In 1929 with the build of a bantamweight boxer she had been one of the leaders of the Bradford hunger march of the textile workers to London. She was prescient about this trouble as she was to be prescient 30 years later about the difficulties which would be caused by the Palestinians.It would be a wrong impression to suppose that McKay was all about exotic foreign causes. In 1931 she left the Communist Party over their attitude to the National Socialists in Germany. Therefore, in sympathy with the spirit of those years I was possessed by a frenzy for change; and since a change, any change, could hardly be for the worse, it must inevitably be for the better. The Communist Party embodied and symbolised that great change, appeared as the instrument of it, pointed the way, even led us to audit, teaching us how, by revolutionising the economic pattern of society, we could solve the remainder of our problems and cure all the ills to which humanity, and particularly the workers, were subjected.Her disenchantment with Communism began on a visit to Germany in 1929 as the guest of the Communist Young Red Freedom Fighters Association. I just wanted to live with all my being and to the full extent of my capacities but this was denied me. I was anormal, life-loving young teenager, interested in fun, dancing, boys and art.

She met Krupskaya, Lenin’s widow, Madame Sun Yat-Sen and Russians such as Rykov and Bukharin and the youth leaders Chaplin and Shatsky.As a Member of Parliament in her fifties looking backwards to the 1920s and considering the social conditions of the times and the circumstances of her own life she did not see in all honesty what else she could have done other than rebel:I did not want to be a rebel. At three o’clock next morning we sailed off to a Socialist new world, a load of gay enthusiasts. Will Lawther, then a young, laughing , handsome man, was the leader of the adult delegation.” McKay grew up with the future trade union leaders; Will Lawther who, as the boss of the Durham miners, achieved fame by telling delegates of the Labour Party conference to shut their gob was later Sir Will Lawther, one of the all- powerful knights of the TUC.McKay was captivated by Russia at that time. The delegation was housed magnificently in one of the grand Leningrad hotels with enormous rooms, the inevitable stuffed bears and potted palms, and whisked off on the first evening to see the ballet The Snow Maiden. For McKay it was as if she had been conveyed straight into fairyland.

She had enrolled for classes at the local branch of the National Council of Labour Colleges, where her first tutor, who taught her economic geography, the theory of surplus value and the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system, was one A.L. Williams, later, as Len Williams, the long-serving national agent of the Labour Party, created governor of Mauritius by Harold Wilson.On 29 October 1927 the delegations both youth and adult met on Tower Hill, London, where a farewell demonstration was held and the veteran Labour leader Tom Mann came down and boarded the Russian vessel Soviet which was moored at Free Trade Wharf “to carry us all away, and there kissed us a hilarious, beery God speed. Soon she was chosen to be part of the youth delegation which went to Russia for the 10th anniversary of the 1917 revolution. This was to be at variance with the traditional Methodism of my mother’s family, the careless Catholicism of my father and even, in the end, antagonistic to the materialist conception of history in which I became steeped in the days of my youth.In 1927 at the age of 16 Margaret McCarthy joined the Accrington Weavers Winders and Warpers Association.