movement’s votes; nine of those ten have Hard Left control at the top, as against two in the early 1970s. All this has been achieved over the heads of millions of British workers by no more than ten thousand dedicated men.
The importance of this Hard Left-dominated union vote will become plain when I describe the electoral college that chooses the new Party leader; the unions hold forty percent of the votes in this so-called college.
Next, the constituency Labour parties, or CLPs. At the core of these lie the general management committees, which, apart from running the day-to-day business of the Party within the constituency, have one other vital function: they choose the Labour candidate for Parliament. Over the decade 1973 to 1983, hard-line activist young people of the extreme Left began to move into the constituencies, and by assiduous attendance at dull and sparsely filled CLP meetings ousted the old-time officials to gain control of one general management committee after another.
As each successive constituency fell to the new Hard Left activist control, the position of the largely centrist MPs representing those constituencies became tougher and tougher. Still, they could not be easily ousted. For the true triumph of the Hard Left it was necessary to weaken, indeed emasculate, the independence of conscience of a member of Parliament; to transform him from the trustee of all his constituents’ interests into a mere legate of his general management committee.
This was brilliantly achieved by the Hard Left at Brighton in 1979 with the passage of the new rule requiring the annual reselection (or deselection) of MPs by their management committees. The rule caused a massive switch of power. A whole group of centrists quit to form the Social Democratic Party; others were deselected and left politics; some of the ablest centrists were harassed into resignation. Still, the Parliamentary Labour Party, though emasculated and humiliated, was left with one vital function: the MPs, and they alone, could elect the Labour Party leader. It was crucial, to complete the three-pronged capture, to take that power away from them. This was achieved, again at the urging of the Hard Left, in 1981 with the creation of the electoral college, in which thirty percent of the votes are held by the Parliamentary Party, thirty percent by the constituency parties, and forty percent by the trade unions. The college will elect each new leader as and when needed,
The struggle for control that I have described brings the story to the general election of 1983. The takeover was almost complete, but our friends had made two errors, aberrations from the Leninist doctrine of caution and dissimulation. They had come out too openly, too visibly, to win those titanic struggles, and the premature call for a general election caught them on the hop. The Hard Left needed one extra year to consolidate, mollify, unify. They did not get it. The Party, saddled too early with the most extreme Hard Left manifesto in history, was in complete disarray.
Worse, the British public had seen the real face of the Hard Left.
As you will recall, the 1983 election was apparently a disaster for the by now Hard Left-dominated Labour Party. Yet I suggest the outcome was in fact a blessing in disguise. For it led to the gritty and self-denying realism to which our true friends in the Party have agreed to submit themselves over the past forty months.
Briefly, out of 650 constituencies in Britain in 1983, the Labour Party won only 209. But it was not quite so bad as it looked. For one thing, of those 209 sitting Labour MPs, 100 were now firmly of the Left, 40 of them of the Hard Left. It may be small, but today’s Parliamentary Labour Party is the farthest left that has ever sat in the House of Commons.
Second, the defeat at the polls gave a jolt to those fools who thought the struggle for total control was already over. They soon realized that after the bitter but necessary struggle by our friends to win control of the Party between 1979 and 1983, the time had come to reestablish unity and to repair the damaged power base in the country, with an eye to the next election. This program began under Hard Left orchestration at the October 1983 Party Conference, and has been unswerving ever since.
Third, they all saw the necessity to return to that clandestinity demanded by Lenin of true believers operating inside a bourgeois society. Thus the leitmotif of the whole span of the Hard Left’s conduct these past forty months has been a return to that clandestinity that worked so well through the early and mid-1970s. This has been coupled with a reversion to an apparent and surprising degree of moderation. It has taken a vast effort of self-discipline to achieve this, but again the comrades have not been found wanting in this regard.
Since October 1983, the Hard Left has effectively taken on the clothes of courtesy, tolerance, and moderation; stress is eternally laid upon the primordial importance of Party unity, and a number of hitherto impossible concessions have been made in Hard Left dogma to achieve this. Both the centrist wing, delighted and amicable, and the media appear to have been completely taken by the new, acceptable face of our Marxist-Leninist friends.
More covertly, the takeover of the Party has been finalized. All the lever committees are now either in the hands of the Hard Left or could be taken over during a single emergency meeting. But—and it is an important
“but”—they have usually been content to leave the chairmanship of these lever committees in the hands of a Soft Left person, and occasionally, when the voting supremacy is sufficiently overwhelming, even in the hands of a centrist.
The centrist wing, with the exception of about a dozen skeptics, has been effectively disarmed by the newfound unity and the absence of harassment of themselves. Nevertheless, the iron fist is still very much in the velvet glove.
At constituency level, the takeover of local CLPs by Hard Left elements has continued quietly and with very little public or media attention. The same thing has happened throughout the history of the trade union movement, as I have already mentioned. Nine out of the Big Ten and half of the remaining seventy unions belong now to the Hard Left, and here again the profile has deliberately been kept much lower than prior to 1983.
In summation, the entire Labour Party of Britain now belongs to the Hard Left, whether directly, through Soft Left surrogates, through intimidated centrists, or through the holding of a fast emergency meeting of the appropriate committee; and yet the rank and file of the Party membership and of the unions, the media, and the broad masses of the old Labour voters seem unaware of this fact.
For the rest, the Hard Left has for forty months approached the next British general election as if planning a military campaign. To win a simple majority in the British Parliament it would need 325 seats—say, 330. It possesses 210 that are regarded as in the bag. The other 120, lost in 1979 or 1983, or both, are regarded as winnable and have been designated as target seats.
It is a fact of political life in Britain that the people, after two full terms of one kind of government, often seem to think it is time for a change, even if the incumbent government is not really unpopular. But the British will change only if they trust what they are changing to. It has been the aim of the Labour Party these past forty months to win back that public trust, albeit by subterfuge on the part of our friends within it.
To judge by recent public-opinion polls, the campaign has been substantially successful, for the percentage gap between the ruling Conservatives and the Labour Party has closed to a few points. Bearing in mind also that under the British system eighty “marginal” seats actually control the outcome of an election, and that the marginals are swung one way or the other by the fifteen percent “floating vote,” the Labour Party has a chance of being returned to government at the next British general election.
The mere election to power of the Labour Party would not alone be enough to destabilize Britain to the revolutionary threshold and beyond it.
It would be necessary to topple the newly triumphant Labour leader from office before he could be called to the Palace and sworn in as premier, and for him to be replaced by the preselected Hard Left nominee as Britain’s first Marxist-Leninist Prime Minister. It is this plan that is now well advanced.
Permit me to make one second digression to describe the manner of the election of a Labour Party leader. After the inception of the so-called electoral college at the urging of our Hard Left friends, the procedure was thus: following an election, nominations for the post of Party leader closed thirty days after the MPs took their oath. There would then ensue three months during which rival candidates could press their claims before the electoral college met. In the event of a Labour defeat there might well be a change of leader; in the event of a victory it would be unthinkable to topple the Prime Minister, since those three months would permit countrywide canvassing of the masses, who would support him.
Then, last year, at the October conference, our friends who dominated the National Executive Committee managed to secure the passage of a tiny “reform.” In the event of a Labour
