Popular Front (UK)

The Popular Front in the United Kingdom attempted an alliance between political parties and individuals of the left and centre-left in the late 1930s to come together to challenge the Nazi/fascist appeasement policies of the National Government led by Neville Chamberlain. The Popular Front (PF) despite not having the formal endorsement of either the Labour Party or the Liberal Party, fielded candidates at parliamentary by-elections with success. There was no general election to test the support of the PF and therefore the opportunity for it to form a government.

The Popular Front was launched by the Liberal MP Richard Acland, the Communist and former MP John Strachey, Labour's economist G. D. H. Cole and Conservative MP Robert Boothby in December 1936.

Richard Acland was a relatively new Liberal MP who had gained Barnstaple from the Conservatives at the 1935 election. He quickly became an influential figure on the left of the Liberal Party. He advocated closer ties with the Labour Party and electoral co-operation with them at constituency level. He also became an outspoken supporter of a Popular Front, becoming one of its founders.

He was elected as Labour Member of Parliament for Birmingham Aston in 1929, serving to 1931. He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Oswald Mosley. He resigned from the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1931 for Mosley's New Party. Following the New Party's drift towards fascism he resigned to become a supporter of the Communist Party, contesting the Aston constituency as an independent. He assisted the publisher Victor Gollancz in founding the Left Book Club in 1936. As the author of The Coming Struggle for Power (1932), and a series of other significant works, Strachey was one of the most prolific and widely read British Marxist-Leninist theorists of the 1930s.

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