Jock Haston - Leadership of The RCP

Leadership of The RCP

Shortly after this dispute the WIL was to fuse with the Revolutionary Socialist League the factionally divided official section of the Fourth International, to become the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) Haston was by this time seen as the foremost leader of the Trotskyist movement in Britain.

Like the WIL the new party was opposed to the electoral truce of the war years between the Labour and Conservative parties. However they had been far too small to be able to break the truce in earlier by-elections so when the Neath Division fell open they sought to take advantage and Haston was the obvious choice of candidate.

Despite the RCP lacking a branch in Neath at the start of the campaign Haston was able to poll 1,781 votes in the Neath by-election, 1945. More importantly an RCP branch was constructed and literature sales were large. Haston's relations with the Labour candidate, D. J. Williams, would seem to have been personally harmonious, so much so that later in 1949 Williams was instrumental in finding Haston a job with the National Council of Labour Colleges.

With the turn of the war against the Nazis the RCP was at pains to look for any signs of the coming revolutionary upheavals that were expected in line with the perspectives of the Fourth International as outlined in the famous Transitional Programme. The leading theoretician of the RCP, Ted Grant, was therefore far seeing when he sought to tailor the political demands of the mvement to the actual movement rather than succumbing to a rosy view of events. This realistic view of events was also prompted by the agreement of the RCP leadership with the documents of the Goldman-Morrow-Heijenoort minority in the American Socialist Workers Party.