Temple Nina

Nina Temple

Temple was born in 1956 and came from a Communist family background – her father, Landon Temple, managed Progressive Tours, the travel company that specialised in Eastern European visits that was effectively owned by the Communist Party at arms’ length.  

She became involved in the London Young Communist League during the mid-1970s, which led to her becoming part of the revisionist tendency, the so-called `Euro-Communists, that took the Communist Party of Great Britain practically to destruction and then finally dissolved it. She was heavily promoted and nurtured by the then YCL General Secretary, Tom Bell, with a view to her succeeding him, which she eventually did in 1979. At that point, significant changes to the structure and policy of the youth body were adopted and, within two or three years, apart from two or three location formations, it was effectively at an end.

This was a period when intense internal conflict raged within British Communism. Nina Temple went on to briefly become the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain before it disbanded itself. Bizarrely, Temple became the strongest advocate for just such a course.

Many of those who had been excluded or expelled from the Communist Party during the intense struggles of the 1980s had established a reformed Party in 1988.  Now that the official rump of the CPGB had voted two to one, albeit by a heavily fought for delegate vote at congress, to dissolve their already massively disintegrating party, many principled Communists who were not yet members increasingly gravitated towards to CPB.

In 1994, from a decision made by the CPB Executive Committee, all such comrades were welcomed to apply to re-join the party. The final achievement of Communist Unity undertaken marked the return of a genuine Communist Party. The CPB has now sought the right to call itself the CPGB and be granted this by the Electoral Commission. But, since this is an outmoded name (Great???), designates itself in ordinary life within the politics of Britain as `The Communist Party’.

Temple now assumed the leading role within Democratic Left, the body that now acquired the assets of the old Communist Party. This body was in turn abandoned in favour of `network politics’, with the assets being managed by a property and asset company, in which Templeand several score other persons played the dominant role.

Various causes, including campaigns to maximise voting (`Make Votes Count’), or to assist in tactical voting have benefited, with Temple playing the executive director role in all this.

The YCL, which Temple had lead into oblivion, had simply died during the long process of implosion of the CPGB but was eventually re-founded by the re-established Communist Party of Britain’s as its youth wing, which around 2000 was formalised once again as the YCL.

Temple became ill with Parkinson's disease at the age of 44 years, which diverted her career for a time. Some years later she had resurfaced as an executive with the Social Market Foundation but has since retrained as a counsellor.