Peter Taaffe, whose group was thrown out of party by Neil Kinnock, praises Jeremy Corbyn and rejects entryist claims

Peter Taaffe, the veteran leader of Militant – the hard-left group pushed out of Labour in the 1980s and now renamed the Socialist party – expects to be readmitted to Labour if Jeremy Corbyn wins September’s leadership election.

Taaffe, who was a founding editor of the Militant newspaper and has remained active throughout the movement’s existence, said he had sounded out Corbyn indirectly, including through Mark Serwotka, the leader of the PCS union, about the possibility of reversing Neil Kinnock’s ban on Militant.

He said he had met Corbyn on a number of occasions over the years, and believed the leader would continue to open up Labour “to all strands of socialist and working-class opinion” and reject control by a “top-down, centralised elite”. He added: “The lava of this revolution is still hot.”

The Socialist party’s website reports that members have attended a number of rallies and meetings of Momentum, the grassroots movement set up to back Corbyn. Taaffe said his colleagues had received a warm welcome from some in Labour. “People say: you were a long time gone, welcome back.”

He said: “I know Jeremy, he’s a good bloke. He’s principled. He’s on the left.”

The Socialist party published an editorial on Tuesday which argued for a Labour split, even if it meant Labour was left with just 20 MPs. “The civil war, now it is out in the open, cannot be simply called off,” the editorial said.



“The worst response to Jeremy’s re-election would be to attempt to make peace with the Blairites. Many Labour supporters will fear that a split would weaken the Labour party. In fact the opposite would be the case.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Taaffe in this 1984 photograph is seen sitting to the right of Tony Benn during a speech. Photograph: Mail On Sunday/REX/Shutterstock

“True a Blairite split away would, at least initially, dramatically decrease the number of Labour MPs in Westminster. But a group of 40, or even 20 or 30, MPs who consistently campaigned against austerity and defended workers in struggle would do far more to strengthen the fightback against the Tories than 232 ‘Labour’ MPs, a majority who vote for austerity, privatisation and war.”

Taaffe has remained politically active throughout the decades since being expelled.

He hit back against the deputy leader Tom Watson’s claims that “Trotskyist entryists” were infiltrating Labour, saying: “I’m not sure whether Tom Watson was active in the Labour party when we were. He’s referring to entryists, but we were not entryists, we were born in the Labour party, and we were expelled because we fought Thatcher in Liverpool and defeated her.”

Instead, he said MPs who backed Tony Blair – who won three successive general elections for Labour – were “Tory entryists into the Labour party”.

Neil Kinnock’s purging of Militant, which culminated in a strongly worded conference speech in 1985 in which he berated the Militant deputy leader of Liverpool council, Derek Hatton, is regarded by many in Labour as a key moment in restoring the party’s electability, though it was another 12 years before it won a general election.

But Taaffe and his Socialist party colleagues still believe they should never have been thrown out. “We were the ones who mobilised people against the poll tax and brought down the Thatcher government,” Taaffe said. Of Kinnock and his colleagues, he said: “They thought by an administrative measure they could erase social forces from history.”

Militant was criticised for operating as a “party within a party”, but Taaffe said: “What’s the difference between us being affiliated to the Labour party, in an open and democratic way, and the Co-op party being affiliated?”

He said he saw Corbyn’s leadership, and the rapid increase in the size of the Labour party, as part of a global phenomenon that could not be halted by opposition among Labour MPs. “Nothing they can do will stop the winds of history as they’re developing at the moment.”

On Tuesday Corbyn’s campaign team condemned Watson for “peddling conspiracy theories” after he warned of “old hands twisting young arms” to shore up support for Corbyn.

Taaffe rejected the idea that Socialist party members were only interested in promulgating political revolution rather than winning parliamentary representation.

He pointed out that Militant had stood candidates in a number of elections, and its successor organisations had continued to do so, adding that the route to progress for the working classes was “not exclusively on the streets, or the industrial struggle – the parliamentary struggle is crucial”.

Taaffe’s intervention will alarm many in Labour who fear that veterans of struggles to deselect sitting MPs regarded as on the right of the party in the 1980s have been emboldened by Corbyn’s decision to shift Labour decisively to the left.

Corbyn’s allies have said they want to “circle the wagons” if, as expected, he wins re-election, and tempt back some of the Labour MPs who resigned from his shadow cabinet.

But Taaffe said he should resist the temptation to compromise on his commitment to anti-austerity policies. “The big mistake for Jeremy Corbyn would be to seek peace with these people,” he said.

“Jeremy Corbyn has said austerity is a political choice, not a necessity. That’s the Ark of the Covenant of the movement at the present time.”

Later a spokesman for Corbyn said the party’s policy on proscribed groups, including the Socialist Party, had not changed.

Militant history

The clash between the Labour party leadership and the far-left Militant faction was one of the definitive political battles of the 1970s and 1980s. Members of the Trotskyist group, which began as the Revolutionary Socialist League associated with the Militant newspaper, campaigned to get its members elected to key roles in the national Labour party in order to further its agenda.

Reg Underhill, Labour’s national agent, repeatedly tried to expel Militant in the late 1970s but the move was rejected by Labour’s national executive committee. Labour’s Young Socialist division was controlled by members of Militant by 1976, with a Militant member the party’s national youth organiser.

In 1982 the group was proscribed by the NEC for contravention of the party’s constitution, which said groups could not be affiliated if they had “programme, principles and policy for separate and distinctive propaganda”. Five members of the Militant newspaper’s editorial board were expelled from the party, along with many other activists over the following years. However, at its peak in the mid-1980s, membership numbered more than 8,000.

The faction’s biggest electoral success was in Liverpool, where the local party and city council were run by members of Militant who went on to set an illegal deficit budget in 1985, in defiance of party policy. The slogan of the local council was “Better to break the law than break the poor.”

With spending higher than income, the council was advised that it would be unable to pay staff wages by November that year, and Militant members decided to issue redundancy notices to every council worker, as a threat to the national government to increase the budget.

Speaking at the 1985 Labour party conference, Kinnock condemned the “grotesque chaos of a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers”. The Liverpool Labour party was suspended soon afterwards by the NEC.

Several Militant members were elected as MPs: Dave Nellist and Terry Fields in 1983 and Pat Wall in 1987. Fields was imprisoned for 60 days for non-payment of the new poll tax, a strategy promoted by Militant. The group was a leading organiser of demonstrations against the poll tax, and set up local and national anti-poll tax unions. Kinnock opposed the strategy of non-payment, famously saying: “Lawmakers must not be lawbreakers. I have always made that clear.”

In the early 1990s, Militant made formal moves away from the Labour party, setting up the independent Scottish Militant Labour and supporting candidates in Liverpool from a National Union of Students faction called Broad Left. In 1991, Militant declared itself a separate organisation under the name Militant Labour.

Of the Labour MPs who had been backed by Militant, Wall died in 1990, and Fields and Nellist were expelled from the party before the 1992 election. Both stood against the official Labour candidates but lost their seats.



After Tony Blair’s election in 1997, Militant Labour changed its name to the Socialist party of England and Wales.

• This article was amended on 11 August 2016. An earlier version said Terry Fields was expelled from the Labour party in 1991 and Dave Nellist was deselected. Both were expelled.