I thought I’d write something on a hot topic of the moment:
- whether the surge of new members of the Labour Party includes extreme left,
Trotskyist members of other organisations who were expelled from the Labour Party
decades ago. Or rather, as it’s pretty clear some of those who were expelled have
indeed joined, or tried to join, whether they are entryists, or just honest
people who see the LP taking a leftward turn for the first time in decades and
feel there is now a place for them. I’ve
seen a couple of articles about how ‘entryists’ operate, and it has caused me
to go back to my time as a Trotskyist, prior to joining the LP, and to
reappraise it. Since I re-joined the LP just over a year ago, I’ve always made
it clear that I was on the left, and had considered the LP to be too right-wing
since Neil Kinnock took over, pre- Blair, for me to wish to support it. So I am
completely open and honest about who I am and where I come from, as I see no
point in being anything else.
So- here’s my history.
In 1977 I got a job in a hotel in Oxford, while I was trying
to finish my thesis (I never did finish it). I was parking cars in the Randolph
Hotel, working with one other guy. I had already done a hotel job, and had been
pretty appalled by the way staff were treated and what they were paid. So when a
group of chambermaids decided they were fed up with conditions and decided to
join the TGWU, and came round to talk to my colleague about it, I decided to
back them up by joining too. I did it because I thought it was fair. I’d never
been political, although I had backed a strike by the staff in my college when
I was an undergrad and had always been vaguely left-wing. When all the staff
who were known to be in the Union got the sack, I came out on strike to support
them. I could have just left, but I thought the right thing to do was stand by
my commitment in joining the Union. Once we were out on strike, standing on a
picket line every day through all weathers, for 6 months over the winter of
77-78, we got all sorts of left-wing groups coming in to support us. That was
when I met Trotskyists for the first time. They were all there – SWP, IMG,
other groups whose names I forget, and a local off-shoot of the WRP, set up by
men who worked in the car factory up at Cowley, called the Workers Socialist League.
At first I wasn’t interested in all the political talk that went on. Most of
the members of these organizations- like the SWP- were students, and even
though I was a student, I still shared the idea that as they weren’t ‘real’
workers, they didn’t really have anything valid to say. But I was impressed by
the car factory blokes who came down so consistently to support us, and
gradually began to listen to what they had to say. I thought that if they -
real working class blokes, thought Trotskyism had something to say to them, in
their real-life, working situation, then there must be something in it.
Of course, as a historian, I knew about Marx. No serious
historian dismisses Marx’s theories about economic causes underlying social
processes and so forth. But I didn’t know much else. Eventually I joined the WSL, and spent about a
year or 18 months being a Trotskyist (NOT a TrotskyITE!!) . The strike had ended, with no success,
and I had got a job working on a milk round for the Co-op.
As a Trotskyist, part of my remit was to be a Trades Union
activist – that is, go into the local branch of my Union, the TGWU, and sort of
push things to the left. In any way I could. It was all a bit vague, but the
image presented by this writer,
about how Trotskyists operate, is, I suppose, accurate. It
wasn’t done in the cynical way he describes. The argument, as I recall, was
that it was important to address the real concerns of working people, in the organizations
they had set up for themselves, but try to keep those organizations from
descending into trifling, bits and pieces about their working conditions, and inject
a wider, more political perspective. Or at least, that is how I understood it.
Anyway - after more than a year of attending meetings, trudging
around council estates selling the newspaper, attending meetings, standing on
the street selling the paper, attending meetings, going on demonstrations and
mass pickets, attending meetings, being expected to provide my car, and myself
as driver, for any use to which the organization wanted, attending meetings,
well - you get the picture – I just decided it was all a waste of time, and
resigned.
But I had become politicized by the whole experience, and
rather than giving up in disillusionment, I joined the Labour Party. In my brief experience of Trotskyism, ‘entryism’
consisted of Trades Union activity. Joining the LP was considered a cop-out. But
this was around the time when the Militant Tendency were openly advocating
entry to the LP, so I can only speak for the lot I was mixed up with (and reading
the Wikipedia entry on the WSL I see their policy on joining the LP changed
around the time I left them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_Socialist_League
). I’m not sure about the description of
Trots as deliberately disrupting meetings and tactically using points of order
and such like to scare off any moderate members in order to take control of
local branches, but I think it is true in some cases. What I noticed was that
all left-wing groups seemed to hate each other more than they ever hated Tories.
I can certainly remember going to a Trades Council meeting in London where Jack
Dromey was speaking, sounding pretty good, to my mind, but the attitude of my
fellow Trotskyists was that he was some kind of lackey of the state or something.
Anyway - once I had left the WSL and joined the LP, I did
indeed find that I was too left wing for the then leader of my local branch. This leader then left to join the newly formed Social Democratic Party, complaining that
his local branch had been infiltrated by Militant Tendency entryists - meaning
me and my husband. My husband was not as
left as me, and was really a floating voter, but he had rashly called this guy
a fascist. It weren’t me, honest! Once he’d left, the rest of the Labour Party
group became very enthusiastic and started producing a regular newsletter which
we distributed free in our area. It was a lot more fun that what I’d done in
the WSL, and really, the politics were better, although I had to learn that the
LP generally doesn’t see itself as a Marxist organisation, which was a total
shock to me. We canvassed the whole area during the election when Michael Foot
was Leader, and also opposed Neil Kinnock as leader because we wanted the more
left candidate. I suppose the reason why we didn’t get disillusioned by Foot’s
defeat was that we were in such a strongly Tory Constituency that we knew we’d
never win in our own area anyway. I find
the same spirit in the LP branch I am in now, in Theresa May’s constituency.
My husband did accidentally get himself elected to the Town Council,
rather in the way Jeremy Corbyn has accidentally got himself elected as Leader of
the Labour Party. He put himself forward as the token LP candidate, because he
was the only one available to do it, believing that we lived in such a Tory
area that he’d never win, only to find that people voted for him because he
looked honest and they couldn’t stand the other chap. Some of them told him this as he stood outside
the polling booth on the day. Of course it was quite boring and un-political on
that town council, but he did his bit for the few years he had left to live. He
died in 1984. After that, I moved to Wales and decided that none of this
politics stuff was for me.
Now I’m back in the Labour Party, because of Jeremy Corbyn.
The LP is shifting to the left for the first time in decades, and is finding
itself attracting hundreds of thousands of new members for doing so. It always describes itself as a ‘Broad Church’
but in reality the hostility of the right wing of the party towards the left
has always been absolute, in the time-honoured tradition of the left always
fighting amongst themselves. There is nothing new about this, it was the same
when Foot was leader, and the reasons given by this generation of right-wing-Labour
(I don’t like to call them right wing as I reserve that for Tories, but I have
to call them something) – that Corbyn has no leadership qualities, that the
British public will never vote for a left wing government, etc etc, are the same
reasons they gave under Foot. Corbyn has
plenty of leadership qualities but too many of the PLP just don’t want to follow
him. Their views were summed up perfectly by Tony Blair when he said he’d
rather see Labour defeated than win on a left platform. They really would rather destroy the party
than work together with a left-wing leader. Even if they have to put up a fake
leftie like Smith, to get Corbyn out. And they will never ever ever see
themselves as the ones who are destroying the party. Or as the ones who can’t
compromise, or co-operate. Or as the
ones who aren’t realists.
Having said that – I don’t want the Labour party to expel
anyone who joins them, whether on the right or left of the party, just for
having the wrong politics. Obviously anyone who is a member of any other
party that opposes the principles of the LP has no place in the party – that includes
other parties of the right and left. But if people have joined the LP recently
who used to be in other parties of the left, then they should be allowed to stay.
A lot of them might be people like me. If they do proceed to behave in the way described
in the article linked above, then they should be expelled because of their behaviour,
not their politics. If they persistently disrupt meetings and prevent the
business of any local group being attended to, then, yes, they have to go. But that applies as much to those on the
right of the party, within the PLP, who are disrupting the business of the Party
and preventing it doing its work as Opposition and Government-in-waiting.
