Division British communism? Televising the decline of the Communist Party of Great Britain

Abstract

In June 1976 George Matthews, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s head of press and publicity, received a letter from Gordon McLennan, the party’s general secretary, in which Matthews was invited to meet with a film maker from Granada Television, Roger Graef. The point of the meeting, which Matthews agreed to, was to film the Communist Party during preparations for its 35th Congress in 1977, where it would debate an important change of rule. The resultant television programme, ‘Decision British Communism’, a three-part series that aired in Summer 1978, has received scant historical attention. Drawing on the party’s own archives, this article places the ‘Decision’ programme in the broader historical context of the party’s decline. It argues that in allowing a TV crew inside its clandestine world, the Communist Party actually demonstrated the very reasons for its own marginality.