Early Life
Born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, Taaffe first joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, before joining the Labour Party where he was attracted to the radical element in the Liverpool Labour Party. In an interview for the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Party’s Over’, Taaffe gave a few biographical details:
| “ | Shaun Ley - "Why was Liverpool so important in the development of Militant?"
PT - "I come from a working-class background. It was an area of a high degree of poverty, and still is unfortunately. "It is also a seaport with a very radical tradition. It has a distinct character. Marxism and Trotskyism, the Communist Party always had a strong base there. "It was an area of low-paid workers, not a majority of really very high-paid like other areas. Manchester, for instance, in the north-west, was more high-paid. "There was also a militant tradition, and I came into that tradition, first in my case, in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and then in the Labour Party. In the Labour Party I discovered radical, socialist, Marxist ideas and in the course of discussion and debate I accepted those ideas." |
” |
In Liverpool, the militant tradition to which Taaffe refers was can be traced to a founder member of the Communist Party (Albert Houghton) who had "long battled with the Stalinists" forming a basis for Trotskyism in Liverpool before the Second World War.
"I came into contact with Socialist Fight in 1960" writes Taaffe. Socialist Fight was the newspaper of a small group of mainly (but not entirely) industrial militants in Liverpool going by the name of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), and led by Jimmy Deane and Ted Grant.
Taaffe considered the ideas they defended to be significant. He "does not subscribe to the view that the struggles of small groupings are of no historical significance." This small group supported the ideas of Leon Trotsky, who proposed that genuine Marxism, followed by Lenin, had always argued that only the working class in the advanced capitalist countries could lead a revolution to establish socialism. These were the ideas to which Taaffe subscribed.
Taaffe argues that "There is a long tradition going right back to the 1930s and Trotsky himself, of Trotskyist groups and organisations which endeavoured to find a base within the labour movement and working class." When Taaffe joined this group, "Ted Grant and the Deanes (Jimmy, Gertie, Brian and Arthur), had been involved in the Trotskyist movement for decades."
This was at the time of the Clydeside apprentices’ strike of 1960. This strike spread to Merseyside and elsewhere, involving "upwards of 100,000" young apprentices, and radicalised new layers of youth, some of whom came into the orbit of Trotskyism (Taaffe cites Ted Mooney, Terry Harrison, Tony Mulhearn and others.)
Ted Grant, with Jock Haston and others, had played an essential role in re-orienting the followers of the ideas of Trotsky at the end of the Second World War, in the period of relative prosperity and stability which opened up. In the 1950s Grant had been editor of Socialist Fight, but the relatively affluent period had been difficult and membership was continuing to fall. By 1964 Socialist Fight had ceased publication.
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