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THE EFFECT ON THE LABOUR PARTY - THE DRIVE AGAINST MILITANT
Jacques's version of this outlook, subsequently labelled, very inaccurately, as 'Eurocommunist', took over the Party as a whole in the mid-1970s and led it inexorably to its disintegration, because it put the intellectual leadership of the Party at odds with its industrial cadre, and ensured that this cadre could not renew itself. But in the short run it gave the Party's work in the academic sphere a new lease of life and fresh energy, and this energy was injected with vigour into the Broad Left in the student movement.
The effect of this change in the CP was that the content of the outlook at the core of the politics of the Broad Left was transformed from a secretive but self-satisfied Leninist cynicism which at least notionally placed the working class at the centre of the picture to a shameless but self-deluding opportunism which placed American fashions – feminism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, gay liberation, etc., etc. – at the centre of the picture and dressed all this up in Marxist verbiage and redefined 'socialism' in terms of it. In other words, while the orientation of the Broad Left remained fiercely at odds with the real traditions of British democracy and the real interests of British workers, its core became hollow.
With the rise to power of Kinnock and Clarke, the Labour Party was taken over by the emptiest kind of cynicism it has ever been its misfortune to be infected by. The cynicism of Digby Jacks and Jeff Staniforth was the cynicism of people who believed in something they could not publicly profess and who were accordingly taking most of the people they worked with for a ride. The cynicism of Neil Kinnock and Charles Clarke has been the unutterably shallow cynicism of people who no longer believe in anything except the gullibility of the British electorate, a belief which has apparently survived repeated demonstrations that it is mistaken.
And this, together with the congenital disinclination of Broad Leftism to mobilise its notional constituency, is why there has been no capacity in Kinnock's and Clarke's Labour Party to organise any kind of agitation in the country against even the most outrageous actions of Thatcher's successive governments, despite the evident disposition of large sections of British public opinion to be mobilised in the most vigorous way if only given a political lead.
It is in the light of these facts, and only in the light of them, that Kinnock's obsessive witch-hunt against Militant can be understood.
The media have unanimously and consistently supported Kinnock's drive against Militant. The Tory press has always known its business, and that blood-letting in the Labour Party is to be encouraged without reservation. But the witch-hunt against Militant has been supported by virtually the entire pro-Labour press as well, from The Guardian to Tribune. What none of these organs have ever done is reflect on the reasons for Kinnock's obsession.
Having no programme or avowable purpose of substance, the Broad Left would have lacked a raison d'être that it could proclaim had it not been for the existence of the Ultra-Left. It could not admit that its function, from the point of view of the CP which was orchestrating it, was to divert left-wing students away from the CP's trade union cadres. Still less could it admit that its other function, from the point of view of the non-Communist elements like Charles Clarke who made up the majority of its activists, was simply that of an electoral machine to get them into NUS offices as the launching pads for their subsequent careers in the Labour Party. And so the business of thwarting the Ultra-Left in student politics became the avowed raison d'être of the Broad Left and assumed the moral dimensions of a crusade. The existence of the Ultra-Left was necessary to the Broad Left as the external condition of its own cohesion and the justification for its own existence and activity. The Broad Left needed an Ultra-Left antagonist (in exactly the same way that Bush's New World Order needs an endless supply of Saddams and Qadhafis) because it would have disintegrated without one.
IS, being active in student politics, was the ideal adversary of the Broad Left within the NUS. But once the Broad Left generation moved into the Labour Party and took over its leadership, they no longer had IS to muster their forces against. The IS had become the Socialist Workers' Party and the SWP had always been resolutely non-entryist. And, while elements of the IMG and other smaller Trotskyist groupings were to be found in the Labour Party by the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were too small and too ridiculous to serve the Broad Left's purpose. It was at this point that Militant (aka the Revolutionary Socialist League, RSL) loomed up on the Broad Left's horizon.
The RSL had never attached importance to student unionism and had taken no part in it. So far as I am aware, it was the only trend in British Trotskyism to take student unionism at its true value. Unlike the IMG, the RSL never took its eyes off the working class. And, unlike the IS/SWP, the RSL/Militant never underestimated the strength of the bond between the working class and the Labour Party, and never supposed that building another working-class party in opposition to the Labour Party could succeed. (The SWP has been trying to build such a party for twenty years and, for all its energy and determination, has got nowhere.) The RSL accordingly opted for and stuck to an entryist strategy. And, in line with this strategy, its only interest in the student political milieu was in those students active in the Labour Clubs and the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS). As such, it went virtually unnoticed by the Broad Left until the Broad Left graduated from the NUS to the Labour Party.