Robert Griffiths (politician)

Robert Griffiths (politician)

Robert Griffiths is the general-secretary of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB). He was elected by the CPB's Executive Committee in January 1998, in place of Mike Hicks, who, along with others, subsequently left the party he had a major role in founding.

Griffiths previously served as president of white-collar union AUEW-TASS in Wales.

Employed as Plaid Cymru research officer from 1974 until 1979, he published, with Gareth Miles, Sosialaeth i'r Cymry (Socialism for the Welsh People) in July 1979, and the following January founded the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement (WSRM). The movement campaigned on a wide range of issues, including steel industry closures and holiday homes. In May 1982, the WSRM was active in support of Bobby Sands and the other Irish paramilitaries on hunger strike when Robert Griffiths was among those arrested and tried on bomb-related charges. Griffiths served time on remand but was found not guilty.

Griffiths joined the original Communist Party of Great Britain in 1984 but was expelled a few years later as the conflict escalated between the party's Executive Committee and the faction in control of the journal Marxism Today on the one side, and The Morning Star management committee and major districts such as London and the North West on the other. The immediate occasion for his expulsion was his authorship of the pamphlet Was Gramsci a Eurocommunist? - A Reply to Roger Simon. He participated in the formation of the Communist Campaign Group, an alliance of members and former members of the Communist Party of Great Britain set up to defend the Morning Star in the early 1980s, becoming its Welsh secretary. He also edited and contributed to a paper critical of both the CPGB's programme, The British Road to Socialism and its Alternative Economic Strategy. The CCG split from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1988 on the basis of the CPGB's party's existing rules, principles and programme, while dropping the 'Great' from its title to become the Communist Party of Britain (CPB). Griffiths subsequently took part in extensive redrafting of the party's programme, renamed Britain's Road to Socialism.

In November 2004, Griffiths was a speaker at the Communist University - a now bi-annual event - hosted by the Welsh Communist Party in Pontypridd under the question "How can we challenge the "New World Order" and create a people's Wales?". Other speakers from across the progressive, labour and socialist movements were George Galloway, John Haylett, Andrew Murray and Leanne Wood.

He comes from the city of Cardiff and was a Communist Party candidate in the 2001 general election standing for the Newport East constituency and winning 173 votes (0.6%). He was a candidate in the Pontypridd constituency for the 2005 general election obtaining 233 votes (0.6%). Labour held Pontypridd with 52.8% of the vote. Griffiths stood for the CPB in the Cardiff South and Penarth seat during the 2010 UK election and came bottom of the poll with 196 votes (0.4 per cent). The seat was held by Labour's Alun Michael (17,262 votes—38.9 per cent of the vote).