Britain’s Communist Party Calls It Quits

Britain’s Communist Party, secretly bankrolled by the KGB and long Moscow’s most loyal outpost in the West, abandoned its Marxist-Leninist constitution Friday and said it will propose a name change.

“We must recognize that the era of Communist parties is at an end,” general secretary Nina Temple said after delegates at a party conference voted by a 2-1 margin to drop the constitution. “Our party cannot be revived by nostalgia.”

The 500 delegates met in a labor union building near the 19th-Century house where the exiled Karl Marx wrote “Das Kapital,” putting forth the principles of communism.

The British party is the latest in the West to bow to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

In January, the Italian Communist Party, the largest in the West, changed its name to the Democratic Party of the Left and dropped its hammer-and-sickle emblem.

The British party’s membership peaked at 56,000 members but has dwindled to 5,000. It has no seats in the 650-member House of Commons.

But the party has in the past been a force in British politics. Communists helped foment the widespread strikes in British industry in the 1970s.

Earlier this month, a former party official acknowledged publicly for the first time that the KGB has made secret payments of up to $179,000 a year to the British party from 1958 to 1979. The party had denied for decades that it received money from Moscow.

The British Communists, long riven by feuds, now face new divisions.

A draft proposal by the party leadership calls for a constitution embracing “creative Marxism, feminism, ecology, anti-racist and other progressive traditions.”