British Left

[neprimerimye]

Not wishing to confuse matters further. but ....... the CPGB you mention are not the official Communist Party but a very small (membership of less than twenty) Trotskyite group who nicked the name when the official CPGB was wound up. The official communists are the CPB (membership around 900) who broke away from the (old) CPGB before it was desolved. To further complicate everything the current CPGB are (very critical) members of RESPECT, while the CPB are not.
Also, if you're really interested there are the New Communist Party(who split from the CPGB in 1977), CPB (M-L), CPGB (M-L), Communist Party of Wales and Communist Party of Scotland.

All of them fighting for unity.

The cpgb (pcc) are not Trotskyists. They are in both Respect and the CNWP.

The Communist Party of Wales is part of the CPB. But the Commuist Party of Scotland is not.

Theres a couple more but I'll leave you the fun of discovering them for yourself.

 

[Fledgling]

That would be easy enough to do, but you'd have to start by defining what you mean as "a reasonable number of members". If you take say 500 as a base line, you rapidly find yourself reduced to three or four parties. Those would be the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party and (depending on how generous you want to be) maybe the Communist Party of Britain.

In fact if you took 300 as your minimum membership figure you'd end up with exactly the same list. None of the anarchist groups get much over 50, the second tier of Trotskyist groups range from 50 to 150.

Well I'll have trouble defining what constitutes reasonable myself given that I don't know much about left political parties and thus setting a random number risks offending members of parties below my ignorant line. However this aside I'll say 200+ as a benchmark with the added request that these parties are ones which have some possibility of development AND appear to be active. I know it's a rough estimate but I keep seeing acronyms before my eyes allo ver this forum and it's bloody confusing!

 

[militant atheist]

The Communist Party of Wales is part of the CPB.

No it isn't actually. The Welsh section of the CPB is the 'The Welsh Committee of the Communist Party of Britain.' The Communist Party of Wales are a different outfit who operate from a PO box in Corwen - no idea who they are though.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I think your being overly generous with the second teir maybe 120 for the AWL and 70 for WP.

Those are their claimed memberships. I tend to believe the AWLs claim and to put Workers Power at a little below theirs. Other groups in this category would include the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Revolutionary Communist Group, both of which must have about 50 or so members.

You also missed the SLP who surely top 300 members?

Here you hit on a tricky issue - groups with membership criteria that are much, much lower than those of the Trotskyist groups. The SLP and CPB are good examples of that. If we were measuring their membership numbers in terms of what would be considered the active membership of a Trotskyist group, the SLP have pretty much zero and the CPB might be Workers Power size. If we count their membership as whoever has been given a card and bunged them a tenner at some point over the year then we are talking about a few hundred for the CPB and an unknowable quantity for the SLP.

 

[nwnm]

"The Communist Party of Wales are a different outfit who operate from a PO box in Corwen - no idea who they are though." Do they have a website? (struggles to restrain train spotter tendency and fails....) Bring back C.O.B.I. - Proletarian Broadside was a gripping read (well they did at least reprint Willie Paul's stuff on the state...)

 

[neprimerimye]

"The Communist Party of Wales are a different outfit who operate from a PO box in Corwen - no idea who they are though." Do they have a website? (struggles to restrain train spotter tendency and fails....) Bring back C.O.B.I. - Proletarian Broadside was a gripping read (well they did at least reprint Willie Paul's stuff on the state...)

Wales has a minor history of 'communist' groups which don't have any real existence. Mention of the BICO reminds me of its split group the Communist Organisation in the British Isles which claimed to have member(s) in bangour. Their typo not mine.

I stand corrected on the CPW which would in any case seem to be something of a chimera but that is true of most of the left groups today I'm afraid. Even when not themselves chimerical their perspectives tend towards the fantastic and delusional.