Establishment In August 1921, two of Great Britain's leading radical youth organisations, the Young Workers' League and the International Communist Schools Movement, gathered at a special conference held at
Birmingham. The assembled delegates to this Unity Conference passed a proposal calling for the two standing groups to merge under a new name, that of the Young Communist League. This proposal was taken to the rank-and-file of each group, and the proposed unified constitution and organisational rules ratified in a referendum of branches held in October. The YCL was the youth wing of the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which exercised oversight over the group. The YCL modeled itself upon the adult party and, in the estimation of historian Thomas Linehan, "functioned as a younger version of it." In 1954, the YCL supported 'The Red Scout', Paul Garland, who had been dismissed from his local
Scout Group in
Bristol following his dual membership. This was a controversy with wide media coverage and a debate in the
House of Lords. While formally independent, the group was always closely linked to the CPGB and its activities and fortunes broadly followed those of its parent organisation. As with the adult party, the YCL saw itself as part of a unified world movement, and took its ultimate direction from the
Young Communist International (CYI), with headquarters in
Moscow. The YCL was seen as a recruiting school for activists in the adult party, and the organisation's structure, internal relationships, and tactical activities closely paralleled and followed those of the CPGB. This was in turn a reflection of the structure and practise of the Russian Communist Party (later known as the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Similarly, the Young Communist International, which formally stood at the head of the YCL's decision-making process, was closely modelled upon the adult
Communist International, which itself was shaped by Russian Communist Party practice. The fledgling YCL published its own official monthly periodical, known as
The Young Communist; it was replaced by
Challenge in 1935, which continues to be published today.
1920s and 1930s In 1923 the YCL founded their Red Sports Clubs, aiming to rival the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. The YCL was very successful in using sports to organise young people politically against imperialism and poverty, and by 1932 the
British Workers' Sports Federations were dominated by members of the YCL.
The Spanish Civil War Between 1936 and 1939 over 35,000 men and women, from over 50 countries, left their homes to volunteer for the
Republican forces of the
Spanish Civil War within the
British Battalion. More than 2,300 of these came from Britain, Ireland and the
Commonwealth, with as many as 80% being members of the
Communist Party of Great Britain and the Young Communist League. The volunteers came from overwhelmingly working-class backgrounds, with large numbers hailing from cities such as London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Only a small number were unemployed with large numbers involved in industrial occupations, such as labouring, construction, shipbuilding and mining. The average age for the volunteers from Britain was twenty-nine. Volunteers included
John Cornford; a poet and Young Communist League member from
Cambridge who was also the great-grandson of
Charles Darwin, and
Charlie Hutchison; chair of the Young Communist League branch in Fulham and the only black British volunteer to join the
International Brigades.
The 1940s and 1970s The YCL was known to have enjoyed close contacts with the London branch of the Caribbean Labour Congress, led by communist activist and pioneer of Black civil rights in Britain,
Billy Strachan. During the 1960s, the Young Communist League actively supported the National Liberation Front (
Viet Cong) and the Vietnamese people during the
Vietnam War. They supplied large quantities of
Blood plasma, as well as collecting funds to buy over one hundred bicycles, many of which were donated to the Vietnamese at the
9th World Festival of Youth and Students in
Bulgaria, 1968. A recruitment drive started in 1966 around the slogan "The Trend - Communism" associated the group with wider cultural trends in society; Throughout this period, YCL membership grew to over 6,000 members and a generation of young members, led by Barney Davis (national secretary), George Bridges (London secretary) and others challenged the political approach of the parent party. The League continued engaging in new musical cultures through the late 1970s, as young communists participated in a Camden squat along with the punk band
Scritti Politti. The YCL took a lead in condemning what it defined as the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia In 1979, its congress adopted a new
programme,
Our Future, which did not commit the group to
Marxism and removed the policy of
democratic centralism. The new programme exacerbated divisions in the group, and in 1983, with membership down to 510, democratic centralism was re-imposed. In 1985,
Mark Ashton became General Secretary of the YCL, having co-founded
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners to raise funds supporting the
National Union of Mineworkers during the year-long
strike of 1984–1985. By the end of the strike, eleven different LGSM groups had emerged throughout the UK, with the
London group alone raising £22,500 by 1985 (equivalent to £69,000 in 2019) in support. The events of Mark Ashton and LGSM have since been dramatised in the 2014 film
Pride. However membership in the League continued to decline due to its slide to
Eurocommunism, and by 1986 the league had fewer than 300 members. ==Youth section of the Communist Party of Britain (1991 to present)==