Militant Tendency

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Image:Militant logo.gif The Militant Tendency was a Trotskyist faction within the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, accused of entryist tactics. They were most powerful during the 1970s and 1980s, and after a series of expulsions from Labour, many of the members participated in the formation of the Socialist Party in England, and the Scottish Socialist Party.

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Foundation

They originated from those former supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Party who continued to look to Ted Grant for leadership. After he was expelled from Gerry Healy's group The Club in 1950 they reorganised as the Revolutionary Socialist League in 1953 and affiliated to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International in 1957.

The newspaper The Militant was founded in 1964 with Peter Taaffe as editor, when the majority of the group broke politically from the United Secretariat of the Fourth International with the minority forming the International Group, which was to develop into the International Marxist Group. The tendency left the Fourth International formally after the Eighth World Congress in 1965.

Militant had a period of steady growth during the late 1960s and the 1970s. In 1970, after the departure of competing tendencies, they won a majority in the Labour Party's youth movement, the Young Socialists, and in the early 1980s they started gaining strong support in various local Constituency Labour Parties. On this basis Militant succeeded in eventually having three of their supporters elected as Members of Parliament: Dave Nellist, Terry Fields and Pat Wall

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Within the Labour Party

In the early 1980s a broad left alliance with a large Militant contingent took over leadership of the ruling Labour group on Liverpool city council and became engaged in a struggle with the Thatcher led central government fighting for extra funding, which they won at first. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Militant were central to the mass movement against the Poll Tax that eventually undermined both that Tax and Margaret Thatcher herself.

Although, as socialists they did not really share the same analysis of much of the rest of the Labour Party, they were a visible component of that coalition. The Militant, who claimed to be nothing more than readers of a newspaper, were alleged to be members of a Leninist political party, with an elected central committee and an internal regime based on democratic centralism.

Many Labour figures saw the Militant tendency as a primary reason for their "loony left" image, as portrayed by the right-wing press, although most of the councils attacked as 'loony' were in fact influenced by the soft-left ideas of Tribune. Ineffective attempts to suppress Militant were made by party leader Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and were carried on with more vigour by Neil Kinnock.

Many of those around Kinnock had held on to control of the National Organisation of Labour Students in the 1970s, whilst Militant gained increasing power in the Young Socialists they did not believe Militant's claims to be nothing more than a newspaper or the argument that an attack on Militant was an attempt to suppress dissent - the claim of a witch hunt.

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Liverpool Council and Neil Kinnock

The tactical decision of the leadership of Liverpool City Council in September 1985 to issue redundancy notices to all their workforce and threaten those who discussed the question with their trade union representatives with disciplinary action (though in fact no members of staff were ever made redundant) backfired and handed a propaganda gift to a Labour leader who had made no secret of his contempt for Trotskyism. Kinnock, coming from the left, had an instinctive understanding of the ideology of the Militant that a previous generation of Labour leaders had not, and that made him only more determined to take them on. With Derek Hatton emerging as a bogey man for the Tories and the right wing press, there were clear tactical advantages in being seen to take on the entryists also.

In what many people have since come to see as a crucial stage in the turnaround of Labour, Kinnock then made a speech to the Labour Party Conference in 1985 that attacked Militant and their record in Liverpool

I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with a far-fetched series of resolutions, and these are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, misplaced, outdated, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers. I tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and people's homes and people's services. Template:Fact

Despite attempts to disupt the speech - Eric Heffer walked off the platform and Derek Hatton repeatedly shouted 'liar' at Kinnock from the floor, the overall reaction of the conference was close to ecstatic - with the walkout only adding to the sense of drama. Few trade unionists had ever had much sympathy with the Militant and the threat to sack every employee in the city had provoked a hugely negative reaction in Liverpool's unions.

This speech was played all over the media repeatedly, and spurred on by the positive media response, Kinnock subsequently suspended the operation of Liverpool District Labour Party and appointed Peter Kilfoyle as an organiser with a specific remit to remove Militant supporters from the Labour Party.

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Expulsion from the Labour Party

Over the next couple of years the Labour Party machinery continued to expel Militant supporters to the acclaim of the Media. At the same time Militant was leading the mass movement against the Poll Tax, with Militant supporters like MP Terry Fields and Scottish Councillor Tommy Sheridan taking a lead in going to prison for refusing to pay. Militant supporters reacted to the continued action against them by standing Lesley Mahmood as a "Real Labour" candidate against Kilfoyle in a 1991 Liverpool Walton parliamentary by-election, giving the Labour Party the further excuse to extend its purges. In the opinion of the Labour leaders, Militant's support for Mahmood confirmed that Militant was a separate political party.

By the beginning of the 1990s most Militant members argued that Labour policy was so far removed from its former socialist content that in 1991 the Millitant Tendency felt the need to form themselves into an external party, first calling themselves Militant Labour (and in Scotland, Scottish Militant Labour) and latterly in England the Socialist Party. Initially known within the Militant as the Scottish Turn this abandonment of entrism led to upheaval and eventually a split.

The minority led by its founder Ted Grant and by Alan Woods went on to set up the Workers International League better known by the name of their publication, Socialist Appeal. Soon afterward a majority of Scottish Militant Labour formed the Scottish Socialist Party with a number of other groups and broke with the majority of the former Militant in England and Wales with only a small minority in Scotland remaining. Meanwhile in England and Wales the majority of Militant, now led by Peter Taaffe, formed the Socialist Party of England and Wales. This Party was involved in the formation of the now defunct Socialist Alliance but left it again in December 2001, stating that it was no longer an open coalition of Left forces, but controlled by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who they believed would eventually abandon it. When the SWP moved to set up a new left-wing coalition, known as Respect, the Socialist Party did not participate.

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External links

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