The Militant Tendency and entrism in the Labour Party

This chapter explores the tactic of entrism within the British Labour Party pursued by the Revolutionary Socialist League and the Militant Tendency between 1955 and 1991. It also explores Labour’s response to such tactics by assessing the impact of the party’s internal investigations into Militant in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the expulsion of the Militant Editorial Board in 1983, and the Inquiry into the Militant Tendency in Liverpool in 1985-6. Through an examination of the Militant newspaper, the group’s penetration of Labour’s youth wing, and its activities in Liverpool, this study analyses the extent of Militant’s infiltration of the Labour Party.

A miner cause?

If twentieth century politics in Wales has largely been defined by class, and therefore along the typical cleavage of Labour versus Conservative; it is nevertheless true that for a significant proportion of Welsh activists and voters, the cleavage is between nation and union (identifiable with the British state). Closely identified with Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, a political manifestation of the Welsh nation was a direct inheritance from nineteenth-century liberalism and its persistence for much of the postwar period was a result of the persistence of that form of politics. But there was an alternative form of left nationalism that emerged through the Communist Party of Great Britain, which this chapter focuses its attention on. Beginning in the 1930s, and spanning almost the entire life of the party thereafter, communists engaged with and developed ideas about nationalism, nationhood and national liberation. This chapter considers the development of these ideas and argues that rather than Plaid Cymru, it was the Communist Party of Great Britain that enabled the persistence of left-nationalist thought and action after 1945 and that it was, to a large extent, communist activists who were the most consistently nationalist in that period.

Origins of the present crisis?

The current state of the radical left and, more broadly, politics in Scotland has its roots in the unique set of political, economic and intellectual conditions found in the 1960s and 1970s. Where mainstream accounts of the origins and development of Scottish nationalism - and its increasing popularity on the left - emphasise political and economic origins in these decades, this chapter emphasises the equally crucial intellectual developments of the period. Khruschev’s ‘secret speech’, ‘de-Stalinization’ and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 engendered a growing plurality of perspectives on the European left, and it was under these new conditions that the British left increasingly questioned Stalinist orthodoxies, and established critiques of labourism and the ‘British Road to Socialism’. The search for alternatives to the classical Marxist, social democratic and Soviet canons led to a new theoretical heterodoxy, bringing Gramscian and world-systems theories to the fore along with a more politically ambiguous conception of the ‘national question’. This chapter integrates an analysis of the intellectual development of left-wing Scottish nationalism with a consideration of the growth of its influence within the labour movement during the 1960s and 1970s.

Protest and survive

This chapter offers a critical investigation into the ways in which the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) sought to undermine the official narrative of nuclear weapons and civil defence policy of successive British governments during the last two decades of the Cold War. The first part of the chapter explores the ways in which CND used the tools of propaganda and parody to turn government advice and publicity surrounding policies of public protection against itself. The second part of the chapter investigates to what extent CND’s activism presented a threat to the process of policy making and to what effect the co-ordinated anti-nuclear campaign by CND and related groups was a cause of anxiety for civil defence planners and policy makers. It asks whether, by offering both the public and political groups of the left alternative politics which sought to challenge the official version of Cold War defence, CND could be said to have contributed to either non-compliance with, or early termination of, civil defence policy.

Networks of solidarity

Alongside the 1984-5 British miners’ strike developed a large and diverse support campaign. This chapter focuses on the role of London’s radical left in that movement, emphasising how activists constructed solidarity networks between the coalfields and the capital. Alongside the activity of members of the Communist Party and Trotskyist groups, it discusses feminist, black, and lesbian and gay support groups, highlighting how the miners’ industrial struggle resonated and was politicised in diverse ways. The chapter shows how radical left Labour members and local councils sought to blur the distinction between institutional and extra-parliamentary activism through their support for the strike. This complex support movement therefore challenged the boundaries of the radical left and class politics, reflecting a broader period of flux and realignment

Understanding the formation of the Communist Party of Britain

This article deals with the foundation of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB), a 1988 split from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which was overseen by a group around Tony Chater, whom had earlier been involved with splitting the Morning Star newspaper away from the CPGB. The CPB was unsuccessful in uniting its preferred constituency, party trade unionists; and appears to have alienated many CPGB oppositionists due to its tactics and agitation for a split. It did manage to group together wider layers of people who had been oppositionists in the old CPGB as the 1990s wore on but, by the middle of the decade, this process had pushed initial leadership figures such as Mike Hicks, Mary Rosser and others into hostility towards those who were perceived to have been oppositional rivals in the 1980s. Thus, the divisions in the CPGB at the foundation of the CPB cast a long political shadow.

Making miners militant?

The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was a visible presence across many significant trade unions in the post-war period, largely due to its industrial strategy. The party envisaged that politicising the rank and file of important trade unions and also capturing the leadership of these unions would allow it to influence the Labour Party, as these unions held a significant number of votes at Labour's annual conference. This chapter analyses the success of this strategy in the National Union of Mineworkers, a union that became increasingly emblematic of the difficulties trade unions faced in the late twentieth century, particularly obvious through its 1984 strike. This chapter considers the relationship between Communists in the party and those in the union, exploring the extent to which the party's strategy translated into the union in practice, and understanding if there was any conflict between these two groups who occupied distinctly different roles. Unpicking the concept of 'wage militancy', the way through which the party felt politicisation of the union rank and file would best be achieved, the chapter frames this discussion within the broader context of the increasingly divided CPGB, the political and economic policies of Labour and Conservative governments, and the union's national strikes.

The point is to change it

Like most organisations of the far left in Britain in the years after 1968, the RCP was small in size and marginal in influence. Starting out with only a few dozen supporters in the mid-1970s, membership peaked at around 200 before its demise in the mid-1990s. Though it emerged out of the left, in many ways it was not of the left and it developed in a struggle against it. In contrast with the spirit of amenable coexistence that prevailed among other factions, the RCP maintained a high level of polemical engagement with the left. Though other far left groups discreetly accepted the RCP’s characterisation of the official labour movement as ‘reformist’, the RCP pointed out that in practice these groups adapted to the reformism of the official movement, reinforcing rather than loosening its grip on militants and activists. The RCP aimed to promote an independent anti-capitalist outlook, thereby to give voice and effect to the interests of the working class and humanity as a whole. It engaged in workplace and trade union struggles and campaigns for women’s rights, and against racism and imperialism, seeking to develop and sustain a creative balance between activities around issues of exploitation and those of oppression.

The British radical left and Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’

Britain’s radical left influenced the Northern Irish Troubles along two separate tracks: through its impact on British politics, and through its contacts with Irish republicanism and the Irish far left. The idea for a civil rights movement in Northern Ireland came from the far-left milieu, and was put into practice by activists who had cut their teeth on the British leftist scene. When conflict between the IRA and the British Army took centre-stage, sections of the British far left provided advice and encouragement for the Provos as they executed a left turn under the leadership of Gerry Adams, and Irish Trotskyists argued for a broad campaign of protest in support of republican prisoners. But despite their best efforts, left-wingers in Britain were unable to shift the Labour Party away from its position of support for the ‘bi-partisan’ consensus on Northern Ireland.

‘You have to start where you’re at’

In the 1980s, Sheffield became known as the ‘Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.’ Underlying this radical reputation was a push for community-led activism and a City Council that attempted to answer to the community. But who this community included was up for debate among councillors and activists, as was the notion of Sheffield as a radical city. This chapter traces City Council-leader David Blunkett’s ideas on paper and in practice and how these were met by Sheffield’s activists. It shows that behind the rhetoric of radicalism, Sheffield’s politics was centred on more traditional notions of working-class community than the radical tendencies of the new urban left and the revolutionary left.