Time to forgive and forget?

LABOUR’s decision to review Derek Hatton’s recent application to re-join the party he was expelled from 30 years ago has prompted debate within the Labour and trade union movement.

Most experts agree that Labour nationally has experienced its worst electoral defeat since 1983 when the party was led by the late Michael Foot.

Last month Labour managed to achieve 30 per cent of the vote, failed to gain 83 ‘target seats’ and even lost Labour-held seats to the Conservatives.

Thirty years ago Derek Hatton, perma-tanned, blinged up and sharp- suited, was Liverpool City Council’s charismatic deputy leader. A Labour Party member, but also the chief PR front-man for the secretive, Trotskyite ‘entryist’ group, the Militant Tendency.

Militant had its main power base was in Merseyside but it had a presence in Tyneside, too. In Newcastle it had its own HQ in the attic of a well known Westgate Road pub – its activities marked by the whirring of photo copying machines and the clacking of typewriters.

In a well-researched book investigative journalist Michael Crick, revealed that Militant was a party within a party with its own hierarchical organisation, membership and policy programme. It was an unaccountable clique which met secretly and had an army of paid full-time workers who far outnumbered the party they claimed to support.

For Crick, Militant was Britain’s fourth largest political party and arguably posed a major security threat to our democratic way of life.

From 1984 Neil Kinnock attempted to drag Labour into the late 20th Century. In his famous no-nonsense speech delivered at Labour’s annual Conference in 1985 he took on the “sectarians’’.

Many party members in Newcastle backed the move. In a gutsy newspaper piece, published in November 1985, we expressed our full support to Kinnock over his tough stance on the activities of the Militant Tendency both in Liverpool and elsewhere in the country. Our remedy spelt out in that article was a full scale purge of those party members who belonged to Militant. And in 1986 to 1987 thousands were expelled, including Derek Hatton.

Hatton at the time claimed that Militant was merely a newspaper. Evidence and experience told us this was far from the case. Militant was a ‘sect’ not unlike the Moonies.

If this wasn’t true, why didn’t the money given to Militant go into cash-strapped constituency Labour parties to support more full-time agents and campaigning? Hatton and his side-kick, fellow councillor Tony Mulhearn - now a Liverpool cabbie - derided Labour’s policies on unemployment, the economy and welfare as ‘’narrow and simplistic’’. Ordinary party members at the time were intimidated, and branded as ‘class traitors’, or simply dismissed as “right-wingers’’ and regarded with utter contempt.

Like other far left Trotskyite sects, Militant arrogantly clung to the belief that they were the sole custodians of an absolute socialist truth. The fact that their ideology of ‘Marxist-Leninism’ and their practice of ‘democratic centralism (we know best!) was firmly rejected by Labour in 1918 cut little ice with Militant’s leadership.

Militant had little in common with democratic socialism, social democracy or for that matter working people and their families.

As we pointed out if a significant section of working class people would not vote for a socialist programme in 1983 at the ballot box, how could you expect them to die for it on the barricades?

Had Militant seized control of the Labour Party, and in the unlikely event of it being elected, Britain would have been transformed into a Communist satellite state. With the fall of the ‘Berlin Wall’ in 1989, history has shown that working people live better in liberal-democracies than in so-called Socialist Republics behind the old Iron Curtain.

After the defeats of 1987 and 1992, many of us learnt important lessons. What Kinnock and the late John Smith began, and what Tony Blair succeeded in doing, was to modernise the Labour Party’s image and policy programme as the only real credible alternative to ‘Thatcherism’ with policies that were relevant to the changing British electorate.

That’s why Blair’s ‘New Labour’ won big in the 1997 General Election with a thumping 179 majority, repeated in 2012 with a 150 seat majority and again in 2005 with a workable 60 seat majority. Even Hatton came to realise this. He embraced ‘capitalism’ by reinventing himself as a businessman and PR executive.

Hatton tell us he’s a reformed character and no longer has any association with ‘hard left’ politics. An ‘enigmatic’, able, colourful individual , perhaps the time has come to reconsider ‘Deggsie’ for Labour Party membership (on a probationary period)?

Some believe, understandably, that he would be disaster reminding voters of Labour’s left-wing extremist past. Others take the view he could be an asset to the Party with his ‘peculiar talents’ to win over those lost five million blue-collar and white blouse voters who deserted Labour in their droves last month.

Stephen Lambert is a Newcastle City Councillor and contested Berwick Upon Tweed for Labour in 1987. He writes in a personal capacity.