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:
“What a vast traffic is drove, what a variety of labour is performed in the world to the maintenance of thousands of families that altogether depend on two silly if not odious customs; the taking of snuff and smoking of tobacco; both of which it is certain do infinitely more hurt than good to those that are addicted to them!”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.”
—Newt Gingrich (b. 1943)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)