Ted Grant - Political Activities

Political Activities

The former Revolutionary Socialist League members formed the Workers' International League, and Grant was to became its main theoretician after the return of Lee to South Africa and in partnership with Jock Haston. The group grew, and in 1941, he became editor of its paper. He continued his role in the fused Revolutionary Communist Party. In 1945, Ted Grant, together with Jock Haston and others, argued that there would be a new but limited period of economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s in the west. This contrasted with the perspectives of the US Socialist Workers Party led by James Cannon in 1945.

After the break up of the RCP, Grant reluctantly joined Gerry Healy's faction, but was soon expelled. He formed a new, small tendency in the Labour Party which, during 1952 and 1953, called itself the International Socialist Group after its quarterly magazine, The International Socialist. Later named the Revolutionary Socialist League, it was recognised as the official British section of the Fourth International between 1957 and 1965. In 1964 it founded the paper Militant.

The group at first grew only very slowly, but by 1983 it had become a significant force in British politics, known as the Militant tendency. Throughout this time Grant and his colleagues formally denied to officials of the Labour Party that Militant was organised in a way which was contrary to the constitution of the Labour Party, instead claiming it was merely a group of supporters of the Militant newspaper. In the atmosphere of Labour's shift to the left in the 1970s, in which constituency Labour Party General Management Committees (GMCs) were largely against expulsions, there were only a few isolated attempts to take action against Militant, whilst its support in the party, judged by the number of delegates to national conference which supported its motions, seemed to grow.

In 1983, the new Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and the National Executive Committee (NEC) expelled the so-called "Editorial Board" of the Militant newspaper, namely the "Political Editor" Ted Grant, "Editor" Peter Taaffe, Keith Dickinson, Lynn Walsh, and the Militant national treasurer Clare Doyle. These members of Militant represented the leading members at that time. The decision was subsequently endorsed by the full conference of the party, where the union block vote (a vote cast by each union in one single block, often used at the discretion of the union general secretaries, and which at that time commanded the overwhelming majority of votes at conference) swung behind the expulsions, while 80% of the delegates of the General Management Committees of the Constituency Labour Parties were against and a considerable number of rank-and-file trade union delegates voted against expulsion. This measure did not however stop the growth of the Militant.