The Walton by-election, in Liverpool,
took place in July 1991, twenty years ago. It arose after the sudden
death of Eric Heffer, the left-wing Labour MP for Walton. At the time it
created quite a political stir. It was also a key factor in the demise
of the Militant, which had boasted it could win the seat, but
failed miserably.
The Walton by-election, in Liverpool,
took place in July 1991, twenty years ago. It arose after the sudden
death of Eric Heffer, the left-wing Labour MP for Walton. At the time it
created quite a political stir. It was also a key factor in the demise
of the Militant, which had boasted it could win the seat, but
failed miserably. The whole episode played into the hands of Labour’s
right wing that used it to expel Militant from the Labour Party. To understand what happened we need to take a brief look at the background.
“From
the vantage point of the future, the Walton by-election will come to be
seen as a significant turning point in the development of the labour
movement in Britain.” Militant International Review (Summer 1991).
A left wing Labour council, deeply influenced by the Militant tendency, had come to power in Liverpool in May1983. The deputy leader of the council was Militant
supporter Derek Hatton, who became effectively the leader of the
council. The Labour Party had been elected on a radical manifesto
promising jobs and housing. It became so popular that in each election
during the life of the council, the Labour Party increased its vote.
This fact gives the lie to the argument of the right wing that left wing
policies made Labour “unelectable”.
The City Council, however,
was facing an emboldened Tory government under Thatcher, which was
intent on attacking the working class and slashing the central grant
given to councils. The council’s financial position was dire. The
Liverpool City Council defiantly answered this by setting a budget that
would finance its programme and it waged a mass campaign to demand the
extra funds from the government.
Despite demands from the
government, the Council was not prepared to make redundancies or
increase the rates to pay for Tory cuts or a reduction in its grant.
This is the way Labour councils should now be fighting the attempts of
the Lib-Dem coalition to force local councils to take upon themselves
all the responsibility for vicious cuts in public spending. This
inevitably led to a series of clashes with the Tory government, but the
council counted on mass support in Liverpool which it mobilized to fight
the government and oppose cuts.
This tactic succeeded and the
Tory government in the end was forced to grant concessions to Liverpool
in the spring of 1984. One of the key reasons at this stage was the
miners’ strike and the Tories unwillingness to “fight on two fronts”.
However, by the following budget, the council was again in a difficult
financial position. To avoid bankruptcy, the leaders of the council
overrode the opposition of the Tories and managed to strike a loan deal
with French banks.
But by 1985, things were coming to a head as
the council set a deficit budget and the councillors were surcharged. If
Liverpool had had the wholehearted backing of the Labour Movement, and
if its lead had been followed by other Labour councils, the whole
situation would have been different. But this was not to be. The right
wing Labour leadership, headed by Kinnock and urged on by the baying and
howling of the Tory national press, was desperate to discredit
Liverpool and expel the Militant Tendency. This led to Kinnock’s infamous 1985 conference speech attacking the City Council.
This prepared the ground for a general assault on Liverpool City council and the expulsion of leading Militant
supporters, including Derek Hatton. Despite these attacks, the council
remained very popular among working people. The councillors could not be
removed democratically, through the ballot box, so the government used
the District Auditor and the courts to surcharge, bankrupt and
disqualify them.
Patient work
The Militant Tendency
was very powerful in Liverpool as a result of decades of patient and
consistent work in the Labour Party. Its growing influence throughout
the 1970s and 1980s had raised fears not only in Labour’s right wing but
also in the ruling class. As a consequence a witch-hunt was launched
against the Militant, starting in the late 1970s, resulting in the expulsion of the Editorial Board.
Labour Leader Neil Kinnock wanted to go further and expel all Militant supporters from the Party, including the Militant-supporting Members of Parliament. Walton provided him with the excuse he was looking for. According to Kinnock’s biographer:
“The Walton by-election, occasioned by Heffer’s death, provided Kinnock with an opportunity to purge Labour of its remaining Militant infiltrators … Reckoning it was much easier to fight Militant
from without than within, Kinnock was delighted, declaring he was :
‘glad they had come into the open from under their stones.’” (Dr George
Drower, Kinnock, p.279)
The shift to the right within the Labour Party had created difficulties for Militant.
This was especially the case in Liverpool where the party’s regional
organizer, Peter Kilfoyle was leading the attack. A key part of the
strategy of Labour’s officialdom was the closure of the District Labour
Party, which was a body of hundreds of delegates representing the whole
of the Liverpool labour movement and which dictated policy to the Labour
councillors.
With the DLP effectively closed down, all kinds of
manoeuvres were used to exclude left candidates in the local elections,
especially supporters of the Broad Left. As a result, in the wards where
dirty methods were used to block candidates, the left decided to stand
those candidates who had been excluded as independent Labour candidates,
and these were elected. In these local council elections, workers
recognized these candidates as the authentic Labour candidates, as
opposed to the imposed official ones.
After the death of Eric
Heffer, the left wing MP for Walton, the Party held a selection meeting
in June to choose a new candidate. The candidate supported by the Broad
Left was Militant supporter Leslie Mahmood. But the meeting was
shamefully rigged in order to ensure the selection of the regional
organizer, Kilfoyle. This created outrage on the left.
In Liverpool, where Militant
dominated the Broad Left, pressure was mounting to stand Leslie as an
independent Labour candidate in Walton, as they earlier had done with
the councillors. Whatever Militant decided would be decisive. It was clear that a significant part of Militant’s
national leadership around Peter Taaffe was frustrated by the right
wing shift in the Labour Party and were keen to give Kinnock (and
Kilfoyle) a bloody nose.
They were carried away with a false sense
of their imagined strength. The fact is that they allowed their
judgment to be clouded by subjective considerations and lost all sense
of proportion. To quote the words of Peter Taaffe: “But eventually it
was felt that to have allowed Kilfoyle a free-run, while not halting the
developing assault of the right, would have disarmed and demoralized
that advanced minority of Liverpool workers, who were coalescing around
the Broad Left”.
What he failed to understand was that there was a
qualitatively difference between supporting independent candidates in
local council elections and standing a candidate in opposition to the
Labour Party in a national election, especially with a vicious Tory
government in power and general election on the horizon.
Militant’s traditions abandoned
Militant
had always understood the importance of the Labour Party as the
traditional mass party of the working class. It correctly held in
complete contempt the ultra-left groupings on the fringes of the
movement. But now the leadership was looking for a short cut and lost
its bearings completely. They had allowed the successes of Militant to go to their heads. They argued that to oppose Kilfoyle electorally was a “principled stand”, which could not be avoided.
This
was false from start to finish. The decision was of a purely tactical
character, not a question of “principle”. And in politics as in war,
tactics must always be subordinate to the long term strategy. In
reality, the gains achieved by Militant, though substantial, were
only the beginning of a long term work to strengthen and build the
Marxist wing of the British Labour Movement.
For the sake of an electoral gesture, they were prepared to sacrifice all the long-term work that Militant
had successfully carried out in the Party for years. The argument about
the mood of the rank and file in Liverpool was equally false. Since
when do Marxists allow their strategy and tactics to be determined by
the ephemeral moods of the rank and file? It is our duty to patiently
explain and convince the activists of the right course of action, not to
pander to their prejudices.
Militant had many experienced
cadres in Liverpool. If they had done their work properly, they could
have convinced the others that it was not correct to put up a candidate
against the Labour Party, explaining that the struggle against the right
wing must be carried on by other means. But this was not done, in part
because of the frustration and impatience of a layer of the comrades in
Liverpool, but mainly because Taaffe and his group was in favour of this
adventure in Walton and were actively encouraging it.
When it was decided to stand Leslie as a “Real Labour” candidate, articles appeared in the Militant
exaggerating the support she had and down-playing that of the Labour
Party. It subsequently became evident that all this was part of the “new
turn”, which was being decided behind the scenes by Taaffe and his
supporters, and which finally led to the destruction of the Militant
Tendency. The Walton adventure was later to be replicated in Scotland,
and soon to be carried out in Britain and internationally, although at
the time this was indignantly denied by its authors.
The Walton debacle
Militant
pulled out all the stops for the election campaign. Full timers were
drafted in from all over Britain and members were directed to go to
help. Some comrades even came from other countries to participate. They
were given to understand that we had a good chance of winning the
election. But the response of ordinary workers on the doorstep soon
convinced them that the real situation was quite different.
The
result was a complete debacle. On 7 July, Kilfoyle won Walton with
21,317 votes, while Leslie Mahmood, fighting as “Real Labour”, managed
only third place with only 2,613 votes. At a stroke, all the pompous
predictions of the Militant leadership were deflated like a punctured tyre.
Anyone
can make a mistake. A revolutionary tendency can make a mistake. But if
a mistake is made, it is necessary to acknowledge it honestly, discuss
it and draw the necessary conclusions. Only in this way can the cadres
be educated. But if a leadership is not prepared to admit a mistake out
of considerations of prestige, the result is disaster. A mistake that is
not recognized, it will be repeated. It will cease to be a mistake and
become an organic tendency.
That is what happened with Militant. The Militant newspaper heralded this debacle as a great victory.
In a banner headline on its front page it proclaimed: “2,600 votes for
Socialism!” This was both foolish and dishonest in the extreme. Dave
Cotterill, who was then the leading light of the Militant
fulltime apparatus in Liverpool (later expelled by Taaffe) wrote a
centre page article justifying the position with all kinds of twists and
turns. Originally we were told that if we did not support a candidate
against Kilfoyle, we would lose the respect of the best workers in
Liverpool, who were involved in a struggle to defend jobs and services.
Now we were offered a different story:
“It is also probable”,
wrote Cotterill, “that with the two main parties busy stealing each
other’s policy ideas, the electorate sees little difference between
them. That is exactly why the Broad Left decided to stand.” He went on
“It is not a question of setting up a separate party. We are the real
Labour Party in Liverpool and we have behind us the active workers.”
This
optimistic appraisal was neither borne out by the Walton result nor by
any of the subsequent development. In a phrase that could well serve as
an epitaph for Militant, Cotterill claimed that the Labour Party would “wither on the vine”,
while the “Real Labour Party” would go from strength to strength! That
anybody could seriously make such a statement showed to what extent they
were out of contact with reality. Incredibly, the majority of the Militant leadership supported this false perspective. They deceived themselves and they deceived others.
From a mistake to a tendency
For
the sake of a couple of thousand votes, they were prepared to throw
away the results of forty years of patient work in the Labour Party in
Liverpool and nationally. They presented Kinnock and the right wing with
just the excuse they were looking for. By standing candidates against
Labour they had obligingly put their heads on the chopping block.
Predictably, the expulsions accelerated and 147 suspected Militant supporters were suspended after the by-election.
Proceedings were then set in motion to expel Militant supporting Labour MPs, Dave Nellist and Terry Fields. By their irresponsible actions in Liverpool, the Militant
leaders had thrown them to the wolves. Before the end of the year they
too were expelled. Walton Labour Party, once the bastion of the Marxist
Tendency in Liverpool, was decimated. Six Party branches (then known as
wards) were suspended and 25 councillors expelled. It was a massacre.
The ‘majority’ of Militant’s
leaders learned nothing from all this. They stubbornly refused to
acknowledge or rectify their mistake. Motivated exclusively by
considerations of prestige, they continued and deepened their error:
“We
reaffirm the correctness of our decision to stand in Walton … Any
decision by us not to stand would not have been understood by the best
workers in the Liverpool area. It would have been seen as a dereliction
of duty to our class and would have led to the demoralization of our
forces of the left in Liverpool.” (Majority Resolution on Walton)
With
astonishing light mindedness the Majority tendency turned what was
already a defeat into a complete rout. It was their actions that finally
succeeded in demoralizing the comrades and supporters of Militant
on Merseyside and everywhere else, as subsequent events showed. In
consequence, what had been the most successful Trotskyist tendency since
the days of the Russian Left Opposition declined, disintegrated and
fell apart.
When the results were announced at Walton in July, Leslie Mahmood made a prediction:
“Real
Labour has been going three weeks in Walton. Already Walton Real Labour
has more members than the official Labour Party. We will go on; the
left will take control of the city council within the next two years.” (Militant, 5/7/91)
These views did not go unchallenged at the time. That part of the Militant leadership led by comrade Ted Grant explained:
“As
predicted the ‘Broad Left’ did very little apart from our comrades. Now
it will fall apart … it is not the Labour Party which will ‘wither on
the vine’, but the artificial Labour Party which is being created in
Liverpool.” (Minority resolution presented by Ted Grant and Rob Sewell, July 1991).
Our
warnings were swiftly corroborated by events. In the May 1992 local
elections, all but one of the 22 Broad Left candidate were wiped out. In
the general election, Kilfoyle increased his majority to over 28,000
votes. Terry Fields, who was expelled, stood in Broadgreen constituency,
but was pushed into third place. This time Real Labour did not
challenge Kilfoyle in Walton for fear of an even lower vote than at the
by-election.
The Militant soon changed its name firstly to Militant Labour
and then more recently to the Socialist Party. It abandoned its
previous methods and perspectives for the mass organizations. It has
become the most sectarian and vociferous of the ultra-left groups
towards the Labour Party. But all its attempts to set up a “new workers’
party” have ended disastrously. Its latest attempt to defeat Labour in
the local elections, under the banner of TUSC, was a complete fiasco..
Within a few years, Militant
support on Merseyside, once regarded as the jewel in the crown of the
Tendency, completely collapsed. This was followed by collapse in
Scotland and elsewhere. Where the right wing failed, they had managed
single-handedly to destroy the Tendency. What is the position in
Liverpool 20 years after Walton? Here are the recent May local election
results:
- Liverpool County (where Roger Bannister stood) – 78 votes (Labour got 2,330 votes)
- Liverpool Riverside – 88 votes (Labour: 2,836)
- Liverpool Princes Park – 104 votes (Labour: 2,263)
- Liverpool Old Swan – 74 votes (Labour: 2,689)
- Liverpool Kirkdale – 162 votes (Labour: 3,001)
- Liverpool Yew Tree – 66 votes (Labour 2,779)
After
20 years, it is crystal clear that the Walton by-election, rather than a
“turning point”, was a recipe for total disaster. The above results
bear eloquent witness to this fact. But after two decades the advocates
of sectarian politics have learned nothing. We urged the leadership at
the time “to avoid the sickness of ultra-leftism and impatience.” Ted
Grant warned them in advance of their mistakes that would flow from the
Walton adventure. But they were not prepared to listen. There are none
so blind as they who will not see.
The American philosopher George
Santayana once said that whoever does not learn from history will
forever be doomed to repeat it. As Marxists, our task is to learn from
history, and not to repeat its mistakes, whether in Walton or
elsewhere.
