Expulsion From The Labour Party
In the 1980s, after a period of growth in the 1970s, the Militant tendency became the most prominent Trotskyist organisation in Britain. Its successes and set backs are outlined in two books by Peter Taaffe: The Rise of Militant and Liverpool - A City That Dared to Fight (with Tony Mulhearn).
During this period, the Labour Party under Michael Foot and especially Neil Kinnock moved to purge Militant from the party. In 1983, Peter Taaffe, Ted Grant, Keith Dickinson, Lynn Walsh and Clare Doyle, were expelled from the Labour Party, in an expulsion of the editorial board of Militant (the leading members of the Militant tendency.
A year later, speaking at the Wembley Conference Centre to several thousand supporters celebrating 20 years of the Militant newspaper, Taaffe highlighted the media attention now fixed on the Militant. Speaking about a "marvellous article" in the Daily Mirror, by now under the ownership of Robert Maxwell, he said:
| “ | I was highly amused at an article allegedly describing the ideas of the Militant Tendency. And in the course of this article, I had to scratch my head and rub my eyes a couple of times, because it quotes me as saying – this is what I actually literally am supposed to have said – in relation to potential middle class recruits to Militant, that I advocated they be dried in the wind, buried in the snow, fried on the grill, then dried in the wind, and buried in the snow again! I don’t know what Bob Maxwell thinks we are, that we want some kind of middle class shish kebab... | ” |
Taaffe reports on a GCE A level examination question, "'Discuss the ideas of the Militant Tendency' - we hope there'll be many people who took that paper sitting in the audience today". His speech contrasted on the one hand the determination showed by strikers during the miners strike in 1984–1985, and the Liverpool victory of the previous year under the leadership of the Militant tendency, and on the other the "five years of defeats" inflicted on workers as a result of poor Labour and trade union leadership.
At Labour Party conference in 1985, Neil Kinnock attacked the Militant-led Liverpool City council. Eric Heffer, a left-wing Liverpool MP, walked off the stage during Kinnock's speech. Taaffe characterised Neil Kinnock in this way: “The bourgeois recognized early that Kinnock’s role in attacking Liverpool and the miners was an attempt to sanitise the Labour Party, ridding it of all that ‘socialist nonsense.’” Taaffe went on to predict “an enormous recoil towards the left” within the Labour Party. But this prognosis was overtaken by the profound changes which took place in the Labour Party.
In 1988, 7,000 attended a Militant rally in the Alexandra Palace, and Peter Taaffe began assessing with the Scottish Militant members the prospects of battle around the government's Community Charge (Poll Tax) legislation. But for Taaffe and the leadership of the Militant, the prospects for Militant in the Labour Party were poor.
In fact it was Grant who had argued in Problems Of Entrism (1959) and reprinted in great secrecy by the Militant in 1973 with an introduction by Peter Taaffe, that it was correct to leave the Labour Party under certain circumstances, as indeed the British Trotskyists who were in the Labour Party before the Second World War had done.
| “ | And here the problem of tactics as tactics, and not as Once-and-for-all fetishes, shows its real importance. The Labour and Trade Union leaders entered a coalition with the capitalist class, and at a later stage, entered the government under Churchill. The Labour organisations declined in activity and as live, functioning organisations. | ” |
Taaffe's 1973 Introduction to this document says it is "rightly considered as a key document of the tendency". Grant's words encapsulated the conclusion that was being gradually drawn by the members and leadership of the Militant as a result of the changes in the Labour Party in the 1980s – too slowly, Taaffe later argued. “Militant was slow to draw all the necessary conclusions from these developments”
Read more about this topic: Peter Taaffe
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