Steadily Left ( English Straight Left ) - the name of a political group in Britain and the left newspaper.
Steadily, the Left was a political group made up of those members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who disagreed with the party’s leadership policy. It was also called the monthly magazine that this group published. Although the origins of this group within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPV) date back to an earlier time, it itself was organized under this name in 1977.
The main ideologist of this group was Fergus Nicholson, who had previously worked as the organizer of the CPV in the student community. Unlike the party leadership, this group supported Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan . They also believed that the party should concentrate its work in trade unions, and not in social movements such as feminism and the environment .
Since the CPV charter prohibited the formation of factions, Steadily Left (SL) acted secretly. Group members supported the organization’s activities with substantial monthly cash contributions, which helped finance the group’s educational meetings, which were often held under the guise of going out on weekends. The organization’s meetings were not publicly announced, and the authors in the newspaper “Straight Left” and their theoretical journal “Communist” signed with pseudonyms, as for example did Nicholson, whose author's pseudonym was “Harry Steel”. The Steadily Left faction also published anonymous ballots in order to influence the CPV congresses, which were usually published under the heading True Congress.
This faction also published an inner-party opposition pamphlet entitled “The Crisis in Our Communist Party — Cause, Effect, and Treatment,” which was distributed under a different name throughout the country. The initiator of this publication was (most likely in collaboration with other leaders of the group) veteran coal miner and communist movement Charlie Woods, who was expelled from the CPV for signing up to this publication with his real name.
Charlie Woods, who was the organizer of the CPV in the north of England in the late 1930s, was the faction’s oldest link with the period of the CPV’s activity, when it acted in such a way that the Strict Left faction hoped to return the Communist Party. A significant number of members of the Strict Left group developed close personal friendships with members of fraternal communist parties, in particular the Iranian Communist Party ( Tude ), the Iraqi , South African Communist Parties and the Communist Party of Greece , whose representatives were well organized in most British campuses. Many supporters of the “Strict Left” believed that the style of activity and organization of these parties was much more effective than that of the CPV at that time, and therefore, they wanted to remove the CPV from the miserable position it occupied within the international communist movement and bring its positions are similar to the above highly effective and highly disciplined, and enjoying a much higher level of support in their countries, fraternal communist parties.
They wanted the Communist Party of Great Britain to return to a more pro-Soviet position, to become more demanding on the activity of its members, to focus on organizing the working class, as well as to focus on Marxist-Leninist education in their local organizations.
The faction involved members from the CPV and demanded a high degree of activity from its activists. The group was seen as successful in recruiting young members within the Communist Party of Great Britain, especially in the 1980s, at the peak of the economic crisis and Thatcherism nightmares, which forced an increasing number of Communist Party activists to question the union of Euro-Communists and centrists, who were increasingly concentrating on work not in the realm of the traditional class struggle, but in new social movements such as the feminist or environmental movement. The struggle of the group with the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain took a lot of time from its activists, and many of them were expelled from the party during this period.
Although the group was a faction within the Communist Party of Great Britain, it also had supporters within the Labor Party. In March 1979, the monthly newspaper “Steadily Left” began to be published, which, as stated, was a “non-partisan, non-sectarian publication of the left, devoted to the unity of the working class and class consciousness”. The newspaper was edited by Mike Toumazou, and the business manager was Seamus Milne. Frank Swift was responsible for financial support, and the editorial board consisted of Ray Buckton, Bill Keys, James Lamond, Jim Layzell, Alfie Bass, Bill Maynard (Bill Maynard), Alan Sapper (Alan Sapper), Gordon Schaffer (Gordon Schaffer) and William Wilson (William Wilson).
Steadfast Left supporters decided to remain in the CPV when similar factions broke away from the party to form the New Communist Party of Britain (NKPB) in 1977 and the Communist Party of Britain (PBC) in 1988. Some prominent activists such as Andrew Murray and Nick Shite formed a group called Communist Communications after the dissolution of the CPV in 1991, which published a newsletter called Diamat (Dialectical Materialism), but later this group dissolved and most of them, including Shait and Murray, joined the Communist Party of Britain (PBC). Others, notably Fergus Nicholson, decided not to join any party.
Straight Left Magazine is still published by Nicholson and his supporters, and they organize many annual conferences.
The group, which was close to the original Straight Left leadership, namely the Noai brothers and Calvin Tucker, continue the group’s political traditions by publishing an electronic journal called 21st Century Socialism.