The driving force behind the formation of the New Communist Party in 1977 was Sid French, who had been the CPGB's Surrey district secretary for many years.

After postwar demobilisation French's commitment to the Communist movement led to his appointment as Secretary of the newly formed Surrey District Committee of the CPGB in 1950.

[5] Divisions within the CPGB had emerged following the Soviet intervention to quell the Hungarian uprising in 1956[6] and the subsequent moves by the Nikita Khrushchev leadership in the USSR to denounce Joseph Stalin.

In the eyes of French and like-minded observers, the CPGB leadership under John Gollan used the Hungarian crisis and the denunciation of what Khrushchev called Stalin's "cult of personality" to weaken and divide the party as a whole.

[9] In 1964 Labour returned to power after 13 years of Conservative rule but the new government under Harold Wilson pursued policies seen by many leftists as anti-union (including an attempt to introduce "In Place of Strife" compulsory arbitration), while in Northern Ireland the government was seen by many in the Catholic community as supporting its oppression following the collapse of the civil rights campaign.

French and others believed that at a moment of profound crisis for social democracy, their party was impotent and unable to wage a struggle for communist policies.

The Young Communist League collapsed, while the growing crisis in the party also affected the credibility of its leadership as formerly senior and influential members left its ranks.

In 1976, four of the party's top engineering activists resigned: Bernard Panter, Cyril Morton, Jimmy Reid and John Tocher, who had all been members of the Political Committee.

The Gollan leadership had redrawn the British Road to Socialism aimed at - according to its detractors - adopting a social-democratic platform that sought the respectability and acceptance of academic and intellectual circles.

The hardliners claimed it was the party's entrance fee into the reformist and social democratic traditions of the official labour movement.

The publication of the draft and the beginning of the pre-Congress discussion period led to furious arguments within the party - with the majority saying that the new programme was about building a broad alliance for revolutionary social change, though implicitly or explicitly agreeing that the proposals broke with the Leninist tradition.

On 15 July 1977 the New Communist Party was established at an emergency meeting in London called by French and other members of the Surrey district committee.

The Nicholson group continued to oppose the CPGB leadership in an increasingly factional way while claiming that French's move had undermined the overall opposition at Congress.

One of the NCP's better-known members was Ernie Trory (1913–2000), who founded the Crabtree Press to publish his political and historical writings.

In the 1990s Party Congresses adopted resolutions repudiating and denouncing Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalin 20th Congress speech (Secret Speech) and defining its ideology around the "great revolutionary teachers of humanity, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin" and the "great revolutionary leaders of the struggling masses, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh".

In April 1992 the NCP was one of the initial signatories of the Pyongyang Declaration, along with 77 other communist, workers, socialist and progressive parties worldwide.

Entitled Let Us Defend and Advance the Cause of Socialism, this was the first statement made by the international communist movement since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and by 2007 has been signed by 300 parties.

[20] In 2003 the NCP adopted an entirely new rule book with the aim of building a monolithic party and based on the principles of the old Communist International.

[21] The party is politically closest to undiluted, orthodox or anti-revisionist communists who see the Soviet leadership from Nikita Khrushchev onwards as stepping away from socialism.