Straight Left was a left-wing newspaper published from 1979. The phrase was also the generic name given to a political faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain who disagreed with the leadership's emerging Eurocommunist politics, and were responsible for the production of the newspaper. The origins of this faction within the CPGB go back earlier, but it emerged under this name in 1977. Organisation and ideology The leading ideological force in the Straight Left faction was Fergus Nicholson, who had previously worked as the CPGB's student organiser. According to Michael Mosbacher in Standpoint magazine, the faction was "a hard-line anti-reformist pro-Soviet faction within the Communist Party". Unlike the leadership, they supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979. They also thought the party should concentrate its work in Trade Unions, and not in social movements such as feminism and environmentalism. Because the CPGB's rules banned the formation of factional groups, SL operated in secret. Members of the faction contributed funds to the organisation through significant monthly donations, which helped fund the groups educational gatherings, often referred to as camping weekends. Its meetings were not publicly announced, and writers in their newspaper Straight Left and their theoretical magazine Communist wrote under pseudonyms like Nicholson, whose pen name was "Harry Steel". The Straight Left faction also produced anonymous bulletins to try to influence CPGB Congresses, usually under the heading "Congress Truth". The faction produced a dissident internal pamphlet entitled "The Crisis in Our Communist Party - Cause, Effect and Cure", which was distributed nationally but not under its name. This was authored (in all likelihood in conjunction with others), by veteran miner and communist Charlie Woods, who was expelled from the CPGB for putting his name to the publication. Charlie Woods, who had been the CPGB's Northern organiser in the late 1930s, was the faction's oldest link to a period when the CPGB was operating in a manner to which the Straight Left faction hoped the CPGB would eventually return. A significant number of Straight Left faction members had developed close personal friendships with members of fraternal communist parties, particularly the Iranian, Iraqi, South African and Greek parties, who were well organised on most British University campuses. Many Straight Left supporters felt that the style of organisation and the overall ethos of these organisations was significantly more impressive than the CPGB at that stage, and as a