User:PhillyDelphia/Sid French

Sid French (1920-1979) was a lifelong British communist activist and organiser, and the first general secretary of the New Communist Party.

Early Years
He was born in 1920, to Ernie French, himself an active communist, and Ethel Wilkinson, who came from a family with left-wing views. Sid’s sister, Doris, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1942 but had been politically active with communists in the 1930s.

Sid joined the Young Communist League at the age of 14. He worked first in an accountant’s office and later as a reporter for the South London Press; service in the RAF followed from September 1941 in Gibraltar, Africa and Italy in which he rose to become a sergeant.

In 1946, he was appointed to be what was then the full-time post of Treasurer of the London District of the Party and, from then on, worked as a full-time official of the CPGB and the NCP for the rest of his life.

Despite the later characterisation of him by detractors as being an unflinching Stalinist, French was actually long known to be critical of personality cults – especially those involving himself! For example, he opposed the sending of a special message and gift to Stalin on his 70th birthday long before both the man and the practice of such obsequiousness would be discredited.

Differences with CPGB
On the other hand, he did see himself as a very disciplined communist; for example, despite the fact that he privately had serious doubts about the election strategy of the CPGB he stood as a candidate in the Mitcham constituency five times, the last in 1974. Allied to this policy concern, he had also been a long-standing critic of the downgrading of the CPGB's policy of affiliation to the Labour Party. He was also member of the Political Purposes Committee of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society for many years and, for a while, even the Vice-Chair, a unique position to be in for a Labour Party-affiliated mass organisation. French’s critical eye had begun early on in his full-time career and appeared to be a feature throughout his time as a CPGB full-time official. Although many shared his concerns, including the CPGB’s own later leadership, he had been an early and vocal critic, within the confines of internal discussion, of the Party’s immediate post-war shift away from organising workplace branches. Whilst twenty years later, he was one of those firmly opposed to changing the name of the Daily Worker to the Morning Star in 1966.

It might be thought that French and the Communist Party had moved a considerable way from each other over those two decades. Yet, although it is possible to discern a cumulative build-up of views held by French that significantly distanced him from the mainstream within the Communist Party from at least around 1962, it would take another 15 years for this to formally take the form of an organisational breach.

It might be thought that his role as the lead political worker in the Surrey District of the CPGB clearly enabled him to maintain a semi-detached position within it. Yet, in many ways, he had seemed at odds with the party’s strategic plan, the British Road to Socialism, ever since it had been first adopted in 1950.

Heading Toward the Split
From the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the resulting schism in the CPGB, Sid French clearly saw the New Communist Party project in the same light as the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split within the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. His Surrey District began to operate as a factional entity within the Young Communist League, which was much more destabilised by differences over the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The intensity of conflict within the YCL was much fuelled by the flagrantly hostile attitudes of the bulk of its national leadership. The fact that much of this leadership mischievously delighted in anti-Soviet rhetoric contrasted so starkly with French and those around him who were especially associated with a relatively uncritical stance regarding the Soviet Union. Although most thought that the CPGB had formally slid only part of the way towards a full-out revisionist perspective by the end of the 1970s, French’s Surrey district won supporters in a few parts of the country to its view that the game was up.

During the inner-party discussion on the 1977 draft of the British Road to Socialism, French was been especially sharply critical of the new text. This dropped the term 'dictatorship of the proletariat', accepted a seemingly gradualist approach to the achievement of socialism and gave a commitment to always honour the verdict of the electorate, event o the extent of a socialist government standing down if it failed to achieve a renewed mandate.

Foundation of the New Communist Party
The Surrey District took the adoption of the programme as a signal for a breakaway, which had been mooted to have the sympathy of several thousand CPGB members, although only several hundred in actuality joined the New Communist Party, when it was founded on July 15, 1977.

It was clearly a personal achievement of sorts for French, though others would point to the manner in which Marxist thinkers in the Party and YCL now began to be targeted heavily by Eurocommunists. Within a mere three to four years a virtually open war had begun inside the CPGB, in which the particular stance of the NCP appeared not so relevant as the CPGB imploded.

Personal Life
In 1953, he married Dr Ruth Harris, a Jewish working class woman who rose to be a consultant paediatrician. She died in 1980. They had two children, Jean and John. French was also an avid cricket fan and regularly attended matches at Lords.