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A PESTILENTIAL NUISANCE

Michael Foot once described Militant as "a pestilential nuisance". Coping with nuisances is a necessary part of all forms of social activity. Coping with them deftly is an essential part of the political art.

From the point of view of any tendency in the Labour Party with a clear position and view of its objectives, every other tendency is a nuisance unless its energies can be harnessed in some way despite itself. From the point of view of the Attlee leadership in 1950-55, not to mention the Gaitskell leadership in 1959-61, Mike Foot and his mates were a pestilential nuisance on a scale and in a manner to which accurate epithets could not be applied in polite society.

It is not to be wondered at that politicians who have made a career out of being pestilential nuisances of the most irresponsible and unreasonable kind should not know how to deal with other political tendencies that make life a trial for them in their respectable dotage. There can be no doubt that, in 1981-3, from the point of view of an Old Bevanite like Foot, Militant were a nuisance and that he heartily wished to have done with them, and that, in saying this when he did, Foot lent his personal authority to Kinnock's subsequent drive to have done with them.

But the interesting thing about Kinnock's drive against Militant is that it was never over, it was always unfinished, there were always plenty of Militants still in the woodwork at the end of the day and the drive always had to be re-launched before long. Has it never occurred to Michael Foot, watching his protégé's painful progress over the last nine years, that from the point of view of the merger, in the Kinnock-Clarke tandem, of lapsed Bevanism with Broad Leftism, Militant were not a nuisance at all, but a God-send, in fact a vital necessity?

The never-quite-completed, forever-to-be-recommenced, witch-hunt against Militant was a permanent feature of the Clarke-Kinnock leadership of the Labour Party because it was an indispensable feature. It was indispensable because the permanent presence of an Ultra-Left antagonist was the external condition of the Broad Left's cohesion within the Labour leadership, just as it had been in the NUS leadership. It was indispensable because the inability of the Broad Left Labour leadership to engage in proper agitation meant that it constantly needed to engage in displacement activity instead. It was indispensable because the Labour leadership, being at odds with the impulses of the party membership and spiritually prostrate before the media, needed constantly to play to the media gallery and obtain its approval and applause to bolster its own position. And it was indispensable for another reason, which is that the utter emptiness of Kinnockism meant that its leadership of the Labour Party constantly tended to generate opposition to itself from those elements within the party with any vestige of self-respect or an independent political outlook and this opposition, being constantly regenerated, had constantly to be suppressed.

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THE ABOLITION OF THE LEFT WITHIN THE LEFT

In the Labour Party from its birth right up until 1979, Left and Right put up with each other because, however much they might disagree with and exasperate each other, they recognised each other as legitimate and necessary elements of the Party. But the irruption of student leftism into the Labour Party after 1979 destroyed this historic understanding and, on capturing the Party leadership in 1983, Broad Leftism set out to complete the process of destruction by launching a scorched-earth campaign against everything disposed to resist its corrupting embrace.

Marx once described the rise of the joint-stock company, with the concomitant disappearance of the classic entrepreneur as the function of the capitalist became increasingly socialised, as the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production. The Broad Left is the abolition of the Left within the Left. Broad leftism presupposes the prior elimination of the 'Right', and its advent therefore abolishes the dichotomy which made the terms 'Left' and 'Right' meaningful.

Broad Leftism represents nothing. It believes in nothing. It mobilises nothing. And it has achieved nothing of value.

Its ascendancy has stopped the Labour Party from representing the working class, and has induced the Party to abandon all of its principles, and has precluded the Party from mobilising public opinion against Conservative misgovernment, and has destroyed the Party's capacity to address the electorate in a way which meets with belief. It has made the Labour Party unfit for Government and incapable of Opposition alike.

"The end of Labour politics" is a phrase that can mean two quite different things. It can mean the purpose, the finality, of Labour politics, or it can mean the death of Labour politics.

The fundamental purpose and objective of Labour politics is the political representation of the labour interest, the interest of the working class, in British society. It has no more important purpose and no other single purpose or pot-pourri of purposes can sustain it if this fundamental purpose is abandoned.

The Broad Left has been destroying the Labour Party because latter-day Broad Leftism has no purpose whatever beyond the personal ambitions of its adepts. The lapsed Bevanite at the end of his rhetorical tether has been like the Emperor who wanted new clothes, and Broad Leftism proffered itself to him as a flexible and glossy new suit which would hide his nakedness. But Broad Leftism has been as transparent as see-through plastic and the British people have seen through it.