Liverpool's Miltant years... what lessons are there to be learnt today

[Fedayn]

Other than proving he was false.

His current activities are irrelevant, I doubt very much that those who were rehoused, especially those from the Piggeries, sit round their dinner table wanting to give up their house cos "See dat Degsy, he's a right cunt nowadays la"
However compare him to Blunkett,a man deemed honourable and a man of integrity and I think he fairs very favourably.
Let's be clear Hatton and the other 48 councillors weren't attacked because some of them liked to look smart, btw since when has it become a 'crime' within the working-class for wanting to look smart??, they were attacked because of their politics and what they did and tried to do.
The legacy of that council is still there not only in thew political fight but there in bricks and mortar, real physical evidence.
Yeah they made some tactical errors, rather glaring errors, but overall there legacy remains one the Left should defend.

 

[ViolentPanda]

in order to avoid making spending cuts, and carry out their promised house building plans, after the tories made massive cuts in the support grant (and imposed rate capping), Liverpool CC would have needed to impose a rates rise of around 100% (maybe higher in fact). Long negotiations with then environment secretary patrick jenkins (?) - during which Hatton refused to stand up to shake hands! - led to an increase in support from the government do the increases were kept down to 18%.

It was that that inspired the SW heasdline groucho referred to.

Wasn't the housing success a lot to do with Liverpool CC having the foresight to get a load of permissions for developments because they smelt what was coming re: Maggie's removal of the power of local authorities to develop social housing?
I wish a few more LAs had the foresight that Liverpool did, that way we might not have such a massive fucking national social housing deficit as we now do.

 

[Fedayn]

quite possibly - but at that time the government were funding such building massively, which they weren't ni the early 80's! Sheffield or Manchester Councils would make a better comparison really (and I've no idea how many houses they built - but I'd be amazed if it was as many as in Liverpool).

If I remember correctly (perhaps those still in the SP can verify this) Liverpool City Council built more houses in the 1983-87 period than all other councils put together. Dual power/pre-revolutionary crisis it certainly wasn't but something to be proud of it was and is.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

This whole issue has been discussed here at great length before - and dennisr's contributions are particularly worth reading, given that he was in Militant in Liverpool at the time. Basically Liverpool Council fought Thatcher's government. When all the other "left" councils backed down one by one, they refused to do so. They won some very significant concessions which amongst other things mean that to this tens of thousands of working class people have quality council homes. Throughout the entire period when Militant played a leading role in the Liverpool Labour Party, the Labour vote went up in every single election in the city - at a time when the Labour vote was in real trouble nationally. But eventually they were defeated by the combined forces of the Conservative government, the local and national media, the Courts and perhaps most importantly the national leadership of the Labour Party.

The Labour leadership took the decision that it was worth destroying their own party on Merseyside in order to break Militant in the city, and that's exactly what they did. The new-model right wing Labour Party has never reached anything like the support which the Militant led council developed.

But we should be clear, they may have gutted the Labour Party but they did succeed in breaking Militant's influence and seperating it from it's base in the local Labour movement. The combination of these defeats both inside andhad a demoralising effect on Militant in the city, particularly in the context of defeat after defeat for the workers movement nationally.

People dropped away from the organisation gradually. At the same time much of the local leadership slowly began to develop a strange mixture of reformist ideas, including if I recall correctly some weird stuff about how the internet had changed capitalism, and there was eventually a split with an organisation called the Merseyside Socialists which is now defunct (Lesley Mahmood is about the only person from that split whose name I still regularly see about). Militant Labour and the Socialist Party hit their lowest ebb in the city at the end of the 1990s, when the organisation was very weak indeed. Over the last few years though it has grown significantly with both new people and a significant layer of members from the 1980s getting active again - including a number of the former councillors and trade unionists.

Overall the period is well worth reading about to show both what can and importantly what can't be achieved by a local council. The list of improvements fought for and won by the Council is extremely impressive - including as articul8 pointed out the last major council house building programme in Britain. On the other hand, it was eventually defeated and defeated thoroughly.

Another thread on the same subject:
http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=84117&page=1&pp=25&highlight=liverpool+militant

Coincidentally, there will be a meeting on this very subject at Socialism 2005 in London this Sunday. Tony Mulhearn one of the surcharged Councillors and the President of Liverpool District Labour Party during the period will be speaking. If anyone here is interested they should go along, listen and have their say.
Socialism 2005 site:
http://www.socialism2005.net
Socialism 2005 thread:
http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=138400

 

[davgraham]

Yeah, a lot left (or were expelled - I was told by them that they left, I can see good reasons why they would say that). The majority declared that there wasn't the need of a party anymore.... and kinda become anarchos.

I happened to share a train journey to London one Saturday morning with about half a dozen of the SP membership who told me that they were going to East London [Leytonstone was it?] for a 'bollocking'. When I asked why they bothered when the writing was so obviously on the wall, I didn't get any clear answer.

As an outsider and seeing them in action in support of the dockers' I formed the impression of a much more 'rooted' group of people than your average Trot, The dockers seemed to take what they said much more seriuosly than any other left group.

. . . and with a lot of trust in one another borne of a long period of work.

. . . but also that many of their most deeply held beliefs were being seriously questioned and that much of what they did was because 'they had always done it'. Oddly enough politics per se was one of the few areas that we simply didn't talk about.

I really liked many of them as people - which is not something you can usually say about politicos. Not sure about them drifting towards anarchism however defined.

Gra

PS One thing I did try and urge them to do was to face up to the period of the 80s and give their version, something they owe people in Liverpool. They did say they were going to produce something but I haven't seen anything yet.

 

[catch]

By the way haggy started a thread down in theory/philosophy/history about Neighbourhood Councils in the '70s which has had a total of one response.

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=138444

thought I'd repost it here since you lot are the most likely to know something about it and I'd never even heard of them before.

 

[Fisher_Gate]

I was in Liverpool during the last gasp of Militant's influence and I think they made a number of serious tactical blunders.

The first was their approach towards the Broad Left (BL), which I was a member of. The Liverpool Broad Left was unlike anything I've ever been part of - it certainly wasn't Broad and some people in it were not Left. Contrary to the popular mythology it was actually the BL that led the Council in 1984-85, not Militant.

The Militant's theory, then, actually had a hierarchy of working class leadership. First you had the 'mass party' - the Labour Party, which could be won as a whole to revolution (despite Lenin's famous description) or 'Marxism' as it was then called by Militant. Then you had the class conscious strugglers - the Broad Left, Then the organised Marxists - Militant. Then the revolutionary leadership - the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL).

In practice in Liverpool, the Broad Left was a hybrid - half belonging to the stalinist notion of 'fellow travellers' and half belonging to the 'City boss' notion of town hall leaders - in Liverpool epitomised by the Braddock tradition in the Labour Party.

Anyone who conciously criticised Militant was excluded from membership of the Broad Left, which was an 'invitation only' organisation. While you were allowed to voice tactical divergences at meetings, if you consistently tried to put a counter-line to that of Militant, you were gradually elbowed out, not invited to meetings (which were always in secret, never open), not asked to move resolutions etc.

Many good left wing elements in the Liverpool Labour Party were excluded by these tactics. For example, I remember a ward meeting where a member voiced opposition in a debate on Women's Rights led by Cathy Wilson, to the reselection of Bob Parry in the Riverside Constituency. Parry refused to vote in Parliament for Labour Party policy in Parliament on abortion rights. The member was concerned that Cathy (a leading member of Riverside CLP) and Militant had supported the reselection of Parry at a time when some left wingers and feminists were critical of him. The sectarian abuse thrown out in this debate literally took my breath away. The member was hounded - Parry was 'working class' and supported the 47; those criticising him were middle-class good-for-nothings and his position on abortion an irrelevance to the issues facing working class people in the city such as council housing.

The result of these sorts of tactics was that there was a sizeable group of left-wingers outside the Broad Left, who were frequently criticised. Some became supporters of Keva Coombes, others dropped out, most became increasingly vociferously anti-Militant. All of them could have been won to a genuinely inclusive left.

The second problem was the issue of race and class.

The acid test for whether you were in the Broad Left or not was the stance that you took on the 'Sam Bond affair'. Bond was a (black) Militant supporter from London, a building surveyor by profession, who was appointed Principal Race Relations Advisor to the Council by a committee chaired by Derek Hatton. The case was well documented in the book 'The Racial Politics of Militant in Liverpool' published by the Runnymede Trust (and just to give balance, rebutted in Chapters 13 & 14 of Taafe and Mulhearn's book). The accusation was one of "Municipal Stalinism" - it was claimed that Militant had appointed one of their own, over better qualified alternative candidates. Militant mounted a vigorous defence of the appointment and anyone who criticised it was denigrated in an appalling way. The rights and wrongs of the issue are not actually that important (though I do think Militant behaved appallingly in the stitched up way the original appointment was made) - the problem was that it became a line in the sand, anyone criticising Militant was beyond the pale. The problem was that Militant did have an exceedingly economistic line on the issue of race - sure, a lot of the things they did on the council supported the black population, and the bleatings of the Liberals, Labour's national leadership and some (not all) of the Liverpool black leadership were hypocritical. But in practice rather than build bridges, Militant's approach served to cut them off from the broader issues of racism and society, reducing everything to class alone, contrary to Trotky's own thinking and the socialist development of black leaders like Malcolm X. It also alienated Militant from an important section of the trade unions in the city, namely Nalgo who opposed them and were forever condemned as 'middle class' traitors.

Racism in Liverpool is a fundamental and explosive issue that divides the city in two, geographically, socially and politically. Militant's mishandling of it made it more difficult to build a principled socialist leadership.

Sorry I've got to pause at this point - tomorrow I'll post on how the Broad Left included some highly unprincipled elements and led Militant out of the Labour Party by the nose in 1992.

 

[belboid]

Any chance of any actual self-criticism from SP members? Or was everything the fault of outside world, and you really did do everything just right?

 

[newbie]

Basically Liverpool Council fought Thatcher's government. When all the other "left" councils backed down one by one, they refused to do so.

minor little point but that's not entirely accurate. Both of my local councils were swept from office for refusing to back down. The GLC was abolished completely and Lambeth councillors were disbarred and surcharged. I appreciate that you wouldn't describe either of them as properly "left", but tha's no excuse for simply airbrushing them away.

 

[articul8]

minor little point but that's not entirely accurate. Both of my local councils were swept from office for refusing to back down. The GLC was abolished completely and Lambeth councillors were disbarred and surcharged. I appreciate that you wouldn't describe either of them as properly "left", but tha's no excuse for simply airbrushing them away.

But didn't "Red" Ken back down and set a rate in the end?

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Any chance of any actual self-criticism from SP members? Or was everything the fault of outside world, and you really did do everything just right?

Liverpool Council and Militant made plenty of mistakes, as is the nature of any serious and prolonged battle. But if you mean "any chance of you accepting the 'truth' of the myths, calumnies and lies that have been put about by the right wing press and various left sectarians then and now?", well then the answer, unsurprisingly, is no. Liverpool Council fought as best they could, they won massive support from the local working class and they won real concessions. They were ultimately defeated by an unholy alliance of just about every reactionary force in society - from the Labour leadership to Courts and media to Thatcher's government. That's my basic view of the subject, a context in which the various criticisms I raise exist within. I think by the way that dennisr's posts on the previous thread on this subject give a more nuanced description of events and are well worth reading.

 

[belboid]

But if you mean "any chance of you accepting the 'truth' of the myths, calumnies and lies that have been put about by the right wing press and various left sectarians then and now?",

that's not what I meant at all, nor is it, I dont think, implied by my question. Put away that matyr complex.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Then the organised Marxists - Militant. Then the revolutionary leadership - the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL).

This is a weird fiction which I've heard retailed here before, but nowhere else. Militant was intended to be a cadre organisation, however much it often fell short of that in practice. There was no organisation within it called the RSL, in fact the RSL was an old name for Militant which fell into disuse as the organisation become more serious about the entryist tactic.

For example, I remember a ward meeting where a member voiced opposition in a debate on Women's Rights led by Cathy Wilson, to the reselection of Bob Parry in the Riverside Constituency. Parry refused to vote in Parliament for Labour Party policy in Parliament on abortion rights. The member was concerned that Cathy (a leading member of Riverside CLP) and Militant had supported the reselection of Parry at a time when some left wingers and feminists were critical of him. The sectarian abuse thrown out in this debate literally took my breath away.

So in other words, some nutcase wanted to get one of the only parliamentary figures supporting the struggle of the Council deselected because he had backwards views on an important but unrelated issue? This in the midst of an ongoing struggle on which the future of the entire Council and its various projects including council housing and other services depended, on which the livelihoods and even freedom of the 47 councillors depended, on which democracy in the Labour movement in the city depended. And you were shocked that this wasn't exactly a popular idea? Frankly I can't think of any abuse that such rank stupidity doesn't deserve.

Out of curiousity, as it's irrelevant to the basic point, was Parry a supporter of any particular left group at the time? I'm curious just because I'm wondering which group could possible spawn such utter tactical ineptitude.

Militant mounted a vigorous defence of the appointment and anyone who criticised it was denigrated in an appalling way.

Why am I not even slightly surprised to see you side with the careerist race relations bureaucracy on this?

 

[Streathamite]

But didn't "Red" Ken back down and set a rate in the end?

yes, but lambeth didn't, IIRC?

 

[dennisr]

yes, but lambeth didn't, IIRC?

Actually, I am not sure if they did or not, you may well be right - i suppose the key thing was that they did not link refusing to set the rate to a mobilisation of the council trade unions and the working class in lambeth/london to defend this action which would have set the stage for going beyond this.

 

[newbie]

Actually, I am not sure if they did or not, you may well be right - i suppose the key thing was that they did not link refusing to set the rate to a mobilisation of the council trade unions and the working class in lambeth/london to defend this action which would have set the stage for going beyond this.

from memory the councillors did make the link. Perhaps not as you would have wished or advocated, and certainly not sucessfully, but then the nitty gritty of local politics is seldom as clearcut as one might wish. Marching & protesting alongside Nupe, Nalgo and the DLO was two-edged, because their interests and the interests of the local people were not necessarily coincident.

 

[dennisr]

The acid test for whether you were in the Broad Left or not was the stance that you took on the 'Sam Bond affair'.... etc etc etc

Absolutely appaling... you repeat all the lies they used and then say they were hypocrites. What was your solution? - licking the arses of the Black Caucus and buying a few off with token council 'race relations' jobs so they could assist you in keeping the rest of the liverpool black communities in thier 'place' ? Exactly what the previous liberal council had done for decades.

Militant "economism" meant building thousands of decent houses (particularly in the liverpool 8 area); creating hundreds of real jobs and training places (particularly recruiting people from the liverpool 8 area); and building a unitied working class struggle against the tory government that cut across racist division - things that did much, much more to assist in fighting divisive racist crap than I don't know how many decades of bleating middle-class white university lecturers ramblings (the appalling book you mentioned); or a couple of token black faces 'monitoring' prejudice (while setting up thier safe wee homes and businesses well away from the 'community' they claimed to love so deeply) ever did These were people who were happy to be used as the muppets of the likes of the daily mail (when it is convenient for the ruling bigots) to defend thier pathetic careers. These people you wish to appease are hated much more than the militants ever were within the black communities of liverpool.

Sam Bonds qualifications were real ones - years spent organising within black communities against state and police and organised racist crap. One of the founding organisers of the original Newham Monitoring Project when it was part of the initial self-organisation for self-defence of communities. Real qualifications - not university qualifications about 'race relations'. Even the Black Caucus members on the very recruiting panel that employed him were so impressed they voted for him getting the job - before they changed their minds like...

and NALGO - who was in control of Liverpool NALGO at the time... don't you remember - the CP and fellow-travellers. Not exactly unbiased were they?? (additional: funnily enough, one of my friends is now a leading light in the Liverpool UNISON - after sone hard fought battles with the old leadership of that branch - a black, scouse militant... funny, given how 'hated' the militants are?)

 

[dennisr]

...Marching & protesting alongside Nupe, Nalgo and the DLO was two-edged, because their interests and the interests of the local people were not necessarily coincident.

come again?

 

[dennisr]

I was in Liverpool during the last gasp of Militant's influence...

Poll Tax? - SSP?

 

[Chuck Wilson]

Actually I think Sam Bond was hounded out by the Black Workers group in Liverpool which if it was anything like the Black Workers groups in Brent Council was any careerist who didn't happen to be white. Most of these people are precisely the ones who with their white liberal counterparts adopted 'multi culturalism' as some sort of little Red Book and deserted the trade unions as they moved up the pay scale.

However I must say it was complete shock to us in Brent Nalgo at the time when we learnt that the new Race Adviser for Liverpool Council was an ex Brent Council employee as no activists knew him and he had never spoken at a union meeting.

 

[newbie]

re Lambeth

come again?

I don't want to derail this interesting thread, but allegations of corruption, jobs for the boys, (lack of) service delivery and racism were rife. Locals were very, very cynical about whose interests the council really served. Attempting to defend their supposedly pro-working class stance against the government was frequently greeted with derision.

 

[Wilf]

Fishergate - interesting post. i was around at the time but had forgotten things like the Sam Bond thing and the relations between Militant and the other lefts in Liverpool. Also Militant made attempts tried to get me to join around the time of the miners strike - right through to inviting me to a meeting which they said they would deny had happened if i ever mentioned it to anyone outside of 'the tendency'. Too much secrecy, too many lines in the sand.

 

[davgraham]

Looking at how the current SP people are still defending the role of that organisation in Liverpool in the 80s, I can see now why Cathy Wilson [since her name has been mentioned] and the others left the Socialist Party now. At the time the huge documents they produced made no kind of sense to me.

I must have been like a breath of fresh air getting away from all that Party shit.

There's not much that can be 'defended' from the old movement and the sooner people realise it the better.

Gra

 

[Divisive Cotton]

Sam Bonds qualifications were real ones - years spent organising within black communities against state and police and organised racist crap. One of the founding organisers of the original Newham Monitoring Project when it was part of the initial self-organisation for self-defence of communities. Real qualifications - not university qualifications about 'race relations'. Even the Black Caucus members on the very recruiting panel that employed him were so impressed they voted for him getting the job - before they changed their minds like...

It shouldn't be forgotten that Derek Hatton has gone on record as saying his biggest regret from this period was employing Sam Bond.

 

[dennisr]

Looking at how the current SP people are still defending the role of that organisation in Liverpool in the 80s, I can see now why Cathy Wilson [since her name has been mentioned] and the others left the Socialist Party now. At the time the huge documents they produced made no kind of sense to me.

I must have been like a breath of fresh air getting away from all that Party shit.

People like Cathy - whom i still think highly of - actually LED that movement in Liverpool. They never regreted that movement and I imagine still defend it. After a decade+ of constant work some of them, I think, were looking for easier options in the face of defeat and knockbacks but that has nothing to do with the Liverpool struggle.

That "party shit" was concrete - 1,000s of homes, many school, sports centres and cannot be written off with trite one-liners

 

[dennisr]

Fishergate - interesting post. i was around at the time but had forgotten things like the Sam Bond thing and the relations between Militant and the other lefts in Liverpool. Also Militant made attempts tried to get me to join around the time of the miners strike - right through to inviting me to a meeting which they said they would deny had happened if i ever mentioned it to anyone outside of 'the tendency'. Too much secrecy, too many lines in the sand.

Yep, It was all a secretive conspiracy

 

[Fedayn]

Looking at how the current SP people are still defending the role of that organisation in Liverpool in the 80s, I can see now why Cathy Wilson [since her name has been mentioned] and the others left the Socialist Party now.

I'm neither current nor SP, but over the issue of Liverpool City Council 1983-1987 I have no problem defending the concrete-quite literally in some areas-gains made by that council. And in Cathy Wilson you will not find someone who will attack the legacy of that very same council. Her political differences with the leadership ofthe SP POST 1987 are well known but her defence of the 1983-1987 and the 47 councillors still 'fighting' remains.

 

[Fedayn]

It shouldn't be forgotten that Derek Hatton has gone on record as saying his biggest regret from this period was employing Sam Bond.

Funny how people use Hatton to attack the legacy of the Council but when it comes to the Sam Bond issue we're supposed to accept that cos he says it was a mistake then we should agree with him.

Btw I wonder how many of those-especially now in the leadership of New Labour-who sided with the Liverpool Black Caucus over the Sam Bond affair will be as fulsome in their praise of the leaders of that self same Black Caucus who were revealed as and convicted of being gangsters and heroin dealers..... funny bedfellows that the likes of Kinnock, Hattersely et al ended up with....

 

[dennisr]

It shouldn't be forgotten that Derek Hatton has gone on record as saying his biggest regret from this period was employing Sam Bond.

Possibly - don't really care what Hatton says nowadays...

At the time - if the militants had made the sort of 'concessions' to the Black Caucus (not Black Workers Group - these people were not trade unionists or claiming such) others now say we should have, in comfortable retrospect, then it would have been concessions to their methods - this would have enormously complicated the real struggle against racism - you only have too look at the reaction to the trendy left approaches in london and elsewhere or the reaction nowadays on the part of many to aspects of "multiculturalism from above".

 

[dennisr]

I don't want to derail this interesting thread, but allegations of corruption, jobs for the boys, (lack of) service delivery and racism were rife. Locals were very, very cynical about whose interests the council really served. Attempting to defend their supposedly pro-working class stance against the government was frequently greeted with derision.

Quitew possibly newbie - these accusations could probably be made of most councils then and now - all 'jobs for the boys' and 'back-handers'. The left london councils were only attacked because of the wider politics - attacking the establishment of the day. In Liverpool the labour councillors were controlled by the workforce rather than the other way around - this made a real difference.

My original point still stands though - in Liverpool the majority of the city - the working class population was mobilised through the campaign of the councillors. The city was looking at all out general strike which would have completely transformed the fight against the thatcher government and the minors struggle. A general strike situation can not be compared to GLC festivals or even a few marches around town in support of a couple of grand-standing councillors. Hence the whole redundancy notice tactic in order to ensure, legalistically, a couple of months extra wages for council workers facing the strong possibility of all-out action at the time