Common Wealth Party
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Common Wealth Party
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| Founded | July 1, 1942 |
| Dissolved | 1993 |
| Ideology |
Socialism Common ownership Syndicalism Left-libertarianism |
The Common Wealth Party (CW) was a socialist political party in the United Kingdom in the Second World War. Thereafter, it continued in being, essentially as a pressure group, until 1993.
Common Wealth was founded in July 1942, during World War II, by the alliance of two left wing groups, the 1941 Committee – a think tank brought together by Picture Post owner Edward G. Hulton, and their 'star' writers J.B. Priestley, Spanish Civil War veteran Tom Wintringham – and the neo-Christian Forward March movement led by Liberal Party Member of Parliament (MP) Richard Acland, along with independents and former Liberals who believed that the party had no direction.
It appealed to the egalitarian sentiments of the English populace and hence aimed to be more appealing to Labour's potential voters, rather than voters leaning Conservative. Common Wealth stood for three principles: Common Ownership, Morality in Politics and Vital Democracy. Disagreeing with the electoral pact established with other parties in the wartime coalition, key figures in the 1941 Committee began sponsoring independent candidates in by-elections under the banner of the Nine Point Group.
Following the electoral success of Tom Driberg with this support in 1942, there was a move to form the Committee into a political party, through a merger with Forward March, though many disliked the idea of being a Party rather than a social movement, and through pressure from Priestley and Wintringham, the word 'Party' was never formally part of Common Wealth's name. Led by Sir Richard Acland, Vernon Bartlett, J.B. Priestley, and Tom Wintringham the group called for common ownership, "vital democracy" and morality in politics. Its programme of common ownership echoed that of the Labour Party but stemmed from a more idealistic perspective, later termed "libertarian socialist". It came to reject the State-dominated form of socialism adopted by Labour under the influence of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, increasingly aligning itself instead with co-operative, syndicalist and guild socialist traditions. One party proposal was that all incomes should be subjected to an absolute upper limit.
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