Andy Croft
Tom Sankey: This is Tom Sankey with the British Left Oral History Project. It is just after three on the 26th of June, 2025. Could you please say your full name for the recording?
Andy Croft: Yeah, my name's Andy Croft.
Sankey: Okay, brilliant, let’s begin. So, what do you say was your first introduction to politics?
Croft: Is it okay if I repeat some of the things that are in that autobiography?
Sankey: Of course.
Croft: Well, I grew up in a heavily Wesleyan Methodist family, which meant there's no politics in my childhood at all except all the unspoken politics of hostility to the notion of politics in my parents, and yet they inhabited a world, in chapel and Sunday school, of democratic involvement. The Methodist Church, it's not a Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Church, it's very much congregationally participant. So the congregation got to choose the next minister, they vote on who they want for minister and they were heavily involved in kind of the participation of their chapels.
Croft: And, in the 1960s, the non-conformist churches in the UK, they were amongst the first public bodies to start thinking about what we now call issues of underdevelopment in the third world. So this is going to sound a long way around answering your question, but Methodist churches and other non-conformist churches had been heavily into missionary work, the most appalling, white-on-black, patronising, sentimental stuff about spreading the Lord's Gospel to the dark, dark places. And this flipped somehow by the middle of the 1960s without anyone saying, oh God, that was embarrassing. They're doing the same stuff, but now they're raising money for development projects in the Third World and they're not sending missionaries out, they’re funding agronomists and technical experts to go and work in underdeveloped parts. And then talking about Third World debt, they never use words like imperialism and they would never address issues like Apartheid. Bizarrely they skirted round that.
Croft: So by, when I was eleven, me and my mate, his dad was the Methodist minister in the little chapel that my parents went to. My dad was the organist and choir master and my mum taught in Sunday school. At the age of eleven, me and Pete, we wrote a little poem about the war in Biafra, but that must have been, I mean, we weren't prompted to do this. No one told us, it wasn’t homework, we did it on our own. Why on earth were we doing this? But because, 1967 this would be every night on the TV news, this would be the first TV film televised, sorry, the first televised war for us, not Vietnam, but Biafra, and it was, it was genuinely shocking. And it, because the Methodist churches were involved in West Africa, it kind of really chimed in with their newly discovered idea of: there is world out there, they’re not smiling little pickaninnies, they're swollen down starven Igbo children in a civil war and the British government is actually supporting the Nigerian government against the breakaway Biafra Republic. So at the age of 11, knowing nothing at all about anything, me and my mate Pete wrote this solemn little acrostic poem spelling, the first verse spelt out the word Biafra, and the second spelt out the word England. So it began “B for Biafra, where there’s bloodshed everywhere, I for the ignorance of the people who don’t care”. I mean, it was, it wasn't my best work, not bad for two eleven-year-olds. And I cannot reconstruct the path that took us to writing that little poem, which got published in our, in the local paper, and I'd forgotten all about this until Pete's mom found this a few years ago in a newspaper cuttings file.
Croft: So that’s, that’s my best answer to your question, when was I first introduced to politics? I wasn't introduced to politics; there was no politics in my childhood.
Croft: At home my dad read the Daily Telegraph, the Methodist Recorder and the local paper, and there was no politics at school, primary school, secondary school, nothing was ever mentioned of it, about this, but things were still seeping in. So by the 1970s, it was hard to avoid politics. I went to university in University 1975, graduated in 1978, did a PhD, so by the 1980s, it wasn't just that it was avoid politics. Politics, whether you liked it or not, shaped… it was the landscape for all kinds of conversations. Conversations about pop music or pop music, or poetry or film, were also conversations about politics. The world changed so dramatically in those years behind our backs, or certainly behind mine, when they talk about, oh, there's a counter-revolution in the 1960s. Well, I never noticed it because I was, I'm 10 or 11 or 12, and you don’t notice what's going on.
Croft: I do remember watching a Sunday teatime chat program, intellectual chat program on the BBC hosted by Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge was a terribly pompous figure, quite a good TV face and voice, and he was discussing something, I don't know what it was, but there was, he was talking to two long haired bearded guys in denim jackets and denim jeans, they look really cool. So I must be about 12 or 13, and they’re talking in thick Spanish-English accents about aesthetics and Marxist aesthetics. I don't know who they were, but I remember thinking, I'd like to be able to do that, these guys look really good and they sound great as well. I wanted a bit of that. So that's another example of something chipping at the thick wall that protected me, not just me, our generation of kids, from events going on in the world. We didn’t know about Vietnam until the late 60s, I suppose. Well I was born between Khrushchev's speech at the 25th, 20th, Congress, and Suez, in a hiatus between the end of one cold war and the start of the next. So politics was remote and invisible, it was… Oh, sorry, man.
Sankey: Sorry.
Croft: Until the 70s when it became much more in your face and you had to take, to make decisions: Who are you going to stand with? Where do you stand? What do you think? By the early 1980s, it was all consuming, really. Everything became political, not just for me. I wasn’t looking for politics, but politics found me. So, by the… I think at university, I started going to all kinds meetings and groups and discussions and debates, I joined the Labour Party in 1979, and in 1983 I joined the Communist Party. That was a long answer, sorry.
Sankey: No, brilliant. So, when you join the Communist Party, was that the only organisation that sort of sprung up to you, was there multiple kind of vying for your support.
Croft: Well, by way of… As a preface to my answer there, I was jotting down some notes earlier. The context you need to understand, I think, by the late 70s, early 1980s, how very visible and audible the Left was in Britain, or the Lefts, because there were many lefts. And this, this must seem unbelievable to someone of your age and generation now. So you could not turn on, well you could turn on Radio 4 or turn on the TV, and in those days you had kind of debates, and not just telling you what to think, you had people arguing. So you would get people like Tony Benn, from the Labour Party left, or Mick McGahey. the deputy general secretary of the, general secretary of the Scottish miners and the Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Bruce Kent from CND, John Ruddock from CND.
CroftThese were names who would turn up on Question Time or Any Questions. They were household names, not quite household names, but within intellectual discourse, names like Edward Thompson, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm, there are no equivalents now. We don’t have that kind of public intellectual, academics have, have retreated to campus they don't really have the presence in life of the towns where the universities are based, we don't have our adult education programs anymore. We don’t have those kinds of figures anymore, and these were of the Left, they were the most interesting people, thinking and speaking and talking and writing. And no one, the people the right were embarrassed; they had no equivalents. All that glamorous and sexy and interesting and innovative thinking was coming from people like that. In poetry, you had someone like Adrian Mitchell, in art criticism or fiction, you have someone like John Berger, all the great names were of the left.
Croft: So it was a very, the Left was a visible place. It wasn't, as it is now, in hiding. I don't think you could write a history of the 1980s without structuring it around the big issues in which the Left really pushed the Falklands War, anti-Apartheid, the miners’ strike, cruise missiles, when Americans were bringing them in, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, the poll tax, these were the big moments, the sot of set piece fights. That, That is the history of Britain in the 1980s, and in each of these, the Left had a really good go, and in almost every case they lost, maybe not anti-Apartheid, but in all the rest we lost all those. The third thing is the left was varied and vivid, and sometimes vicious place, there were lots of lefts. There was the Labour Party, there was the Communist Party, there was the SWP, the IMG, there was Militant inside the Labour Party, the ludicrous RCP. There were people who said they were soft left or hard left. People who called themselves “Tankies”, and “Euros”. There were, we need, in all of those organisations there were splits and trends and counter-trends. So there was a… You could pick-and-mix.
Croft: So when you said, why did I choose the Communist Party? I'd gone to lots of events and meetings by all kinds of organisations. In my first week at university in 1975, Tariq Ali was advertised, do you know Tariq Ali from, he was a leader of the IMG and is now a Guardian journalist. A bit of a windbag. He was advertised to speak and I didn't know anything Tariq Ali, but I knew that he's the kind of person my dad would not want me to go and listen to, so all right. Tariq Ali is coming? I know him, he’s been on telly. So I got to this meeting really early and then another twelve people turn up, and I didn't know it was going to be like that. That was my first introduction to the difference between what you expect and what actually happened. And Tariq Ali didn't have anything to say, but he was part of the IMG.
Croft: In the 1960s. election as a student I supported the Socialist Unity candidate in Nottingham where I was a student. That was an electoral platform combining the SWP and the IMG, and they were hopeless, they didn't do any organising, they didn’t do anything at all. They just sat around thinking and talking about the revolution. That put me off the kind of Trotskyites, I think. I've been reading the Morning Star, in those days, and still is, a brilliant publication. I couldn't believe that little newspaper, in those days it was only a six-page newspaper, something wise and so clear, and so clean and so well connected and so well written. I wanted more of this. So that sort of pulled me into the Communist Party.
Croft: Two other points, or a few other points to make about the Left in 1980s. The Left was a very innovative place, there was lots of hard thinking and sometimes difficult and painful thinking. Eric Hobsbawm, the historian wrote an essay in the magazine Marxism Today called “The Forward March of Labour Halted”, which was incredibly controversial. Up to that point everyone thought just one more push, just shoulder to the wheel, lads.
Croft: One more push, Comrades, and we'll win. And Hobsbawm pointed out that structurally, it wasn't working out like that; changes inside the, demographic changes and economic and cultural changes inside the working class, inside the middle class meant this was not going to happen. We needed to have a big rethink, and it was really painful rethink, but it came from the Left. The Left was asking questions, not just about itself, but about the… Hobsbawm was in the Communist Party, Marxism Today was the Communist Party magazine, but it was asking questions of everyone who considered themselves to be on the left.
Croft: It was only a few years earlier that Communist shop stewards on the, in the Upper Clyde shipbuilders in Glasgow, they came up with this brilliant idea. Instead of going on strike, they locked the management out and they carried on building ships without the management.
Sankey: [laughs]
Just fantastic! A completely original idea, and management didn’t know what to do, the companies didn't know what to do, the government didn't know what to do. And you'll find on YouTube, there’s some brilliant clips of these three great Communists. Glaswegian, hard drinking, hard smoking shop stewards: Jimmy Reid, Jimmy Airlie and Sammy Barr. And Jimmy Reid is speaking to, he’s got ten thousand shipyard workers there, and he’s saying [in a Scottish accent] and there’ll be nae hooliganism, and there’ll be bevvying! Yeah, he's laying down the, he’s got the cameras of the world are on us. We have to show them that we are better than they think we are, we’re better than they way we are. We're not scum, we're the people who make the ships that keep the world moving. We don’t need the managers, because the management were trying to close the shipyards. So that was a really innovative way of dealing with an industrial dispute.
Croft: One of the last things the Communist Party did was organise this brilliant, round-Britain bike ride. Not quite the same scale as Upper Clyde shipbuilders. It was a sponsored bike ride, the complete circumference of the UK, and you could ride for one day's leg or two or three or as long as you want and you could ride, you could raise money for any campaign you wanted, as long as it was a progressive campaign, no fascists or Tories. So hundreds of people were just riding bikes, enjoying themselves, and enjoying the hospitality of comrades around the country. It was like, again, it was a really innovative thing to do.
Croft: And you cannot talk about the 1980s without talking about the magazine Marxism Today, which was, do you know what I'm saying?
Sankey: I've been doing a lot of reading about it quite recently.
Croft: Ah ok, so you understand how this was really very important, painfully important because they never stopped asking difficult questions or with… The things we thought we could take for granted, they're saying, oh, another, another thing: we need to rethink this. It was a, a, that kind of intellectual renewal, so, that was also part of, being on the Left meant you were part of, felt part of, an intellectual renewal. And it was also an internationalised, an internationalist place to be. Being on the Left. not just on the Communist Party, meant you were connected to struggles in South Africa, Grenada and Nicaragua and El Salvador and Vietnam, the revolution in Iran, the revolution in Portugal, in Greece, the fascist coup in Chile. If you ever get a chance, look at footage or photographs of the funeral of Enrico Berlinguer, he was the Italian Communist Party leader for about twenty, thirty, one of the pioneers of Eurocommunism. And when Berlinguer died there, I think there's two million people turned up for the funeral. You just see aerial photographs of Rome, (Sankey: Wow) the thousands, all the roads and red banners and red banners and red banners and red banners. And of course, at you end of the 1980s we got Gorbachev, the interesting person on the planet, wise, cultured, well-travelled, liberal, communist, trying to get things done, trying to change things, trying to get rid of nuclear weapons, trying to dismantle cold war thinking.
Croft: So, it was innovative and it was international. So, as I was selling the Morning Star or something in Middlesbrough for the Communist Party, I also had the sense I was linked to comrades in South Africa, and comrades in Vietnam and that was a very liberating and empowering way of thinking.
Croft: There’s a quote by Harry Pollitt sometime in the 1940s, Harry Pollitt was the legendary general secretary of the Communist Party in the '30s and '40s. And the Communist Party had just lost a by-election in St Pancras and he says, we lost in St Pancras. but we won in China.
Croft & Sankey: [laughs]
Croft: There's a really good way of thinking about things. Think locally, act worried, act locally think globally. So that's the larger context of why I joined the Communist Party for all those reasons, because all those factors would have applied to other parts but especially to the Communist Party. It was so well connected internationally, to the international movement, and to its intellectual heritage and its militant past. Sorry, that was a long answer.
Sankey: No, it’s a brilliant answer. I just want to zoom in a bit on your personal experiences. So you came across the Communist Party at Nottingham Uni. How did you find the sort of, the specific community there?
Croft: I didn't join in Nottingham, I just used to go to branch meetings, (Sankey: Ah Sorry) or public meetings when they had debates. Yeah, that's something else actually you need to understand that in the 19, up to the, up to the 90s, in any town in the UK on any night of the week, there would have been a public lecture, a talk, a debate, some evening classes, some courses, some weekend schools, maybe organized by university adult education departments, maybe organised by the WEA, community campaigning groups, trade councils, community arts groups. And that was a space, that space had always been there, and the left had made that space its own. So if, you could go to the jazz and poetry night, and there may be some politics, probably would be some politics, attached to that. The Communist Party in Middlesborough when I was there, we had debates with all kinds of other organisations, public debates, debates about William Morris or children's television, or Lenin, when we'd get other speakers, public meetings.
Croft: That’s, the loss of that space, because it doesn't exist now, there are no debates or lectures or public meetings. If you saw a public meeting advertised, you think that something really strange going on. So that low level, not low level, that community-based space where people could think talk about things and talk about things and argue about things, it's just gone. And it's not replaced by social media, that is not an equivalent, its full of mad people getting overexcited about things they haven’t thought about because it’s not a listening, it's not a collective, cooperative space.
Croft: So I used to go to meetings in Nottingham, then when I moved to Middlesbrough, as I put in, said in that little essay, it was the day that the Americans invaded Grenada and on the World at One at dinner time, Geoffrey Howe from the Conservative Party and Denis Healey from the Labour Party were agreeing what a great idea it was for the Americans to be invading Grenada. And Denis Healey said, there comes a point in every person's life when they have to choose between democracy and communism. All right, okay, you’ve put it like that. Well i know, if you think invading Grenada and overthrowing a UNESCO sponsored literacy program is democracy, well, I'm going for the other guys.
Sankey: [laughs]
Croft: And I'd been leaning that way for so many years, it was inevitable, if it hadn’t been that day, it would have been the following day. And that was, and then I joined the Middlesbrough branch, which was a large branch, a fairly poor branch, there weren’t many of us with cars in the branch, and really busy branch, and it was everything I ever wanted. It combined activity, reflection, discussion, debate, and recreation. It was, in a way my years in the Labour Party had never done those things, done any of those things. No recreation in the Labour Party, no discussion in the Labour Party, it’s just resolutions and who’s going to get a majority on this committee, all that kind of squabbling and infighting. The Communist Party, at that point, was completely immune from infighting, so that's when I got involved properly.
Sankey: How did your family react to you first joining the Communist Party?
Croft: I don't think I told them, no. My wife, or the woman I was married to at the time, she stayed in the Labour Party. No, it wasn't… By 1983, this was, it was just beginning to become a bit difficult, although there were still a lot of battles, and a lot of big defeats still to come. By 1983, we’d… Thatcher was back in the Falklands, we’d lost with the Falkland’s War, and she was going to be triumphantly in power for, I don't know, however many more years it was. So, already I felt then slightly the need to keep my head down a little bit. I just got job and I didn’t want to jeopardise that. So to begin with, I was, I was a little bit circumspect, for probably two or three years I suppose. That’s right, I applied for a job at Teesside University and I was told, I didn't get an interview, and informally I was told afterwards: did I, could I possibly have imagined they were going to employ a member of the Communist Party to teach at university? Oh right okay, fine, thanks for letting me know. Why did I waste my time applying? If I'd known that, you should have put that in the job spec: No Communists Allowed. Older communists, and not just communists, older trade unionists, had been used to this for years, being blacklisted, suddenly finding themselves out of a job mysteriously, suddenly finding they can't get a job mysteriously, but this was new to me. After a while I stopped being shy about it but to begin with, I probably was a bit.
Sankey: Do you think that stigma got better or worse, sort of, from the start of the 1980s to the end of the 90s?
Croft: It probably got worse and I probably got more thick skinned because with each successive defeat, the left is retreating and shrinking and then starting to fight amongst itself. Brilliant. That’s going to help isn't it, comrades. Why are we doing this? But we're doing this because we're, we're retreating in the space where we could operate was smaller and smaller, and I was getting more thick skinned by the end of the 80s, I think, I didn’t care.
Sankey: Good. So, what was your relationship with mainstream politics at the time, Did you personally engage in the Labour Party? Did you vote?
Croft: Oh, okay, in terms of voting history, living in Middlesbrough, it was really difficult because there was a, it's one of those one-party states, not now: red wall, blue wall. I think, for decades, Middlesbrough had been Labour, had been right-wing Labour, had been run by the GMB. So, the County Council was Labour, Middlesbrough Council, Stockton Council, Darlington Council, Hartlepool Council, Redcar Council, all the authorities on Teesside were all Labour, the MEP was Labour and all the MPs were Labour. And in Middlesbrough, to make it worse, it was a, our MP was a was a gangster, a real unpleasant piece of work called Stuart Bell. Vicious…
Croft: So I was never going to vote for him. We were in Middlesborough for thirty years, so I've barely voted. I voted for Michael Foot in 1983, and I voted for Corbyn in, was that 2017? And in the last two elections, the Corbyn elections. But in between, what are we going to do? I’m not going to vote for the Tories, obviously and I'm not going to vote for the liberals because obviously, and I'm not going to vote for the Labour Party. So usually I just write, “this is not a choice”. I always go to the polling booth and write “this is not a choice”. Reprehensible, ridiculous, repulsive does not a choice make. They all agree on the same things: privatise the NHS, expel foreigners, spend more money on, wrap yourself in the Union Jack, that is not a choice. And so my, and I am ware this is not good, from a Gramscian perspective, the Left needs to be as involved as possible. And there's many parts as a British society as possible, not cutting itself off.
Croft: Being in the Communist Party didn’t feel like I was cutting myself off but I'm aware that in retrospect, it must look like it was a small, obscure, self-defeating, comic opera sect that was going nowhere, but at the time, in the 70s and 80s, it felt like an opening up, not a narrowing. Yeah so good question there.
Sankey: And, just jumping forward because you mentioned it, did the sort of Corbyn moment, did that inspire much hope for a return, sort of, bigger role for the left?
Croft: I was, well, it happened, didn't it? For two or three years he was leader. there was a genuine revival of interest in other ways of thinking, other ways of doing politics. I remember hearing the appalling MP, the Labour MP for Barrow, who's now… He’s a special government advisor on ramping down on protests, John... During the Corbyn years, this MP for Barrow, he was saying: “I don't know what's the point of having all these new members, we’ve invited them to come to the Christmas social and they don’t come!”
Sankey: [laughs]
Croft: So, he thought that's membership of a political party consisted of, going to the Christmas social. Well, he's not talking about campaigning or protests or demonstrations or free nurseries for children or raising money for… He’s doing nothing at all for poetry readings or theatre, it was just, you’re a member, you come to Christmas social, give us your money. and fuck off. It was such a narrow, I'd forgotten how narrow and dull mainstream politics was. The Communist Party was never that, there was always, always interesting stuff happening, people trying to find new an interesting ways of doing things, not going to the Christmas social and that's it.
Croft: So there was that brief moment but the Labour Party being, being so braindead it was unable to make the most of its this influx of new members around Momentum and around Corbyn. I leafleted in our village, the last village we lived in, for Corbyn and was seriously thinking of joining the Labour Party. Didn’t get round to it, and then they assassinated him with that preposterous campaign about anti-Semitism, Very effective, it worked, didn't it. They [chopping noises]. So, I'm never going to vote again, I think, there's no… I’m never going to have a choice. In Middlesbrough we'd used to stand, the Communist Party used stand candidates, though never in my ward. So we did, because in Middlesbrough, the Labour Party had been in power for so long that there were lots of wards where there was no candidate, only a Labour party candidate. The Liberals weren't going to bother standing and the Tories definitely weren’t going to bother, so there was one Labour candidate. So, we stood candidates in those wards, just democratic choice. Otherwise, it's not, you can’t really call it an election. It’s just a coronation, not a proper election. So yeah, mainstream politics and me, my political life since 1991, has been outside of political structures, is going to be a cultural things or educational things or community things, not through membership of organisations. I'm still a member of CND after 50 years.
Sankey: So, just building on from that, so there was a significant crossover between your political life and your social circle in the period. Could you say more on that? Did you have many friends outside the Left or the Communist Party?
Croft: Outside the Communist Party? Yes, most of my friends never joined.
Sankey: You notice much tension there?
Croft: I don't think so, no. I just can’t think of any arguments we'd have. Had lots of discussions. Well, that's goes back to the point I was making before about the Left being large and visible. And varied place. You still knew were, you could still make assumptions. We may not we agree about, like, martial law in Poland, but we are going to agree about the poll tax, or we may not agree respond to Arthur Scargill’s leadership during the miners’ strike, but we were going to agree on South Africa and Apartheid. But, the bulk of things were you could assume that people followed the line.
Croft: And what that line, that line was never laid down anywhere, but it emerged, you knew when when you met people, they got the line. You knew they were on the left and therefore you could make assumptions. It didn’t really matter where you were, or what particular part of the left, with the exception probably of the RCP who were just mad, but I only ever knew one RCP, fortunately, and he was mad.
Sankey: Cool. I'm just going to go through kind of a series in the period and ask, how you, or if you were involved with them at the time. So, did ‘84 and ‘85 miners’ strike, how did that effect you and your community? Were you involved at all? Reaction to it?
Croft: Yeah, it was very painful, long and painful, drawn out, painful defeat. It was horrible. In Middlesbrough, for the NUPE branch, as it was then, Stuart will tell you more about this because he worked full time for NUPE. The NUPE branch office was used as the collecting point for food and money. So the Communist Party, we would take food and money for the NUPE branch, We were just a bit too far from the Durham Coalfield when there were lots of events in the miners’ welfares in South Durham, but they were always kind of 30 minutes, 40 minutes from Middlesborough as well. Middlesbrough was halfway between the Yorkshire Coalfield, the South Yorkshire Coalfield, and the Durham coalfield, so the Miners’ Strike didn't impact on Teesside in a way it did in other parts of the country so, quite so visibly. We organised lots of events and raised lots of money for the NUM.
Croft: But not only was it a defeat for the NUM, and therefor for the left, that invested so much in the NUM cause, it was where some of the arguments in the Left that really began. So the Communist Party… The leadership of the NUM in South Wales and Kent, bizarrely, the Kent coalfield, the Communist Party provided the leadership there. Scargill had been member of the Communist Party, but big thing is that open up over the conduct of the strike, whether there should have been a ballot of the NUM membership, whether that was conceding too much to the press and Thatcher, or whether that would have shored up the democratic credentials of the, of the case of the miners’ strike. In South Wales particularly there was a big resentment against Scargill’s shouty attitude. Scargill was a great shouter in public, a man untroubled by doubt. I thought he was great at the time. Whereas in South Wales, and Scotland, there were more reservations about just… We need a, that the NUM needed the widest possible, the absolute widest possible basis of support outside of the coalfields so the Communist Party tried to provide that in places a long way from the coalfield, generating support. Whereas there were elements around Scargill who just thought one more push, one more big push at the picket line and we can break the strike. It was a…
Croft: My friend Bert Ward, also from Teesside, was working at party centre in London. This must have been in mid-1970s, when Scargill was elected General Secretary of the NUM. Bert was in the pub opposite, at the party headquarters one dinner time, and in came Mick McGahey for a drink, a big drinker. And Mick McGahey had been campaign manager for Scargill. Scargill had just been elected NUM General Secretary and Bert said, “Mick, Mick, come over here, come over here, let me buy you a drink. Congratulations, you've got Arthur elected”, and Mick McGahey said, [in a Scottish accent] “Aye, and now our problems will begin.”
Croft & Sankey: [laughs]
Croft: He got what he wanted, but he also knew that Scargill was a bit of a throwback liability, whereas McGahey had a much bigger, long term. He had a strategic view. Scargill had it kind of tactical view. So some of the big divisions that I think that's going to open up, not just in the Communist Party, not just in the MUN, not just in the trade union movement, in the Left, they were beginning to open up in the miners’ strike, they were beginning to open up. In retrospect, you can see that some, we were papering over the divisions. And there was such, a lot of energy went into the miners’ strike, we didn’t have time really to notice that we're starting fall out here we thought we could go back to how it was, but we couldn’t go back cause the defeat was so catastrophic and Thatcher was so triumphant. The victory march of Thatcherism and that South Yorkshire police, or at Hillsborough two years later, surprise, surprise. That was a really, really painful time for everyone on the left, whether or not you were a miner it was really horrible, and we realise that exactly what Eric Hobsbawm had been saying, this is the forward march of labour halted. What happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force? And we’re retreating now.
Sankey: Do you think the defeat there had a significant impact on the eventual collapse/transformation of the party in the 90s, early 90s?
Croft: Yes, there had been arguments and divisions in the Communist Party since the 1920s, they'd mostly been resolved. People left, people joined, people left in high dudgeon, people joined with enthusiasm, people fell out with this person. Generally, the Communist Party was a stable organization. The events in 1956 were painful for an earlier generation when a third of membership, a third of membership, left. The events in 1968 around Czechoslovakia were painful again, not so many left. In fact, the people who left, left because the party had criticized the Soviet intervention. So the first time round people left because party supported the Soviet intervention in Hungary, time it was the headcases who liked the idea of the tanks, hence the term “Tankies” and the “Euros”.
Sankey: Of course.
Croft: They were the Tankies. But after ‘68, things had settled down again it seemed. But then there's generational differences between older comrades who were used to things a different way, and younger comrades who had university education, who read a lot more things, and maybe more travelled, who had different attitudes. There were kind of other divisions potentially opening up, other arguments opening up about youths, before my time. The Communist Party used to argue about whether youth was a separate category, a separate demographic, are working class youth any different to working class adults or working class grandparents.
Croft: Then the issue of women. The Communist Party, to its enormous credit, was way ahead of everyone else on the left about feminism. The Communist Party kind of really imported second-generation feminism into British political life, and American second-generation feminism into British political life. And that opened up rows as well, completely stupid rows, unnecessarily rows. So by the time of Gorbachev comes to power, we have more things to disagree on. Is Gorbachev, is he a class traitor or is he the last best chance we've got? Were the Soviets right to send tanks into Afghanistan? Then the coup d'état against Morris Bishop in in 1983, who was responsible for that? Arguments about shop stewards, whether they were being incorporated too much into the system, rather than being oppositional. It seemed…
Sankey: A whole milieu of things.
Croft: Yeah, too many things. The Communist Party just became addicted to arguing with itself on what, on issues that seem now theological. The notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Croft: What a stupid thing to fall out about. But there were older comrades wanted to keep in the notion that if and when the Communist Party takes power, it will not hold elections and allow the Tories ever to come back in. And there's others who are saying, well, you've got to take people with you, and if you can't win the arguments, you don’t deserve to be in power. But of course, the Communist Party was never going to be in power. It was a ludicrous thing to fall out about, just a theological abstraction here. “Why are you arguing about this?”, “Well cause these things are important”, but they’re not important. I don’t think they were, I don’t. I was never interested in those theological, theoretical arguments.
Croft: So, by 1990, 1991, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we didn’t know, I don’t think any of us knew, the scale of the defeat that that was going to involve. We didn’t realise that it was over, not just for the Soviets, but for everyone, and that all the dominoes were going to fall, not just internationally but in the UK as well: there is no Left left. Not that, by then, the Communist Party wasn't really that attached to the Soviet Union, though we were very, very keen on Gorbachev. But we didn't realize that once Gorbachev went, Eastern Europe would go, the Italian Communist Party would go, the Spanish Communist Party would go and everything would go and the British Communists…
Croft: And now, and now there’s this flat, levelled boring landscape dominated by the most preposterous characters like Farage and Starmer and Badenoch. How the hell did they get anywhere near power? When I think of the wise, clever, experienced people I’ve known in politics, the selfless people who gave their lives to make the world a better place and these little shrivelled absurd cartoon characters parade on the world stage as though they’re… Starmer thinks he’s of the Left – not of any recognisable Left I’ve ever seen. He would not have been allowed in any of the lefts of the 1980s, he's a ludicrous figure, clearly a chancer, an opportunist, a cynic and a charmless character. [unintelligible]
Croft: So by 1991, it was all over, which is why I voted for the dissolution of the party in 1991, cause I couldn’t see, it was unsustainable. And it was really, really painful conclusion to come to. I wanted the party to survive, I wanted the party to grow. I was in love with that organization. It was the best thing I ever did; that, marrying my wife, having children. I loved being in the Communist Party. It made me in many ways. I've not been a communist party for thirty-four years, though I have, just two months ago, I've joined the CPB. Yeah, and they, they were the people who were, were partly responsible for splitting the party back in 1991, these were the “Tankies”. They’re OK now, I’ve forgiven them. So, I've just been to my first branch meeting, my first in thirty-four years, it was great. It was as though I'd not been away actually, there weren’t any mad people there, just wise people trying to think things through and get things done, although the CPB is infinitesimally smaller than the old, the Communist Party was around 35,000 strong when I joined it in the 80s, and the CPB’s probably only 2000 strong, but they're busy, they're serious, they're dedicated. So I'm happy to have rejoined it.
Sankey: Brilliant, um, so we've gone to the time, sorry I'm just looking at my notes. Okay, I'd like to ask you now about the kind of, the changing social landscape in the period, and sort of looking at it from a communist point of view. So we briefly touched on women’s issues in the period, how did, at the time, you react to the, sort of, the increasing role of women in society?
Croft: I was fine with this. Not that I welcomed it, it seemed to be common sense. Men of my generations, of the Left, we grew up with second-generation feminism, it wasn’t something we had to get our heads round. So, once we thought about it, once we’d been confronted with the idea, yeah, ok, it makes, how could we possibly argue with this. That was fine, but it could be divisive.
Croft: The most successful public meeting, most successful campaign that the Communist Party in Middlesbrough ever organized was around the sexual abuse of children, which seems like a strange thing have got involved in, but in the, what would this be, the mid-1980s, in Cleveland, that was the old County Council around Teesside there was something called the Cleveland child abuse scandal. A really strange, and also another painful thing but very, very local. Suddenly, Middlesbrough was all over the national pages and on the news and on the TV daily and daily and daily and daily about these alleged, the alleged sexual abuse of all these children. And Stuart Bell, the gangster MP, he politicised this by attacking the social workers and the paediatricians, saying that these people, it's they who are abusing the children. The families, and their fathers and the men are innocent. It's a stupid thing to do, because he couldn't possibly have known this, but he really, he saw this as his opportunity to try and get in the cabinet, I think, to get on TV. The Roman Catholic Church absolutely sided, which was big on Teesside, absolutely sided against these feminists, these women, because there were women, the social workers and the pediatricians, especially Marietta Higgs. The Labour Party sided with Bell, the Evening Gazette, which was still an influential newspaper in those days, sided with the Evening Gazette.
Croft: So the real closing down of discussion around this, and the demonising of the paediatricians and the social workers. So we didn’t understand what was going on, so we organised a public meeting at the St Mary's Centre in Middlesbrough, and I got Bea Campbell, who was then at the height of her fame, a journalist, to come and start to think through, or to talk through, the issues here. Normally when we'd book a room In the Middlesbrough for a Communist Party meeting, we get 30, 40, 50 people. There were around 200 people, we couldn't get in the room! And that's because lots of people were also asking the same question: “What's happening here?”, “Is this real?”, “We don't understand”. And Bea was just fantastic, she kind of improvised the series, not of answers, because at that point the Communist Party had stopped trying to give answers but we good at asking questions, and no one else is asking questions, everyone else thinks they know the answers. We didn't know the answers, we knew that there's some really important questions to be asked here so… Halfway through the meeting, someone from the SWP stands up and says, "My name is so-and-so, I'm from the SWP and I think the sexual abuse of children, its a class issue”. And everyone goes, oh god, there’s a groan in the room. The reductive left, are you still around, are you? We were, It wasn't a political issue, It was an issue with lots of political consequences and ramifications and out of that came a national campaign. So that was how the Communist Party could not have done that, could only do that because we were, by then, the Communist Party was very, very comfortable with feminism, so Bea, improvised a kind of a feminist, analysis of what was happening around child abuse and around the Cleveland story about other parts of the country where children were being sexually abused. And it was brilliant, she got a book out of it. And the Communist Party our meeting isn't mentioned and it should have been because it started at that meeting, she stayed at our house as well.
Croft: So, feminism was never difficult for me. And it was one of the, one of the most innovative reasons I like being on the Left because things would, long before the change in society. larger society, the Left was getting these things right. And that, of course, is why they came up with notions like “Looney Left”, or “political correctness”, or now they say “woke” because the Left was in advance.
Croft: The Left had just started thinking about how to use language. You don’t say “y’alright love” or “don’t worry love it’s only a joke”, because if she's not finding it funny, it's not funny, and we understood this a long time before other parts of society. So feminism was really important to me as part of my communism in the 1980s, yeah.
Sankey: So, kind of on a similar tack, the 80s and 90s was also a period of, kind of, increasing gay visibility and of course also the AIDS epidemic. How did, sort of, Communists and yourself react to that? Or was there not much of a…
Croft: Well, there was, the General Secretary of the YCL, the Young Communist League, was a young man from Belfast called Mark Ashton. Have you heard of Mark Ashton?
Sankey: It rings a bell.
Croft: He was a really charismatic young man. He set up London Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners during the Miner Strike, which was another of those innovative things. And he got bands like the Bronski Beat, do you know the Bronski Beat? Jimmy Somerville had a high falsetto voice. He was in the Communist Party, they were on Top of the Pops. They had lots of good cultural things going on to raise money for the miners. But Ashton's genius here was was thinking, was arguing that there are no hierarchies of oppression; she's oppressed by her sex, he's oppressed by her colour, they’re oppressed by their class, these people are oppressed by their sexual preferences, and it’s not for me to say that my oppression is greater than hers or theirs. Oppression is felt by… When you're oppressed, there are no hierarchies, this is another really important argument, and it was Mark Ashton’s argument, I think. There are no hierarchies of oppression so he could see that middle-class gay people in London who, during the Thatcher years it was not a good time to be gay at all, they could make common cause with some South Wales miners who were also having a horrible time, and it's Thatcher and the government and the Tories who are giving everyone a horrible time. So, he was trying to link up everyone's horrible time, everyone's experience of oppression. There's a film made about Mark Ashton It's called... It’s a feature film…
Sankey: I can look it up later.
Croft: So, it's about London Gay and Lesbians Support the Miners and it's a bit of a romantic comedy, some cartoon, goodly Welsh people, and some cartoon, camp, London, middle class gays, I mean, it's not very good. What's really interesting in it is the Mark Ashton isn't in the Communist Party at all. Someone turns up with a copy of the SWP, a copy of Socialist Worker. They could make the story about Mark Ashton, but they couldn’t mention the fact that this was a Communist-inspired campaign. It took a communist of his generation and a gay communist to see the strategic possibilities of linking up different struggles, and to pretend he wasn’t a communist, it makes no sense. Why would you have done this? Only someone from that intellectual and political milieu could have, could have thought of that, like that. But then Mark Ashton died of AIDS, very, very shortly after getting it, I mean within like days, I think, not even weeks of getting the diagnosis of HIV. That was terrible, a real blow to everyone because he was, he was great, Mark Ashton.
Croft: I can't think about anything, anything else useful to say about… Well again, the Communist Party was never going to be homophobic. People had long moved past all those things, whatever prejudices we’d grown up with as children or as teenagers. The educational and cultural impact of being on the Left, certainly of being in the Communist Party, meant that it would never arise. You wouldn't get people being homophobic in the Communist Party, I can’t think of any example, or you’d never get antisemitic or racist comments. It would never have happened.
Sankey: Brilliant, so we’re just coming up on the hour. Are there any final comments you want to make about your personal relationship to the Left, communism, the Communist Party? No worries if not.
Croft: Only that, without exception, the most interesting people I’ve met in my life have been of the Left, not necessarily in the Communist Party but many of them, some of them old men who I knew who had fought in Spain; these were just giants to me, I couldn't get over it. I'm in the presence of someone who fought in the Spanish Civil War. I'm having a drink with them, or a cup of coffee with them, and we’re talking and he's treating me as equals. There's this guy here, John Cornford, he was at Cambridge when the Spanish Civil War broke out, a member of the Communist Party. He went out to Spain before the International Brigades were formed, and he was killed on his twenty-first birthday, but he was also a very gifted poet. He was so young that he only wrote a half a dozen poems. He wrote poems to his girlfriend, a woman called Margot Heinemann, and I knew Margot when she was a very old lady, and she blessed me with her friendship. And I was making a program for Radio 4 at the time, one of the times I, I went down to interview Margot and asked her if she would read the poem that he wrote to Margot, in the last letter he wrote, and she’s in her mid-eighties at this point. So she tries to read this poem, it's a love poem, and it ends, “And if bad luck should lay my strength into the shallow grave, remember all the good you can, and don’t forget my love”. And Margot, 50 years after she Cornford died, she couldn't read this, she broke down in tears. And that was, that was an exceptional moment for me. I’m connecting here, I’m making a program with Margot Heinemann. who was in love with John Cornford, who was killed in 1936, in Spain. So I was given access to some of these remarkable people who’d lived selfless lives. The International Brigaders, after the, those who came back, they sort of went into ordinary lives. They didn't go on to become superstars, in fact they were mostly prevented from doing anything because of the black lists.
Croft: I was also given access to, being in the Communist Party gave me access to a whole load of really interesting writers, poets and novelists, who between them, they sort of tried to teach me how to write, when I was younger, for which I'm very, very grateful. So just on a personal level, that contact with these great people. And I can say that I’ve shaken hands with someone who shook hands with Mikhael Gorbachev, because I was a big fan of Gorbachev. Gordon MacLennan, the last General Secretary, or last but one, I knew Gordon had shaken hands with Gorbachev. Only one degree of separation.
Sankey: That’s pretty cool.
Croft: Yeah, it really is very cool, I think. Yeah. And that's it I think, I can’t think of anything else to say, but if you’ve got any specific questions or if things I have said don’t make sense and will need clarification, have you got some special software that will turn this into text?
Sankey: Yeah, and then I edit it myself.
Croft: You haven’t got to type everything up?
Sankey: No, not everything.
Croft: Ah, good.
Sankey: Well brilliant, thank you so much.
Croft: No, thank you, I really enjoyed that.