Howling Down the Old Guard

Labor's new leftists advocate frightening doctrines "This government has got to be forced out of office!" cried a Young Socialist and self-professed "Trotskyite" at an anti-Thatcher rally earlier this winter. As the thunderous roar of approval died down, the frail, white-maned figure of Labor Party Leader Michael Foot stepped to the microphone. "Throw the government out!" yelled Foot. Then he cautioned: "But prepare to destroy at the ballot box."

Foot's message to the increasingly restive extreme of his party was the same then as it is now: cool it. But it is falling for the most part on deaf ears. Even Foot, a firebrand himself in his youth, has been overtaken by a new breed of militant British leftists. They are mostly youthful, largely middle-class ideologues who habitually spout Marx, Lenin and Trotsky but shun Soviet-style Communism. Combining pie-in-the-sky visions of a British Utopia with a pragmatic flair for nuts-and-bolts political organizing, they have driven a wedge deep into the 80-year-old Labor Party.

Divisive behavior on the part of Labor's extreme left is nothing new. In the '30s and again in the '50s, the far left went to the mat with the leadership, first over Depression-era economic policies, then over nuclear disarmament and state ownership of industry. But the extreme left has never come so tantalizingly close to dominating the party. Nor has Labor's future ever rested so firmly in the hands of such an unlikely and, to many Britons, scary lot.

A sampler of the policies being advocated by Labor's militant left:

>Withdrawal from NATO and unilateral nuclear disarmament. A resolution to pull out of NATO altogether was defeated at the annual conference in Blackpool last fall, but anti-NATO, anti-American sentiment runs strong. The party is already committed to opposing the deployment of American cruise missiles on British soil and to canceling Britain's $1.6 billion order with the U.S. for 64 Trident missiles. Far leftists also strongly oppose the Thatcher government's $12 billion program to modernize Britain's existing nuclear force.

>Withdrawal from the European Community. Britain's membership in the Community, say the leftists, has pushed up prices, cost thousands of British jobs and reduced the sovereign rights of Parliament. The militants resent the fact that Britain pays out large subsidies to support the economies of other Community countries. Some fear a Community grab to control Britain's energy policy and North Sea oil. The nation, they say, should look elsewhere for more profitable and sympathetic trading partners, including Communist bloc and Third World countries. According to a recent poll, 58% of the British public now agree that Britain's economy suffers because of Community membership.

>Nationalization of Big Industry. As the centerpiece of a planned economy, the militants would immediately nationalize Britain's top 200 corporations, including the banking, insurance and trucking industries. They also call for renationalization without compensation for any businesses that might be returned to private ownership by the Thatcher government. Militant theorists believe the free-market system is incapable of correcting the economic distortions created by stagflation. They view direct government intervention as the only way to put Britain back on a sound economic footing.

>Abolition of elite institutions. Labor has accepted a radical motion that would abolish Britain's storied private schools and the House of Lords. The radicals consider the House of Lords a prime symbol of the elitist British class system. One left-wing leader proposed a novel idea for its self-destruction: place 1,000 new barons in the House of Lords just so they could vote to abolish it.

"Everything that is outmoded or that will hinder our progress, and everything that can be used to maintain the power and privilege of the Tory establishment must be swept away," exclaims far-left M.P. Eric Heffer. Heffer, 59, rejects the old British maxim that "the Labor Party owes more to Methodism than Marx." His view is blunt: "Marxism has been a more powerful influence."

But the undisputed guru of the militant left is M.P. Tony Benn. A constant thorn in the side of Labor's parliamentary party, which comprises the elected M.P.s, Benn has held several Cabinet posts in Labor governments since he was first elected to the House of Commons in 1950. A handsome aristocrat who attributes many of his political ideas to the Bible, Benn became a favorite, if unanointed leader of the extreme left for renouncing his peerage in 1963.

Benn insists he is not a Marxist. Yet during the present crisis, he has uncritically supported militant maneuvering to expand the left's power. Not surprisingly, last week Benn was made a member of Foot's shadow cabinet. Says the man who became famous as "the reluctant peer": "The only time the leaders will take any notice is when those of us who put them where they are today also have the power to remove them."

The party's leadership is already dominated by moderate leftists who hesitate to discipline troublemakers. The 30-member national executive committee, for example, is controlled by its 19 leftist members, including Heffer and Benn. Four of the twelve major unions in the party vote consistently with the left. Of Labor's 635 constituency parties, the militants already control some 100 and carry weight in another 200.

The consequent impact of a mere 10,000 militant activists has been out of all proportion to their numbers. The heaviest hitters are the followers of Tony Benn and a loosely organized group of Trotskyites called the Militant Tendency. Militant Tendency runs its own weekly newspaper, maintains a full-time paid staff of 66 whose prime task is to recruit students to the cause, and controls some 2,000 regulars. Predicts M.T. Leader Ted Grant, 67, a balding South African-born revolutionary: "In another five to ten years the Marxists will have real influence in the party."

The secret of the militant left has been its patient cultivation of party members at the grass roots. Their technique? Simply to outlast and outtalk older party members. Under pressure from families or jobs, the elders are not as inclined as the militants to argue politics into the wee hours. Protests right-wing Dissident Leader Shirley Williams: "When the moderates resist, they are howled down.

There is a fascism of the left, just like the right." Similar tactics also won the militants considerable support among the unions, where they have had immeasurable help from the likes of Arthur Scargill, the combative Marxist president of the Yorkshire Miners, and Clive Jenkins, general secretary of the 500,000-member white-collar Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs. Widespread apathy among the rank and file has also made the militants' job easier. Individual party membership has dropped to about 220,000 from a high of more than 1 million in 1952.

The hard work and high rhetoric have paid off handsomely. The radicals have forced Labor to accept "reselection," a midterm performance review of M.P.s by their constituents. They have not only heavily influenced the party's manifesto, or platform, with their radical policies, but are pressing for more control over enforcement of party policy at the grass roots. When they wrested the privilege of selecting the party's leader and potential Prune Minister from the parliamentary party, many militants predicted their power play would one day be regarded as a kind of coup de grace against the moderates.

What conditions have fostered the radical transformation from the libertarian tradition of Aneurin Bevan to the hot-eyed radicalism of Benn and Scargill? Some believe that Britain's freewheeling, free-spending years under a succession of Labor governments raised illusory expectations for the young. Others think the party became devoid of serious ideas. "There was an ideological vacuum in the Labor Party," says Peter Shipley, a conservative expert on British revolutionaries. "Labor had come to a full stop. The extreme left claimed to have the answers and started to fill the vacuum." Says Alfred Sherman, director of Britain's conservative Center for Policy Studies: "The young have gone left because in Britain there is nothing to believe in any more. Not Christianity. Not the Empire. Not the old institutions." Former Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson, for one, is as wistful as he is angry about the change. "Nye Bevan," he muses, "would not be seen dead with this lot." qed

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