Why The British Left Sucks in 2006: Episode VIII - The Labour Party pt 3

The Labour Party pt 3: Deep Entry

Not the latest Jenna Jameson 'spectacular', unfortunately, but the conclusion to our trilogy within a trilogy of trilogies. We now poke our heads towards a dying breed - those far leftists still entered in the Labour party.

The only remaining group of any significance is the Grant(RIP)-Woods faction, which is one of the split-spawn from the old Militant Tendency. Militant, once upon a time, were big fish. Apart from the communist party, they were the largest far-left organisation in Britain - and unlike the communists, they even had three members sitting in parliament at one stage.

Well, sort of.

Because, thanks to the bureaucratic regime inside the LP, you're not allowed to organise openly as a faction. But what you are allowed is a newspaper. So, Militant was "officially" Militant, a party magazine of Trotskyist leanings. The "central committee" was the editorial board of said magazine. And because of these conditions, things were often awkward for them. Of course, nobody was fooled. And it only took until the mid-80s for someone to grow a testicle or two and decide to propagate a good old stalinist purge. Fighting on many fronts, including the excellently-named Operation Icepick, a motley coalition of tankie Stalinists, eurocommunists and proto-new labourites basically booted them all out.

But the thing with booting someone out of an open-membership party is that, well, they can always just join again. And they did, over and over and over again. Then, in the early 90s, the majority of the "editorial board" and the "readership" got fucking tired of this shit. It was agreed that entrism would be abandoned. A small group around golden-age main man Ted Grant were too attached to Labour, and broke off to pursue their deep entry fantasies.

Nowadays, the 'open' party is led by Peter Taaffe, and goes by the name Socialist Party of England and Wales - which can be appropriately shortened to SPEW - and has gone through all manner of strife and fragmentation. The Grant group has remained homogenous and split-free, although Grant finally bought it two months ago (me and Ted share a birthday! freaky deaky...), bequeathing it all to his disciple, brusque Welsh polyglot Alan Woods.

And what does the scion inherit? Well, a small national organisation, a paper called Socialist Appeal, a natty website and a rather larger and more influential international organisation. The thing with the Grant-Woods group is this - they are completely, deeply committed to entryism in the most passionate sense. A young Swedish comrade recently declaimed to the "Marxism" myspace group "ENTRISM IS MY LIFE!" which is, admittedly, an extreme (and likely extremely badly translated) example. But what obviously does not get considered is the specific conditions - the difference between entering the Labour Party and the Pakistan People's Party. In applying the tactic scattershot to everything, they obviously get varying success - they had an MP in Pakistan for example, a veritable Dave Nellist of the subcontinent, but they're hilariously irrelevant in the States. Apart from the rather random distribution of their support, there are other consequences of their fixation. Back when the geocentric universe was starting to look shaky, desperate orthodox astronomers started creating incredibly complex "orbits" for the various heavenly bodies, trying in vain to shore up an increasingly obvious folly. And so Woods continues to grasp nettles with the determination of a retarded ginger child - socialism can be achieved at the ballot box, with an 'enablnig bill in parliament'; chavismo is a "revolution" in progress; etc, etc, etc. But what he cannot countenance is the most important truth of all - strategy and tactics are not metaphysical constants. You pick them according to their utility. Entry in Britain is not a useful strategy, and - as it happens - has almost never been.

The story of Militant and Socialist Appeal is an important one, and tells us much about the Labour party. They failed because the host organism had no truck with symbiotes and parasites - they were forced to operate clandestinely, and as a result could not be open to anyone. If you hide from the Party bureaucrats, you hide from the proletariat by the same stroke. They couldn't win - should they become significantly successful, their enemies on the right (and for that matter, as in Operation Icepick, the left) would simply boot them out, and so it came to pass. Sneaking around in a club, violating the entire dress code and being obnoxious will not result in a long night out. Being a Trot in the labour party is simply not worth the arse-pain.

Taafe said of the LP at the time of the 'open turn' that it had previously been a worker's party and thus worth entering, but had now degenerated beyond recovery. He was unable to face a more crucial truth - Mili could never have gotten further than they did with entry work. Labour didn't change, but he did.
Grant, god rest his soul, was nothing if not consistent.