The Campbell Case of 1924 involved charges against a British communist newspaper editor, J. R. Campbell, for alleged "incitement to mutiny" caused by his publication of a provocative open letter to members of the military. The decision of the government of British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who later suspended prosecution of the case ostensibly because of pressure from backbenchers in his Labour Party, proved to be instrumental in bringing down the short-lived first Labour government.
J. R. Campbell was the acting editor of Workers Weekly , a newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). In its 25 July 1924 edition, the paper contained a provocative article for the "Anti-War Week Campaign" being conducted by the party, "An Open Letter to the Fighting Forces." The article read in part:
Comrades:
You never joined the Army or Navy because you were in love with warfare, or because you were attracted to the glamour of the uniform. In nine cases out of ten you were compelled to join the services after a long fight against poverty and misery caused by prolonged unemployment…
Repressive regulations and irksome restrictions are intentionally imposed upon you. And when war is declared you are supposed to be filled with a longing to "beat the enemy." The enemy consists of working men like yourselves, living under the same slave conditions…
Soldiers, sailors, airmen, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, the Communist Party calls upon you to begin the task of not only organising passive resistance when war is declared, or when an industrial dispute involves you, but to definitely and categorically let it be known that, neither in the class war nor a military war, will you turn your guns on your fellow workers, but instead will line up with your fellow workers in an attack upon the exploiters and capitalists, and will use your arms on the side of your own class…
Refuse to shoot down your fellow workers!
Refuse to fight for profits!
Turn your weapons on your oppressors!" [1]
— Workers Weekly
On 6 August, it was announced in the British House of Commons that the Attorney General for England and Wales, Sir Patrick Hastings, had advised the prosecution of Campbell under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 but pressure from a number of Labour backbenchers had forced the government to withdraw the charges on 13 August. Along with allegations of pro-Soviet activity, that allowed the Liberals and the Conservatives to brand Labour as under the control of radical left-wing groups.
Although the actual motion of censure moved by Sir Robert Horne MP in the terms "That the conduct of His Majesty's Government in relation to the institution and subsequent withdrawal of criminal proceedings against the editor of the 'Workers' Weekly' is deserving of the censure of this House" was expressly rejected by 198 votes to 359, an alternative motion, proposed by Sir John Simon MP, "That a Select Committee be appointed to investigate and report upon the circumstances leading up to the withdrawal of the proceedings recently instituted by the Director of Public Prosecutions against Mr. Campbell", was passed by 364 to 198. [2]
The government, however, had made clear that it regarded both motions as votes of confidence [3] and so British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald requested and obtained a dissolution the following day. It would be the largest government defeat in the House of Commons until the Brexit vote on 16 January 2019. [4] Later, the 1924 general election was called, which Labour lost to a majority Conservative government.
In a pamphlet published after the fall of the MacDonald government, the Communist Party published a message by Campbell defending his decision to publish the aggressive anti-militarist articles that he did in the Workers Weekly:
...[T]he Communist Party of Great Britain had to call attention to the fact that the Labour Government, while talking of its attachment to the cause of peace, was continuing the policy of previous imperialist governments. We had to expose to the Labour movement the true nature of this policy and to ask the Labour movement, if it was sincerely opposed to war, to fight war by all the means in its power.
On the question of armaments, we advocated the policy of no credits for capitalist armaments.
On the question of empire, we advocated that the Labour movement should force the government to abandon the brutal and cowardly repression of the struggling colonial peoples.
We asserted that the Labour Government could prove its attachment to peace in a practical fashion, by publishing the secret treaties and the secret war plans in the archives of the Foreign and War Offices. [5]
A year later, in October 1925, after a number of posters had appeared that advocated the formation of soldiers' and sailors' committees and denounced the use of troops against workers, further articles in issues of the Workers' Weekly, dated 7 and 14 August 1925, called for members of the military to resist orders ("If you must shoot, don't shoot the workers"). That caused the newly appointed Attorney General Douglas Hogg, with the overt encouragement of the Home Secretary, William Joynson Hicks, to authorise a fresh prosecution under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797.
The new round of prosecutions embroiled not only Campbell but also eleven other members of the Communist Party, Willie Gallacher, Wal Hannington, Albert Inkpin, Harry Pollitt, William Rust, R. Page Arnot, Tom Bell, Ernest Cant, Arthur MacManus, J. T. Murphy and Tom Wintringham. The defendants were charged with "conspiring between 1st January 1924 and 21st October 1925 to
After an eight-day trial at the Old Bailey all of the defendants were convicted. Those with prior convictions Gallacher, Hannington, Inkpin, Pollitt and Rust being given sentences of twelve months imprisonment, and Campbell and the others received terms of six months. Those receiving the lesser term had all refused an offer by the judge of a non-custodial sentence in return for a declaration that they would not engage in further political activities similar to those which formed the basis of the charges.
The Zinoviev letter was a forged document published and sensationalised by the British Daily Mail newspaper four days before the 1924 United Kingdom general election, which was held on 29 October. The letter purported to be a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), ordering it to engage in seditious activities. It stated that the normalisation of British–Soviet relations under a Labour Party government would radicalise the British working class and put the CPGB in a favourable position to pursue a Bolshevik-style revolution. It further suggested that these effects would extend throughout the British Empire. The right-wing press depicted the letter as a grave foreign subversion of British politics and blamed the incumbent Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald for promoting the policy of political reconciliation and open trade with the Soviet Union on which the scheme appeared to depend. The election resulted in the fall of the first Labour government and a strong victory for the Conservative Party and the continued collapse of the Liberal Party. Labour supporters often blamed the letter, at least in part, for their party's defeat.
The Morning Star is a left-wing British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. Originally founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), ownership was transferred from the CPGB to an independent readers' co-operative, the People's Press Printing Society, in 1945 and later renamed the Morning Star in 1966. The paper describes its editorial stance as in line with Britain's Road to Socialism, the programme of the Communist Party of Britain.
William Gallacher was a Scottish trade unionist, activist and communist. He was one of the leading figures of the Shop Stewards' Movement in wartime Glasgow and a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He served two terms in the House of Commons as one of the last Communist Members of Parliament.
Rajani Palme Dutt, generally known as R. Palme Dutt, was a leading journalist and theoretician in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and briefly served as its fourth general secretary during World War II from October 1939 to June 1941. His classic book India Today heralded the Marxist approach in Indian historiography.
Harry Pollitt was a British communist who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) from July 1929 to September 1939 and again from 1941 until his death in 1960. Pollitt spent most of his life advocating communism. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, Pollitt was an adherent particularly of Joseph Stalin even after Stalin's death and disavowal by Nikita Khrushchev. Pollitt's acts included opposition to the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and Polish–Soviet War, support for the Spanish Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, both support for and opposition to the war against Nazi Germany, defence of the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and support for the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.
William Adamson was a Scottish trade unionist and Labour Party politician. He was Leader of the Labour Party from 1917 to 1921 and was Secretary of State for Scotland in 1924 and during 1929–1931 in the first two Labour ministries headed by Ramsay MacDonald.
Thomas Mann, was an English trade unionist and is widely recognised as a leading, pioneering figure for the early labour movement in Britain. Largely self-educated, Mann became a successful organiser and a popular public speaker in the British labour movement.
Arthur MacManus was a Scottish trade unionist and communist politician.
The National Minority Movement was a British organisation, established in 1924 by the Communist Party of Great Britain, which attempted to organise a radical presence within the existing trade unions. The organization was headed by longtime unionist Tom Mann and future General Secretary of the CPGB Harry Pollitt.
John Thomas Murphy was a British trade union organiser and Communist functionary. Murphy is best remembered as a leader of the communist labour movement in the United Kingdom from the middle 1920s until his resignation from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1932.
Walter "Wal" Hannington (1896–1966) was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and National Organiser of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, from its formation in 1921 to its end in 1939, when he became National Organiser of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.
Albert Samuel Inkpin, was a British communist and the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He served several terms in prison for political offences. In 1929 he was replaced as head of the CPGB and made head of the party's Friends of Soviet Russia organisation, a position he retained until his death.
The Clyde Workers Committee was formed to campaign against the Munitions Act. It was originally called the Labour Withholding Committee. The leader of the CWC was Willie Gallacher, who was jailed under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 together with John Muir for an article in the CWC journal The Worker criticising the First World War.
John Ross Campbell was a British communist activist and newspaper editor. Campbell was a co-founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain and briefly served as its second leader from July 1928 to July 1929. He is best remembered as the principal in the Campbell Case. In 1924, Campbell was charged under the Incitement to Mutiny Act for an article published in the paper Workers' Weekly. The article called on British soldiers to "let it be known that, neither in the class war nor in a military war, will you turn your guns on your fellow workers, but instead will line up with your fellow workers in an attack upon the exploiters and capitalists." He was sentenced to six months in prison.
The Hands Off Russia campaign was an international political initiative first launched by British Socialists in 1919 to organise opposition to the British intervention on the side of the White armies against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, as well as to oppose support for Poland during the Polish-Soviet war. The movement was funded partly with financial support from the Bolsheviks themselves. Their most prominent success was in stopping the sailing of the SS Jolly George with munitions bound for Poland. The movement was encouraged by the fledgling Communist International and ultimately emulated in several other countries, including the United States, Canada, and Australia.
The British Socialist Party (BSP) was a Marxist political organisation established in Great Britain in 1911. Following a protracted period of factional struggle, in 1916 the party's anti-war forces gained decisive control of the party and saw the defection of its pro-war right wing. After the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia at the end of 1917 and the termination of the First World War the following year, the BSP emerged as an explicitly revolutionary socialist organisation. It negotiated with other radical groups in an effort to establish a unified communist organisation, an effort which culminated in August 1920 with the establishment of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The youth organisation the Young Socialist League was affiliated with the party.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB founded the Daily Worker. In 1936, members of the party were present at the Battle of Cable Street, helping organise resistance against the British Union of Fascists. In the Spanish Civil War, the CPGB worked with the USSR to create the British Battalion of the International Brigades, which party activist Bill Alexander commanded.
Frederick Harold Peet was a British communist activist.
The Shop Stewards Movement was a movement which brought together shop stewards from across the United Kingdom during the First World War. It originated with the Clyde Workers Committee, the first shop stewards committee in Britain, which organised against the imprisonment of three of their members in 1915. Most of them were members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE). In November 1916 the Sheffield Workers Committee was formed when members of the ASE there went on strike against the conscription of a local engineer. The government brought the strike to an end by exempting craft union members such as ASE engineers from military service. However, when this policy was reversed in May 1917, this was met by a strike involving 200,000 workers in 48 towns. The Shop Stewards Movement arose from organising this strike.
William Henry Thompson (1885–1947) was an English radical lawyer closely involved with trade unions, who founded Thompsons Solicitors. From the 1920s he was associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He was married to Joan Beauchamp, a prominent suffragette.
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