Seeing the name of Harry Smith alongside that of Steve Radford on the NO2EU list for the North West set me thinking about several things. One is the future or otherwise of Radford's Liberal Party now that Michael Meadowcroft has joined the Lib Dems after all, and of its tradition of Liberal Euroscepticism going back at least to Emlyn Hooson's vote against accession, and stretching, via Oliver Smedley, Alan Sked, Nick Harvey's vote against Maastricht and Simon Hughes's abstention, to Mike Hancock's opposition to Lisbon (although I'd have to check how he voted in the end).
Meanwhile, it was of course Michael Crick, now for all practical purposes the BNP's Head of Publicity, who invented the myth of the Militant Tendency, which in reality barely existed beyond Merseyside and had far fewer members than even the International Socialists, the Workers' Revolutionary Party (for some reason depicted by Nick Cohen in What's Left as of earth-shattering importance) or the International Marxist Group (of which Alistair Darling was a stalwart).
But they were university-based, like the Communist Party. The purge of untypically working-class, frightfully provincial (why, even Scouse) Militant could be depicted as the purge of Trotskyism in particular and Marxism in general. It was no such thing.
On the contrary, thanks to Crick and his Myth of Militant, the International Socialists, the Workers' Revolutionary Party, the International Marxist Group, the Communist Party, and all the others who had followed academic Marxism from economics to the culture wars in the pursuit of entirely unchanged objectives were able to create New Labour.
As a result, pretty much every Hard Left social and cultural aim has now been achieved and become a matter of cross-party "consensus", although there is still a bit of constitutional tidying up to do...
By contrast, some months ago, I heard a radio interview with Derek Hatton in which he explained, entirely matter-of-factly, his pride at having built so many "council houses with gardens front and back". How very Herbert Morrison. And Smith and the rest of the Liverpool 47 (the surcharged councillors still use that name, although two of them have died) continue to maintain a website which lists the following as the "Legacy of the Liverpool battle":
• 6,300 families rehoused from tenements, flats and maisonettes
• 2, 873 tenement flats demolished
• 1,315 walk-up flats demolished
• 2,086 flats/maisonettes demolished
• 4,800 houses and bungalows built
• 7,400 houses and flats improved
• 600 houses/bungalows created by ‘top-downing’ 1,315 walk-up flats
• 25 new Housing Action Areas being developed
• 6 new nursery classes built and open
• 17 Community Comprehensive Schools established following a massive re-organisation
• £10million spent on school improvements
• Five new sports centres, one with a leisure pool attached, built and open
• Two thousand additional jobs provided for in Liverpool City Council Budget
• Ten thousand people per year employed on Council’s Capital Programme
• Three new parks built
• Rents frozen for five years
No wonder the real Trots wanted rid of them, and still bang on and on about how awful they were.
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I remember seeing Jimmy McGovern being interviewed on tv and he said of Militant, in despair of the propaganda: "All's they ever did was build bloody council houses!"
ReplyDeleteMore than enough for some, of course.
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