New Communist Party of Britain

ERIC TREVETT, the President of the New Communist Party of Britain, passed away on Saturday 6th September. A life-long communist, internationalist and peace campaigner, Eric worked with Sid French on the Surrey District of the Communist Party of Great Britain for many years fighting for peace and struggling against revisionism within the old communist party.

They opposed the revisionist line of the CPGB as expressed in its programme, The British Road to Socialism. They had fought within the party for many years against this departure from Marxist-Leninist ideology through the CPGB’s internal democratic centralist structure. But in 1977, when the revisionist leaders moved to violate their own rules and basic communist norms and expel Sid and Eric to push through a more blatantly revisionist programme, the formation of a new party became inevitable.

Eric was a founder member of the NCPB in 1977 and he was elected general secretary of the Party following the death of Sid French in 1979. He held that post until his retirement from full-time party work in 1995.

He was subsequently elected president of the NCPB, a post he held until his death last weekend. Eric suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, which increasingly limited his mobility. But only this year he helped to set up a new pensioners’ association in his locality while encouraging the workers to join a union at his residential care-home. He will be sadly missed.