The Truth About The Trots

And the Tankies.

Harry’s Place is off about Trotskyists again, specifically about the SWP today and the Militant Tendency in the 1980s. But Militant barely existed outside the Liverpool area. They must be thinking of John Reid, Peter Mandelson, Ralph Miliband, and the Communist Party of Great Britain, in those days the paid agency of an enemy power. Alistair Darling, Bob Ainsworth, Geoff Gallop (Tony Blair’s mentor at Oxford) and the International Marxist Group. Charles Clarke, Jack Straw and the nominally Labour but entirely pro-Soviet faction that controlled the National Union of Students. Alan Milburn, Stephen Byers and Trotskyism; Milburn’s only ever job outside politics was running a Trotskyist bookshop called Days of Hope, known to its clientele as “Haze of Dope”. The most powerful man in the voluntary sector, an old university friend of Tony Blair’s, the recently knighted Sir Stephen Bubb, who was one of the surcharged and disqualified Lambeth councillors, so that, yes, he really was a Militant. And so on, and on, and on. Including the assembled New Labourites who sang, not The Red Flag, but The Internationale, at the funerals of Donald Dewar and Robin Cook.

They have very cleverly described themselves as “Social Democrats” in the knowledge that, while almost all Britons on hearing or reading that term think of it as referring to the non-Marxist and anti-Marxist tradition within the British Labour Movement, it was also the name of the party of the Russian Revolution, to the Bolshevik majority within which looked back the Communist Party, the International Marxist Group, the Labour pro-Soviet faction, and the Trotskyists, partially overlapping as those, and many more besides, often were. So it is arguable that they have not lied directly. But it is indisputable that they have used a term in such a way as to assume its meaning within the tiny Leninist subculture, rather than its meaning in ordinary usage even among the politically well-informed. In so doing, they have monstrously deceived the electorate.

As it took shape, Labour adapted itself both to Radical Liberalism and to populist Toryism, depending on the pre-existing culture at least of its target electorate. Labour was never the party of anything like the whole of the working classes, nor did those classes ever provide anything like all of its support. Britain has neither a proletariat nor a bourgeoisie in the Marxist or Continental sense, but several working classes and several middle classes. There was never any incongruity about the presence of middle or upper-class people in the Labour Party, and not least among Labour MPs. Nor about their having come from, and far from cast off, either Liberal or Tory backgrounds. Especially in Labour’s early years, those backgrounds routinely included activism, and indeed parliamentary service, on behalf of either of those parties.

Both Radical Liberalism and populist Toryism were very open to central and local government action in the service of their communities. They were therefore open to many aspects of the never-dominant Socialist strand in Labour as surely as they acted as checks and balances on that tendency. Deeply rooted in the chapels, the Radicals had a pronounced streak of moral and social conservatism, especially where intoxication and gambling were concerned. Toryism, properly so called, upholds the organic Constitution, believes in carefully controlled importation and immigration, and advocates a realist foreign policy which includes a strong defence capability used only most sparingly and to strictly defensive ends. And so on.

The movement that drank deeply from both of these wells did in fact deliver social democracy in this country, a good both in itself and in its prevention of a Communist revolution. That movement was destroyed by those who had always been its bitterest enemies, the sectarian Hard Left, which had moved from economic to moral, social, cultural and constitutional means. Although the better brother won, a Miliband versus Miliband Labour Leadership Election perfectly encapsulated the takeover of the Labour Party, well within 20 years, by a subculture defined by its vitriolic hatred of the Labour Movement, by an almost complete ignorance of it, and by an utter incomprehension of, combined with a pathological distaste for, most of its Fabian and all of its non-Fabian roots: Radical Liberal, Tory populist, trade union, co-operative, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and so on. “The progressive Centre Left” means something else entirely, and refers to where the wealthy anti-Labour faction of Leftist political apparatchiki and their media retainers has ended up. Will everyone else finally get the message?