Later Labour Party Responses
Neil Kinnock was determined to remove the Militant tendency presence from the party. Kinnock's closest advisers were often from the ranks of the Labour Party's student organisation NOLS led by the Clause Four or associated with the Labour Co-ordinating Committee.
The resulting confrontation saw many leading Militant tendency members expelled from the Labour Party and created a dynamic within the organisation that led many to question the policy of entryism. They argued that the Militant tendency was able to grow outside Labour and that the Labour Party's position on the poll tax revealed it to be out of touch with working class opinion. At first only a handful of leading Militant tendency members were expelled, and most of the organisation's thousands of members and their three Labour-elected Members of Parliament could not be expelled.
In 1986 the Labour Party comprehensively over hauled its rule book, at the same as expelling leading Militant tendency members in Merseyside, with a view to making it possible to systematically remove members of entryist parties such as the Militant.
Read more about this topic: Ted Grant
Famous quotes containing the words labour, party and/or responses:
“Are we aware of our obligations to a mob? It is the mob that labour in your fields and serve in your houses—that man your navy, and recruit your army—that have enabled you to defy the world, and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob; but do not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“At every party there are two kinds of people—those who want to go home and those who don’t. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.”
—Ann Landers (b. 1918)
“Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)