I found Francis's article very interesting, and sent him a response. On reflection, it occurs to me that this response, along with Francis's article, may prompt other accounts and perhaps some fruitful discussion. So here is my piece.

Francis –

Have just finished the article. Very interesting: a journey through nostalgia, recognition, and abiding political questions. Parts of what you write about were common to the party at different times and in different places, while others are more time- or place-dependent. My experiences started earlier – I joined the party in 1962 – and took place further north. Although I'm from the south London suburbs, I went to Leeds university in 1961 and joined the party there. After 5 years at Leeds, I had 6 years in West Wales (Lampeter – for most of the time the only party member there), then 2 years in Sheffield and 6 in Sunderland. Then Norway.

All this time I had little or no contact with the YCL. The fact that the YCL was open to comrades up to the age of 30 reflects I think its inheritance from the 1930s, when you could serve a long apprenticeship. By the 1960s, few in their 20s wanted to be in the youth section of a party.

What I remember from the beginning was the emphasis on activity and education. While at Leeds I was interviewed by someone (who I later learned was a party member!) who was part of a research project on how students spent their time. I had to say what I had done apart from study the previous 7 days; it turned out that I had been involved in some party related activity every single day. In Leeds, Sheffield and Sunderland we had regular, weekly branch meetings, at which we reported on activity, planned more, and had political discussion on a topic – introduced often by a visitor from outside. At Leeds we had a weekly public meeting with a visiting speaker, and we had our own Communist week with meetings every lunchtime and a bazaar at which we sold stuff provided by the Star market. There was a genuine sense of a unity of theory and practice – one which made me contemptuous of the Althusserian concept of "theoretical practice" when it emerged in the 1970s.

I learned the meaning of internationalism in the CPGB. Not only were branch education discussions regularly about the struggles in other countries, but these were reported in party journals and the Worker / Star and – most important, perhaps – there were visitors involved in these struggles from all over the world who spoke at party meetings, including lowly branch meetings. Meeting old communists in the GDR involved many moving accounts. Our party literature sales in the student union attracted visits from a range of foreign students.

The contrast with the Labour Party was striking. When an anti-racist group we supported tried to make contact with Labour Party branches in Sunderland in the 1970s, we were told none of them had regular meetings, and some had no meetings at all. When we asked where they discussed matters, on one occasion we were told, "We leave that to the Fabians." I saw Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party as an attack on this top-down control and an attempt to build a genuinely active mass membership, a view supported by the fact that the current leadership has expressed no regret that – what is it? 100 thousand? – members have left the Labour Party since it took office. Back to government by the PLP and expulsion of those who disagree.

Being a communist in the 60s to 80s meant meeting many very impressive individuals. In my time in Sunderland I was at branch meetings attended by 3 different International Brigaders. I was chairman at meetings addressed by top NUM officials, leading international comrades, and comrades who had been involved in the battle of Cable Street. History was something you learned as much from other, older, comrades as from the printed page. My tutor at Leeds, party member Arnold Kettle, was in the same Cambridge Branch as Guy Burgess ("We made him treasurer, and he absconded with the branch funds," Kettle sadly reported), as was, I think, Maurice Cornforth, who I met through Lawrence and Wishart. At Leeds, Bert Ramelson (another International Brigader), was District secretary. On the Yorkshire District Committee was an ex-suffragette who had been in prison before WW1; I remember her addressing envelopes for election letters with her face about 6 inches from what she was writing, her sight was so bad. I can never forget one comment she made to me: "You know, as an ex suffragette, the last 40 years have been very disappointing politically." In Leeds I chaired a meeting addressed by Hugh MacDiarmid.

In one of her novels Doris Lessing has her communist heroine describe going round trying to get members to reregister, only to be told again and again that they were dead or had left the party years before (this from memory). That was my experience in Sheffield and Sunderland: party membership figures were deliberately inflated – which of course led to a problem with the non-payment of dues by ghost members (Gogol's Dead Souls . . .). I remember that Dave Cook argued that joining the party was such a big step that we should sign up anyone who wanted to join (as against the policy in the 30s of more careful vetting and a probationary period before full membership was allowed). We were never allowed to expel those who paid no dues and attended no meetings, and Dave Prescott from south Wales justified this by noting that there had been a move to expel the Rosenbergs for non-attendance at branch meetings . . . On this, I was more in agreement with the NCP line of "a party of a new sort" and so on, although I recognise that Dave Cook wanted to lift the party out of a ghetto mentality. (A comrade from Leeds told me about travelling back there on the train from London with Bert Ramelson, and meeting other comrades. "Isn’t it good to be in a party where everyone knows everyone else?" she commented. "No," thundered Bert: "it’s the sign of a small party.") But one NCP comrade in Sunderland told me that he had stopped attending meetings but was still a member . . . Perhaps two levels of membership was a good idea.

In the 1970s Kettle remarked to me: "The history of the party in the 1930s shows that if you get one big thing right you can get away with getting lots of other things wrong." When I asked what the big thing was, he said: "The anti-fascist struggle of course." Being right in theory and practice about one big thing ensured party unity, but when that battle was (for the time) won, the problems about the little things became more pressing. When the Soviet Union was fighting and defeating fascism, questioning the nature of democracy in the state was not going to be chosen as a sensible item for discussion, but after Kruschev's speech at the 20th Congress it became an inescapable issue. Those who were politically at odds with the Gollan / McLennan leadership labelled any attempt to discuss such matters as reformist, revisionist, trotskyist, or whatever. Some of them refused to sell the Star and instead sold Soviet Weekly. We all make mistakes, and hindsight is a great thing, but on that topic – problems of democracy in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe – I think that the Euros were right. Even members of the NCP, I discovered, were by the first decade of the present century, admitting that "We underestimated the problems in the Soviet Union." But some of the Euros were also guilty of naivety: in some cases believing that socialism was secure in Eastern Europe and just needed tweaking, and seriously underestimating the enormous work of international solidarity led by the Soviet Union. (To do him credit: Kettle shocked me when, in about 1973, he said to me that we had to be prepared for the possibility that socialism would be overthrown in Eastern Europe, and he mentioned Poland in particular.)

Factionalism became more and more of a problem, and poisoned relationships. Dave Cook told me off for working with Straight Left supporters: I told him that the ones I worked with were active, and prepared to work, which was all I was concerned about; some of the ones he wanted me to work with never came to branch meetings. In both wings of the party there were comrades who worked hard, and others who never attended a meeting. Incidentally, it was a myth that the Euros were all students while Straight Left supporters were all "real workers": the truth was that in both groupings there were both categories. It became impossible to recruit new members when branch meetings consisted of repetitive battles between "tankies" and "Euros" about Joseph Stalin.

I think that one phrase that has been a disaster for communism – or at least, its mindless and mechanical repetition – is "the dictatorship of the proletariat." The important point – that the enemies of socialism and democracy will use any means to overthrow a transfer of power from capital to labour, and this has to be prepared for and resisted – can be stressed without using the word "dictatorship."

When I came to Norway in 1981 I joined the Norwegian party. It faced very similar problems. By the 1990s I felt we were just going through the motions, and when I turned up at a branch meeting and was – at the age of about 55 – the youngest member there, I decided to call it a day.