Robert Griffiths, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), has been forced out of his home. The 72-year-old is living in temporary accommodation after Storm Bert triggered a flash flood that took over Caerleon, south Wales last November. Despite being displaced, he is feeling relaxed, and has resolved to simply get on.
Griffiths is no stranger to exile. Active in left-wing politics for over 50 years, he is well accustomed to hostility and operating on the sidelines. When we meet one frosty Saturday morning in Croydon, south London, he is dressed in a collared shirt and knitted jumper. He has a gentle, almost grandfatherly manner.
Griffiths is in Croydon ahead of the CPB’s biannual executive meeting. Over a coffee at the neoclassical Aerodrome Hotel—about 15 miles from Gatwick and even closer to Ruskin House, the party’s headquarters—he walks me through the day’s order of business. Executive elections, major campaigns, finances, membership and political debate are all on the agenda.
“The character of the Labour party is going to be a big question. To what extent has the Labour party actually changed its character?” Griffiths says. “The increasing capitulation to big business interests, the acceptance of big business donations—outweighing even donations from trade union affiliation fees—will all be part of the debate, including an important one for us: public ownership.”
The Communists will also discuss how to combat Reform and the rising threat of right-wing populism. “We will continue to work with the left and with others on the not-so-left in opposing Reform policy,” Griffiths tells me. “What we have to do is expose the whole class character of Reform: who funds it, who leads it. It is a party largely run and funded by very wealthy people, and that is reflected in their policies.”
Born in Cardiff in 1952, Griffiths grew up in Llanrumney, a council estate on the city’s east side. In the 1960s, he studied economics at the University of Bath, where he “moved quite sharply to the left”. In the early 1970s, he joined Plaid Cymru and worked as a parliamentary researcher. Griffiths’s post was officially discontinued for financial reasons, although he was a vocal member of the party’s left wing, and his departure coincided with bitter infighting.
Griffiths then established the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement, which led to him sitting as a defendant in a political conspiracy trial that ultimately fell through. The case was connected to a series of attacks in the 1980s, when underground republican groups planted bombs and set fire to English-owned holiday homes in Wales. Griffiths maintains he had no involvement with these organisations but, because he was an “openly political” campaigner and a “pain in the backside”, became a suspect anyway.
In 1983, he joined what was the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), only to be expelled a couple of years later, he says, for challenging the dominant line of the leadership. With the CPGB’s collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union, Griffiths re-established himself as a leading figure in its successor the CPB, winning election as its general secretary in 1998—a position he has held ever since.
I ask Griffiths about the CPB’s purpose and relevance today. The party, which is Marxist-Leninist in orientation, received few votes in last year’s general election. Polling shows most people view communism as a bad system. Griffiths and his comrades are under no illusion about their peripheral status. “We’re not naive,” he says. “We know we’re a fringe party. We know we’re ignored by the mass media. But when people hear what we have to say, it actually goes down quite well.”
Griffiths believes that part of the problem lies with the term “communism”, which the media have been “very successful” in making unpopular. “You either say, ‘well, let’s just drop the word’, and talk about socialism and being a socialist. But then they make that a dirty word,” he says. “The other option is, as Mick McGahey said during the miners’ strike: when you stop running, they stop chasing you. You have to stop running at some point. Stand your ground and defend yourself.”
