Dave Hill
Ted Grant co-founded and led Militant in Britain in 1964, which grew to become the most effective and largest Trotskyist organisation in Britain.
At its height it had 8000 members, three MPs (and other fellow-travellers) and more full-time workers than the British Labour Party itself. It controlled Liverpool City Council from 1983 to 1987, and included many Labour councillors (see Liverpool - A City that Dared to Fight by Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn, and The Rise of Militant by Peter Taaffe, at ).
Militant dominated many local Labour Party branches in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a major part of the Labour Left, which came close to taking control of the Labour Party at the Wembley conference in 1981.
I am moved by Ted Grant's death. Militant (now The Socialist) and its international review magazine (formerly Militant International Review, now Socialism Today) had a major impact on me. I and thousands of others learned a lot of our Marxism from it, and from the picket lines and mobilisations.
Militant was not just theory; it was strikes, picket lines, mobilisations - and a focus on passing resolutions at party meetings (which lasted hours and hours).
We, the East Sussex Labour Group, were the last of the Labour groups, together with Liverpool City Council and Lambeth Council (led by Ted Knight), to support the deficit budget policy against Margaret Thatcher's rate-capping policies.
Labour's sharp swing to the right started with Neil Kinnock's expulsion of Grant and the Militant editorial board in 1983. The Labour Party Young Socialists and various city parties, such as Liverpool and Brighton, were suspended and closed down. It was a witch hunt.
Labour Party conferences in the 1970s and 1980s had a degree of internal democracy - the power to select parliamentary candidates and party policy.
Militant split in 1991. The Grantites, overwhelmingly defeated at a Militant conference, formed Socialist Appeal and focused their efforts on the Labour Party, rather than building a socialist alternative to Labour. The majority of Militant became the Socialist Party (SP), outside the Labour Party and contesting elections. It wins and retains an as yet small, but growing, number of council seats.
Until the last year or so (perhaps naively), I hoped that Labour could be reclaimed for class action. But the moment has gone. Labour is no longer a "capitalist workers' party"; it is a capitalist party.
I joined the Respect coalition in 2005 simply because it is the largest socialist grouping to the left of Labour. But the SP has more of a class analysis and a united front strategy, rather than Respect's popular front strategy.
The time has come for socialists and trade unions to bring Marxist and socialist organisations together in a new workers' party that embraces groups as diverse as the SP, the International Socialist Group, the Socialist Workers Party and Respect, and the might, muscle and money of trade unions.
Grant's writings can be read at .