international Communism. But this, it should be stressed, represented part of a long-term, interrupted, ad hoc and opportunistic process. It stretched from the reversal of the Popular Front policy to reflect the Soviet Union’s alliance with Nazi Germany, the ensuing forced return to Popular Front politics during Russia’s wartime ‘Grand Alliance’ with the liberal democracies and the dissolution of the Comintern, to the coercive installation of ‘Popular Front’ regimes in conquered Eastern Europe, the turn to ‘national roads to socialism’ by the former Comintern sections, the search for ‘Broad Democratic Alliances’ against ‘monopoly capitalism’, and finally the consolidation of neo-reformism in Eurocommunism. The resonance of the Seventh Congress was, nonetheless, immediate. It powerfully influenced the formation of a generation of young Communists, including members of what became the Communist Party History Group which embraced key figures in the second wave of ‘history from below’ in the post-war years. The Popular Front permanently marked their politics and their view of history. It is, thus, of particular interest to labour historians.

Moulded by his visits to France and induction into the new politics when he went up to King’s College, Cambridge in 1936, Eric Hobsbawm reflected in his 2002 autobiography: ‘I belong to the era of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front. It continues to determine my strategic thinking in politics to this day’.[4] One of his former students remarked that the Popular Front rationale of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, reinforced by the Soviet Union’s wartime compact with America and Britain, proved compulsive and ‘he continued supporting this logic longer and more repeatedly than most’.[5] During the CPGB’s left turn in the early Cold War and Cominform years, Hobsbawm was forced to take consolation from the strands of Popular Frontism that survived.[6] His watchers reported to MI5 the impression of his colleagues that ‘Hobsbawm was thoroughly out of date in his Communism and was still in the “popular front” era’.[7]

Its conceptions haunted his writing and permeated his attempts to further ‘progressive’ history. Together with Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and other Communist historians, he planned Past and Present ‘not as a Marxist journal but a common platform for a “popular front” of historians’.[8] Mirroring their party’s political concessions to cement alliances, they subsequently acceded to the wishes of Sir John Elliott and Lawrence Stone who agreed to join the editorial board on condition the phrase ‘a journal of scientific history’ was removed from the masthead.[9] Hobsbawm’s revamping of Popular Front ideas – minus the Soviet Union and any goal beyond Labour’s evaporating gradualism – in the very different world of ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, Marxism Today and ‘New Times’ – has been well-documented.[10] As Logie Barrow commented: ‘if you presume anything to the left of “Popular Front” to be “Third Period” then little alternative remains to groping one’s way rightwards’.[11]

Seven years younger than Hobsbawm, who described him as the only historian he knew possessed of ‘genius in the traditional sense of the word’[12], Edward Thompson’s ‘extraordinarily formative moment’ came with the second blossoming of Communist alliance politics, ‘that insurgent popular front type movement [which] reached its peak between ’43 and ‘46’, a time when, he recalled, ‘it was possible to be deeply committed even to the point of life itself in support of a particular political struggle that was at the same time a popular struggle; that is one didn’t feel a sense of being isolated in any way’.[13] Thompson extended that moment back to the 1930s to constitute what he described as ‘a decade of heroes’.[14] For Thompson, Perry Anderson opined, the history of Communism started in1935 and his dedication to a rosy vision of the politics of broad alliances lingered through his life, his writings and his politics.[15]

The youthful Thompson was strongly influenced by older Communist intellectuals who answered the Comintern call to engage with bourgeois democracy, adapt to the national polity and recuperate and reconstruct ‘progressive’ traditions, proletarian, bourgeois and plebeian. He was particularly receptive to Christopher Hill’s The English Revolution 1640 and, as Peter Gurney has recently reminded us, Jack Lindsay and Edgell Rickward’s popular compilation, A Handbook of Freedom.[16] They helped set him firmly on the path that, with many forks and detours, led to The Making of the English Working Class. Like Hobsbawm, he accepted with fortitude the CPGB’s change of line and consequent isolation during the early Cold War and although his youthful attachments remained intact, there is inadequate evidence in the literature to support suggestions that he dissented from or articulated any desire for change in the party line before 1956. Politically he remained a loyal Stalinist.[17]

When he did depart from the party, he remained reluctant to break with his romantic view of the Popular Front. It continued to inform his political journey after 1956. Analysing the First New Left, Michael Kenny observed that Thompson’s ambitions for it ‘drew upon the memory of the Popular Front of the 1930s, the experience of partisan resistance movements in the Second World War and the political shift to the left which took place in several European countries from 1943–45’.[18] He envisaged the movement of the late 1950s in terms of a revival of what he considered the spirit of the Popular Front. The New Left should adapt some of its best elements. The Reasoner, he hoped, would emulate the CPGB-inspired ‘broad’ journal of the 1930s, Left Review. ‘In organisational forms’, he proposed, ‘the New Left will draw upon the experience of the Left Book Club movement’.[19] Together with John Saville, he attempted to extract from the CPGB’s past a ‘rational, humane and libertarian strand’ with a ‘profoundly democratic content’ which they identified with Tom Mann, Ralph Fox and sometimes Tom Wintringham. It could, they suggested, somewhat subjectively and incongruously given the availability of alternative traditions with less contaminated credentials, inform the embryonic socialist humanism of the New Left.[20]

In later years, Thompson’s work as a labour and social historian, particularly his research on the development and operation of English law, as well as his crusades against the state’s encroachment on democracy, civil liberties and academic freedom were accompanied by calls to construct an opposing coalition of Marxists and liberals centred on defence of the rule of law and the liberal university.[21] Regarding his engagement with European Nuclear Disarmament in the early 1980s, one of his biographers argued Thompson: ‘envisaged a new kind of anti-nuclear movement which would have a Popular Front character … a broad alliance between the left wing of the Labour Party, Communists, Christian groups and other pacifists’.[22] When attempting to turn his vision of an all-embracing, cross-class nuclear disarmament mobilisation into reality, he frequently evoked the Popular Front years, the Second World War and ‘alliances of liberals, Communists, agrarians, social-democrats and conservatives’.[23]

Similar points might be made about other former Communist historians, such as Saville.[24] Their continued attachment was a tribute to the reach, resources and staying power, if only among a limited constituency, of the collaborationist, coming in from the cold ethos of the Popular Front, with its accompanying sense of belonging – certainly in comparison to the revolutionary rhetoric and defiantly self-chosen isolation of the preceding Third Period, as well as the rigours of the Cold War. However, what was often remembered, highlighted and recommended, at least in many of their writings, was a partial, selectively recollected and over-optimistic version of Popular Front politics; although the part played by the Soviet Union and Stalinism and the failure of the tactic were sometimes acknowledged, they went relatively unexplored and underplayed. Hobsbawm seemed oblivious to the fact that, particularly in Britain, the Popular Front was not a success. He demonstrated tenacious loyalty and at times candour in refusing to completely reject his Stalinist past. In the 1990s he was still asserting in a widely publicised interview with Michael Ignatieff – an interrogation he felt was ‘deeply hostile’ – that in substance the promised end of the Soviet experience justified – or would have done had it been achieved – the terrible, dysfunctional means employed.[25] He minimised the role of Soviet policy in the provenance, execution and termination of the Popular Fronts and was at pains to emphasise, indeed exaggerate, how little was known in Britain before 1956 about the scale of the dystopian happenings in Russia.[26]

Thompson and Saville did fulsomely denounce Stalinism in 1956 while Hobsbawm protested but remained loyal to the party. Nonetheless, their break was less than complete.[27] Saville praised the CPGB’s role between 1935–1939 and 1941–1945: ‘our record is an example to the whole labour movement’.[28] Commending the exiled George Lukacs in 1957, Thompson claimed:

As long as the Communist tradition includes men like this I want to remain associated with it. I am not going to spend years crippled by remorse because I was duped by the Rajk and Rostov trials, because I was a casuist here and perhaps an accomplice there.[29]

The fate of the Rajks and Rostovs and innumerable other victims was, of course, an intrinsic aspect of the Communist tradition, together with the Stalin dictatorship, the Moscow trials, the liquidation of the Old Bolsheviks, the death camps and the terror which accompanied the Popular Front and its quietus in order to foster German-Soviet relations in the aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and, one might add, the manipulation, mendacity, double-dealing and cynicism that Thompson so eloquently savaged. ‘The Communist tradition’ they referred to was, all things considered, ultimately a Stalinist tradition. If libertarianism, profound democracy, socialist-humanism were present as part of that tradition, they were, in any proportionate, political sense, difficult to detect.

Of this group of labour historians, only Hobsbawm, and then relatively briefly, examined the policy as a historian.[30] Yet in assessing the Popular Front, as with any other phase of Communist policy, it seems useful to start from and explore in full its provenance, politics, rationale and outcomes, the indispensable context in which the lives, political trajectories, recollections and memories of Communist activists have to be situated. Ninety years after its inception and the development of a voluminous, still proliferating literature which articulates a wide range of viewpoints and has generated not a few controversies, it seems timely to review the politics of the Popular Front.

John McIlroy, ‘Stalin, the Comintern and the Popular Front in Britain, France and Spain, 1935–1939: Some Historiographical and Political Reflections’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 51, 2–3, 2023, is a recent Open Access article which attempts this task. Using Hobsbawm as a motif, it critically surveys the origins, evolution, demise and legacy of the policy, scrutinises much of the literature and addresses many of the issues and arguments. It is available at: Full article: Stalin, the Comintern and the Popular Front in Britain, France and Spain, 1935–1939: Some Historiographical and Political Reflections (tandfonline.com)

Analysing the Popular Front in France and Spain puts the experience in Britain into perspective: it was not a great success for either the Communists or the left, certainly when measured against its overt goals of constructing cross-class coalitions sufficiently powerful to pressurise the National Government to enter into an alliance with the Soviet Union to combat aggression from Nazi Germany. Nor did it usher in ‘the most fruitful period in the history of the British left’. The CPGB did achieve an ephemeral united front with the Labour left and the ILP; elected an MP; did much to increase awareness of the fascist threat and organise resistance to it; increased party membership to a then new high; and achieved a greater presence in the trade unions and in intellectual life than hitherto. Given the significance the Soviet elite and the Comintern attributed to leadership and the dramatic shift from the left to the right, from vilifying Labour and trade union leaders to conciliating the middle classes which the move from Class Against Class to the Popular Front entailed, one might have expected an appreciable change in the characteristics and skill sets of the party’s leading personnel.

Nonetheless, our recent survey of the Communists who served on the party’s Central Committee (CC) between 1935 and 1939 – the latest instalment of our prosopography of the British Communist elite between the wars[31] – suggests such innovation was fairly limited. Rather, analysis of the 47 activists elected to the three CCs during these years demonstrated a significant degree of continuity. Twenty-one of our sample, which was almost complete, had served on the committee before 1935 and we designated them the ‘Continuation Group’, compared with 26 newcomers or ‘Debutantes’. The former included a core of dominant, experienced actors – Willie Gallacher, Rajani Palme Dutt, Harry Pollitt, J. R. Campbell and Bill Rust, whose service stretched back to the 1920s and who, replenished by Emile Burns and John Gollan, exercised a powerful influence on the elaboration and delivery of Comintern policy. None of the 47 expressed discomfort with the 1935 turn. Nobody dissented as the CPGB doffed their existing political apparel, an exercise repeated in 1939 and 1941 and again in 1947. If, as some have asserted, leading British Communists were independent spirits who exercised their own political predilections, an extraordinary series of coincidences must have ensured these predilections were always ultimately in harmony with those of the Comintern leaders and the rulers of Russia.

Only seven members of the 1935–1939 cohort were women, a slight decline on the 15.2% during the Third Period while only Dutt was an untypical representative of people of colour. More than 54% were English, 32.6% Scots and 8.7% Welsh compared with respective figures of 60.3%, 25.4% and 12.5% between 1929 and 1935. The number of Jewish representatives – 2 – remained static, while the presence of those with an Irish background slightly increased. The Popular Front CCs were slightly older than their Third Period counterparts while ‘the entry of the intellectuals’ into the party did not greatly increase middle-class representation. There was a small increase in the percentage of those who had experienced higher education, but the vast majority of CC representatives were, like the CPGB membership more generally, of working-class origin. Convergence between the elected CC – intended to reflect all sections of the party and particularly in the Third Period rank-and-file workers – and the party’s full-time bureaucracy, noted in relation to earlier cohorts, was evident. Two-thirds of the members of the committees we studied occupied full-time party posts. As in the past, the CPGB consisted largely of ‘practical’ men and women, agitators and organisers; there were few theorists. The paper provides brief life histories of all the Debutantes to the CC. Biographical sketches of the Continuation Group and the female members were included in previous surveys.[32]

Our article, John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘For Peace and Defence of the Soviet Union: The Leadership of British Communism in the Popular Front Era, 1935–1939’, Labor History, 64, 1, 2023, is available here.

John McIlroy is Visiting Professor of Employment Relations, University of Middlesex Business School.

Alan Campbell is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Department of History, University of Liverpool

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[1] Jim Fyrth, ‘Introduction: In the Thirties’, in Jim Fyrth (ed.), Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front, Lawrence and Wishart, 1985, p. 15.

[2] Paul Mason, ‘Labour’s Best Tactic to Beat Boris Johnson? A Popular Front’, Guardian, 2 August 2019.

[3] Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 265–267.

[4] Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, Allen Lane, 2002, p. 218.

[5] Logie Barrow, ‘Anatomising Methuselah’, Labour History Review, 78, 3, 2013, p. 355. As Logie adds: ‘Always the question must be: friendship on whose terms? Otherwise such logic can impel us into supporting the bad against the, at least potentially, better’.

[6] Hobsbawm’s loyalty to the CPGB comes through in his early 1950s internal party autobiography copied by MI5: National Archives, London (NA), KV2/3982, Security Service file, Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm; Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, Little Brown, 2019, pp. 301–302.  

[7] NA, KV2/3982, Security Service file, Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, J.H. Money to D.H. Whyte, 19 October 1953.

[8] Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 230.

[9] Ibid., p. 231.

[10] For his own account, see ibid., pp. 264–276.

[11] Barrow, ‘Methuselah’, p. 355.

[12] Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 215, although ‘Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass’.

[13] Interview with E. P. Thompson in Henry Abelove, Betsy Blackmar, Peter Dimock and Jonathan Schneer (eds), Visions of History, Manchester University Press, 1986, quotes from pp. 10–11.

[14] Ibid., p. 19.

[15] Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, Verso, 1980, p. 150.

[16] Peter Gurney, ‘History and Commitment: E. P. Thompson’s Legacy’, Labour History Review, 78, 3, 2013, pp. 338–339.

[17] The issue was raised by Anderson, Arguments, p. 167, but remained unexplored by later authors. The evidence is summarised and assessed in John McIlroy, ‘Another Look at E. P. Thompson and British Communism’, Labor History, 58, 4, 2017, pp. 506–539.

[18] Michael Kenny, The First New Left: Intellectuals after Stalin, Lawrence and Wishart, 1995, p. 74.

[19] EPT and JS, ‘Statement’ in The Reasoner, 2, 1956, reprinted in Paul Flewers and John McIlroy (eds), 1956: John Saville, E. P. Thompson and The Reasoner, Merlin Press, 2016, p. 187; E. P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, New Reasoner, 9, 1959, reprinted in Cal Winslow (ed.), E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, Lawrence and Wishart, 2014, pp. 133–134.

[20] ‘Editorial’, New Reasoner, Autumn 1959; E.P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’, in E.P. Thompson (ed.), Out of Apathy, 1960, reprinted in E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Merlin Press, 1978, pp. 211–243. Sometimes the claim was that the membership of the CPGB was ‘less tainted’ by Stalinism than the leadership: E. P. Thompson. ‘Through the Smoke of Budapest’, Reasoner, 2, 1956, in Flewers and McIlroy, 1956, p. 275. At other times, Thompson based himself on a simplistic and impressionistic binary division between a Stalinist leadership and a rank and file who represented humanity and morality – where the intellectuals figured in this was unclear: E. P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’, Universities and Left Review, Summer 1957, reprinted in Winslow, E. P. Thompson, pp. 98–99.

[21] See, for example, Bob Fine, Democracy and the Rule of Law: Liberal Ideals and Marxist Critiques, Pluto Press, 1984, pp. 169–189; E. P. Thompson (ed.), Warwick University Ltd, Penguin, 1970; E. P. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight, Merlin, 1980.

[22] Christos Efstathiou, E. P. Thompson: A Twentieth Century Romantic, Merlin Press, 2015, p. 132.

[23] E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War, Merlin Press, 1982, p. 156.

[24] John McIlroy, ‘John Saville and Stalinism: An Exploration’, in Flewers and McIlroy, 1956, pp. 351–393. Saville, however, distanced himself from the 1980s trend in the CPGB to look for a new Popular Front of which Hobsbawm was the leading spokesman: John Saville, ‘Marxism Today: An Anatomy’, in Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch and John Saville (eds), Socialist Register 1990, Merlin Press, 1990, pp. 89–100. During the 1984 miners’ strike, Hobsbawm’s ‘contempt for Scargill … resounded through a half-hour row with Saville, effectively closing a surprise party for Raphael Samuel’: Barrow, ‘Methuselah’, p. 355. Of the former Communists involved in labour history, Royden Harrison never struck us as passionate about resuscitating the Popular Front. For his criticism of Hobsbawm’s 1980s project, see Royden Harrison, untitled contribution, in Martin Jacques and Francis Mulhern (eds), The Forward March of Labour Halted?, Verso, 1981, pp. 51–58. Hobsbawm himself recalled: ‘Most of the socialist and Marxist intellectuals outside the Marxism Today milieu were hostile … For many of them the line of Marxism Today meant the betrayal of the traditional hopes and policies of socialists …’: Interesting Times, pp. 274–275.

[25] See Evans, Hobsbawm, pp. 590–592.

[26] Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, pp. 139–140, where he remarks: ‘We were not liberals’.

[27] Anderson reflected that their promise of a rigorous theoretical investigation and explanation of Stalinism had not been fulfilled: ‘For all the passionate polemics and self-questioning of the hour, it might be said that overall it is the dearth of sustained study of Stalinism that is remarkable’: Anderson, Arguments, p.119. The issue was minimally pursued by subsequent historians of the New Left. But see McIlroy, ‘John Saville and Stalinism’; and Paul Flewers, ‘E. P. Thompson and the Soviet Experience’, in Flewers and McIlroy, 1956, pp. 394–432.

[28] John Saville, ‘On Party History: An Open Letter to Comrade R. Page Arnot’, in The Reasoner, 3, reprinted in Flewers and McIlroy, 1956, quote from p. 315. He cited the party’s record on colonial issues, unemployment, rising membership, increased political influence, organisational flexibility and intellectual vigour. Written, it must be said, while Saville and Thompson still hoped to change the CPGB. However, he repeated the sentiment in 1959, praising the CPGB’s contribution to ‘English socialism’ and, in the interwar years, ‘its contribution to the development of Marxist ideas’: John Saville, ‘A Further Note on British Communist History’, New Reasoner, Spring 1959, p. 100.

[29] E. P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’, [1957] reprinted in Winslow, E. P. Thompson, p. 99.

[30] Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Fifty Years of People’s Fronts’, in Fyrth, Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front, pp. 235–250. See also some of the observations in Eric Hobsbawm, ‘“The Moscow Line” and International Communist Policy, 1933–47’, in Chris Wrigley (ed.), Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics: Essays for A. J. P. Taylor, Hamish Hamilton, 1986, pp. 163–188. John Saville, The Labour Movement in Britain: A Commentary, Faber and Faber, 1988, pp. 62–81, briefly surveys the 1930s but has not a great deal to say about the Popular Front. See also John Saville, ‘May Day 1937’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds), Essays in Labour History, 1918–1939, vol. 3, Croom Helm, 1977, pp. 232–284.

[31] For some of the previous findings from this project, see John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Socialist Labour Party and the Leadership of Early British Communism’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 48, 4, 2020, pp. 609–659; John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Early British Communist Leaders, 1920–1923: A Prosopographical Exploration’, Labor History, 61, 5–6, 2020, pp. 423–465; John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Leadership of British Communism, 1923–1928: Pages from a Prosopographical Project’, Labor History, 62, 3, 2021, pp. 207–253; John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The “Core” Leaders of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 1923–1928: Their Past, Present and Future’, Labor History, 62, 4, 2021, pp. 371–412; John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Comintern, Communist Women Leaders and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation in Britain between the Wars: A Political and Prosopographical Investigation, Part 1’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 50, 1, 2022, pp. 51–105; John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, ‘The Comintern, Communist Women Leaders and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation in Britain between the Wars: A Political and Prosopographical Investigation, Part 2’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 50, 1, 2022, pp. 107–153; John McIlroy and  Alan Campbell, ‘“Class Against Class”: The Leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain during the Comintern’s Third Period, 1928–1934’, Labor History, 63, 2, 2022, pp. 145–189.   

[32] See McIlroy and Campbell, ‘Core Leaders’; McIlroy and Campbell, ‘Leadership of British Communism’; McIlroy and Campbell, ‘Communist Women Leaders, Part 2’.