British Communist leaders, it complained, showed inadequate enthusiasm for denouncing the heresies of the non-Stalinist left. A prominent Comintern bureaucrat protested in 1929: How does it happen that all the fundamental problems of the Communist International fail to stir our fraternal British party? . . . All these problems have the appearance of being forcibly injected into the activities of the British Communist Party . . . In the British party there is a sort of special system which may be characterised thus: the party is a society of great friends. At the end of 1929 Comintern ousted the ‘great friends’ from office and imposed a new leadership on the submissive CPGB. At Moscow’s insistence, Harry Pollitt, the new general secretary, abandoned all attempt to reach an accommodation with the ‘class enemies’ of the Labour Party. During 1930 the CPGB dutifully, if absurdly, denounced Ramsay Mac-Donald’s second Labour government as ‘social-Fascist’, though the Communist National Minority Movement in the trade unions continued to be publicly accused by Moscow of ‘right opportunist errors’.
