...The SPGB is almost unique to Britain (its companion parties in seven other countries have no more than a few dozen members apiece, and all of them were founded by emigrants or returned exiles who had been in the ‘mother’ party) – and it is certainly unique
in British political life [1]. Originating in a group of young dissidents in the old Social Democratic Federation early this century, dubbed “Impossibilists” for their refusal to countenance the advocacy of any reforms whatever or of any programme but complete socialism it adopted at its inception in 1904 an
Object and Declaration of Principles to which it has adhered ever since. Apart from fluctuations during the two World Wars (sharply downward in the first and slowly upward in the second, to a peak of about 1000 by the late 1940s) and the effects of internal disputes in the 1950s and early 1960s, its membership for most of its history has stayed between the four hundred or so it had reached by 1914 and about seven hundred. Beyond this at any given time it has probably had several hundred supporters and sympathizers, including ex-members who got behind with their dues and were lapsed from membership.
For all its lack of size and obvious influence, the SPGB is a remarkably durable body with an equally durable standpoint. Major disagreements have developed within it not more than three or four times in its three-quarters of a century of existence, and each time they have ended in the reaffirmation of the Declaration of Principles and the departure of the dissidents. Alone among the various small powerless organizations claiming to be socialist, then, it has known neither splits nor decline into moribundity, although perhaps it is more inward-looking and less overtly aggressive in its polemical stance than it was thirty or forty years ago. ...
