‘A different species’: the British Labour Party and the Militant ‘other’, 1979-1983

ABSTRACT

This article assesses the efforts that were made within the British Labour Party to isolate and exclude the Militant Tendency, a Trotskyite entryist group, during the period 1979 to 1983. It argues that the battle over whether or not Militant should be expelled from Labour was, primarily, a battle of metaphor and semantics. More specifically, it suggests that these years witnessed the successful construction of Militant as Labour’s unwanted and malignant ‘other’. Five central discursive motifs (medical, subhumanal, emotional, ideological, and historical) for ‘othering’ are identified. These motifs were operationalised in a systematic and sustained manner by individuals and groups who were hostile to Militant, such as the Labour Solidarity Campaign. Over time, Labour leader Michael Foot, who had, initially, been reluctant to take action against Militant, also adopted the language of this active and purposive rhetorical strategy. In response, Militant’s main counter-discursive strategy, the ‘witch hunt’ narrative, failed to shape party opinion decisively and prevent the initiation of exclusionary processes. By 1983, the pattern of interrelated discursive motifs for ‘othering’ that would be applied to Militant throughout the decade had been established: a hegemonic narrative, concerning the tendency’s imminent ‘threat’ to Labour, had permeated all levels of the party.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour
• Militant
• rhetoric
• othering
• factionalism

For one international observer, the pattern and nature of the language that was used to attack the Militant Tendency at the 1982 Labour Party Conference felt both striking and significant. Writing for the New York Times, Raymond Walter Apple Jr. noted the widespread and excessive use of metaphors to identify and condemn the supporters of this specific Trotskyite group. He wrote that ‘a parade of speakers described the Militants … as “cuckoos in our nest”, “parasites” and “a Frankenstein”.’ Apple continued his report by commenting on the level of discursive coherence and coordination that seemed to inform the sentiments that were being expressed: ‘All [of these speakers] agreed with John Spellar, a parliamentary candidate, who asserted that “Militant is killing us with the electorate, and the electorate will never trust us unless we rid ourselves of this alien body”.’¹ Given the level of attention afforded to language within this account, it is, perhaps, surprising that the role played by political discourse in the debates surrounding Militant’s position within Labour has largely been neglected in favour of an emphasis on organisational and procedural manoeuvres.² More generally, we still know relatively little about the way that British political parties, including Labour, have defined and isolated perceived internal ‘threats’ discursively.³ Therefore, in contrast to previous studies that have emphasised the organisational and procedural actions that were taken to exclude Militant, this article will suggest that the battle over whether or not Militant should be expelled from Labour was, primarily, a battle of metaphor and semantics. Militant’s fight to remain within the party was lost during the period 1979 to 1983 and it was defeated, above all, on linguistic terrain.

Labour and Militant, 1979–1983: an overview

Neil Kinnock’s 1985 Labour Party Conference leader’s speech and the vitriolic nature of the intraparty debate that surrounded the publication of the inquiry into the Liverpool District Labour Party in 1986 have become embedded in popular political memories of Labour in the mid-1980s.⁴ Here, the overriding perception has been that Kinnock—the ‘moderniser’ - took on Militant as part of a broader strategy to reform Labour’s image and make the party electable.⁵ Recently, Christopher Massey has argued that the failure of the Militant-infiltrated Liverpool City Council to set a legal budget and the resulting party investigation into Liverpool District Labour Party represented a pivotal moment in Labour’s ‘modernisation’ process. Massey has described how, during the 1985–6 period, the power balance within the party’s National Executive Committee shifted firmly in favour of Kinnock’s agenda and allowed for decisive action to be taken against nine influential Militant supporters in Liverpool, an outcome that engendered the start of the decline of Militant as a political force in Britain.⁶ In contrast to this emphasis on the significance of Kinnock-era developments, the left-wing nature of the party’s leadership and programmatic orientation between the 1979 and 1983 General Elections has made the attacks that were made on Militant in this period harder to fit into narratives of centrist ‘modernisation’. This situation has, to a degree, served to obscure the extent to which this significant aspect of internal party reform, often almost entirely associated with Kinnock’s leadership, was pursued and accelerated at an earlier stage. Nonetheless, Labour’s organisational efforts to expel Militant between the 1979 and 1983 General Elections have been assessed by a number of rigorous studies.⁷

The Trotskyite Militant Tendency (frequently referred to as ‘Militant’) was established by members of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) in 1964, an organisation whose 1962 constitution had explicitly committed it to the political tactic of ‘entryism’.⁸ Militant derived its name from its monthly newspaper. From September 1971, Militant was published and printed by Cambridge Heath Press Limited, a company that was named after the group’s Cambridge Heath offices in Bethnal Green, London, on a fortnightly and then weekly basis.⁹ Militant grew in strength throughout the 1970s and, increasingly, its newspaper was widely-sold at Labour gatherings. It was particularly successful in infiltrating the Labour Party Young Socialist movement, which it took over in 1970.¹⁰ As time went by, some of its supporters also obtained prominent positions in Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) and a small number were selected as Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs).¹¹As Kassimeris and Price have shown recently, Militant’s growing political significance was reflected in an increased level of interest from the Security Service (MI5) in the group’s activities within Labour and the ‘danger’ that these might pose to the British state.¹²

In the mid-1970s, Militant’s rise prompted Reg Underhill, Labour’s National Agent, to compile a report for the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC). Underhill detailed the depth and breadth of Militant’s organisational advance and the extent of its threat to Labour as a ‘party within a party’. However, although it was delivered initially in September 1975, successive versions of Underhill’s report were shelved by a left-leaning NEC.¹³ At the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, new evidence, received by Underhill, began to leak to the national press and the issue returned to the forefront of Labour’s politics. Yet, once again, substantive and immediate action was not forthcoming from a left-wing NEC, despite the fact that Militant was clearly growing in organisational strength.¹⁴

In late 1981, a hitherto reluctant Michael Foot, who had taken over from James Callaghan as party leader in November 1980, became convinced that procedural mechanisms to tackle Militant were required. Aided by a rightwards shift in political representation on the party’s NEC, an internal party inquiry into Militant was ordered.¹⁵ This inquiry was instructed to ‘provide a report on the activities of the Militant Tendency and whether these conflict with Clause II (3) of the Constitution of the Labour Party’, a clause which prohibited the affiliation to Labour of organisations with ‘their own Programme, Principles and Policy for distinctive and separate propaganda’.¹⁶ In a highly important development, reporting in June 1982, Ron Hayward (General Secretary) and David Hughes (National Agent) found the tendency to be in ‘conflict with Clause II Section (3) of the Party Constitution’ and recommended that Labour establish a prescribed register of non-affiliated organisations: Militant would be deemed ineligible for affiliation and the prescribed register would serve as a way to expel the group from the party.¹⁷ Despite opposition from the majority of CLPs, the trade union block vote ensured that the idea of a prescribed register was endorsed at the party’s annual conference.¹⁸ Nevertheless, this register was subsequently deemed unlawful by party lawyers, including a pre-parliamentary Tony Blair, who believed that it was both unconstitutional and violated principles of ‘natural justice’.¹⁹ What transpired then was, in essence, a decision to return to a limited version of a proscribed list of organisations not eligible for affiliation to the party, which had previously been abolished in 1973. Moreover, due to the political sensitivities and difficulties that surrounded the identification of Militant’s membership, the decision was reached to target the five key figures who formed Militant’s editorial board. Their expulsion was ratified by the Labour Party’s annual conference in 1983.²⁰ Whilst broader efforts to expunge Militant from Labour would not follow until later in the decade, the ejection of these significant Militant activists from the party in 1983 clearly represented an important development.²¹

Political language: discourse and rhetoric

The way that language constructs political ‘threats’ has been well-established. Particular attention has been paid to the role played by discourse in shaping moments of state ‘crisis’. Colin Hay’s work on the 1978–9 ‘Winter of Discontent’ emphasised that, rather than being an ‘objective condition’, ‘crisis’ is, instead, ‘subjectively perceived and hence brought into existence through narrative and discourse’. Central to such narratives are interpellations, reinforced by the media, which are rooted in the ‘dualistic counterposing of “us” and “them”.’²² Similarly, Jutta Weldes’ analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis has also shown that, as they are shaped by ‘discursively constituted identities’, ‘crises’ are highly dependent on the cultural context in which they are constructed.²³ Viewed through the conceptual lens of sociocultural construction, language, derived from the lexicon of group identities, or ‘us’, serves to give meaning to political events and situations, to the extent that the meaning becomes the event or situation itself and contemporary experiences are sculpted accordingly.²⁴ Moreover, ‘problematic’ events and situations that threaten collective cohesion and stability are interpreted through existing structures of knowledge and patterns of language that are, in themselves, socially predetermined.²⁵

Although the terms ‘discourse’ and ‘rhetoric’ will be used interchangeably in this article to include all forms of written and verbal communication, the emphasis placed on ‘rhetoric’ in recent political history studies perhaps reflects a conceptual shift away from overly-deterministic approaches to textual language, such as discourse analysis. Scholars have stressed the importance of recapturing the relationship between the ‘meaning’ of political texts and the ‘circumstances in which that text was delivered, mediated, and received’.²⁶ Rather than simply being predetermined by the sociocultural context in which it is articulated, political language, thus, retains a more fluid and malleable state that operates within the constant process of negotiation between rhetoric and reality. Seen in this light, whilst political discourse is, of course, conducted within existing linguistic structures and conventions, a greater degree of agency is afforded to individuals or groups of political actors and rhetoricians who wish to shape and reshape the way that events and situations are perceived and ‘to provide others with reasons for thinking, feeling or acting in some particular way’.²⁷ Ultimately, this means that, within political parties, rhetoricians can redefine the parameters of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the groups or individuals that might constitute a ‘threat’ in a way that is both instrumental and responds to contemporary developments.

The political ‘other’

An awareness of the ‘other’ has been perceived as a critical facet of human consciousness and central to the imagining of the ‘self’.²⁸ Furthermore, it has been suggested that this awareness is shaped by social and cultural signals, rooted in the language in which the ‘other’ is framed, that are received throughout the human life-cycle.²⁹ Yet ‘selfhood’ also exists in a relationship with the collective understandings that are held by the group (or groups) to which an individual belongs. These collective identities both determine and are dependent upon the external ‘cultures and values that are deemed “other”.’³⁰ In short, as William Connolly has put it, ‘Identity is relational and collective’ and external groups are often defined negatively to ensure the positive cohesion, legitimacy, and sustenance of the core group identity.³¹ Viewed in this context, language matters because the discursive construction of the ‘other’ or ‘other’ groups shapes the way that ‘we’ - defined by the groups that ‘we’ identify with—perceive and interact with the world, its inhabitants, and the objects within it. As they launch regular attacks on ‘other’ groups, the language of the political ‘other’ is, thus, central to the identities, orientations and trajectories of political parties.

The process of ‘othering’ can be overt and explicit, but it can also be subtle and implicit. The repetitive and exaggerated use of discursive tropes, metaphors, and stereotypes to identify specific groups as a ‘threat’ has been explored in depth in the historical and political literature on national identity and race relations.³² Chris Waters’ work has charted the way that the imagining of post-war British national identity ‘depended on reworking established tropes of little Englandism against the migrant other’.³³ Similarly, much of the literature on the recent rise of populism in Europe has focused on the systematic and overt racist ‘othering’ of groups who have been depicted as incompatible with and a ‘threat’ to perceived ‘Western’ cultural and societal values.³⁴ Yet, whilst the explicit tropes, metaphors, and stereotypes that form the framework of ‘othering’ can be readily identified, they exist in tandem with more subtle deployments of language, such as the way that the ‘Members of a “we” group may be identified by personal names more often than Others’.³⁵ Therefore, it is critical that, when identifying the language of political ‘othering’, a nuanced approach is adopted that interrogates both explicit and implicit forms of linguistic exclusion.

Strategies to ‘other’ Militant: discursive motifs

During the period 1979–1983, there were five core discursive motifs that were mobilised to depict the Militant Tendency as ‘other’ and a threat to party cohesion and success. Here, this article categorises these motifs as medical; subhumanal (by which I mean that subjects were assigned the characteristics of lifeforms perceived by the rhetorician as ‘less’ than human); emotional; ideological; and historical. Ultimately, as we shall see, these motifs were interrelated and, in many cases, symbiotic, but their repetitive and standardised deployment means that they deserve consideration as distinctive categories. Moreover, by categorising and applying a thematic lens to rhetorical attacks on Militant, it is possible to generate a greater sensitivity to the fluidity and malleability of the motif itself and to illustrate its responsive and adaptive nature as real-world events unfolded.

Before Labour’s 1979 General Election defeat, the way that the ‘threat’ of Militant infiltration was presented by its political opponents, both inside and outside of the party, lacked consistency and coherence. At this stage, to the extent that the topic received coverage at all, the language that was deployed alternated considerably between the functional and the extreme. In late 1975, with Reg Underhill’s report on Militant due to be discussed by the party’s NEC, ‘moderate’ Labour politicians offered somewhat non-committal assessments to the press that suggested that the issue raised questions about how ‘“we can maintain democratic selection inside the party in the face of what seems to be planned infiltration”.’³⁶ In contrast, at the same time, the right-wing media provided some sensationalist and inappropriate metaphorical analysis of the situation: the Daily Mail proclaimed that, with Militant on the agenda for a meeting of Labour’s executive, the NEC would ‘decide whether to resist the rape of its Social Democratic ideals by extremism, or just lie back and enjoy it’.³⁷ Unsurprisingly, given its highly objectionable nature, this was not a metaphor that was ever reused by Militant’s opponents in Labour.

Importantly, in the mid to late 1970s, the rhetorical distance that existed between these examples of mundane and outrageous language would stand in stark contrast to the more standardised and systematic ‘othering’ of Militant that would follow. Perhaps most significantly, the sporadic and uncoordinated metaphors originating from Labour’s right wing, which described Militant as, amongst other things, a ‘“bedsitter brigade”’, would soon be superseded by a much more coherent and unified discursive strategy.³⁸

Medical ‘othering’

In the months that immediately followed Labour’s 1979 General Election defeat, a number of MPs and activists who were hostile to Militant attempted to persuade Labour’s leadership that the tendency represented a ‘threat’ to the party’s organisational health and vitality. In metaphorical terms, they intimated that action was required because Labour was organisationally ‘sick’ and required ‘curing’. After he had been provided with new evidence of Trotskyite infiltration, Underhill placed considerable rhetorical pressure on the NEC to publish his report in full and he did so in a manner that meant the language of the medical ‘other’ became infused within the popular discourse surrounding Militant’s role within the party’s structures.³⁹ On 14 January 1980, Underhill’s quote that Militant ‘“are a cancer. They are a body inside the Labour Party with their own organisation, their own branches and their own paper”’ was widely reported.⁴⁰ The same day, the supportive left-wing Daily Mirror ran the frontpage headline ‘Militants in Takeover Plot: Labour’s hidden “Cancer”’ above an article by Joe Haines. ⁴¹ Haines was the paper’s political editor and had previously worked as Labour leader Harold Wilson’s press secretary. In such a manner, the link between Militant’s conspiratorial ‘party within a party’ status and Labour’s perceived organisational ill-health was established by Militant’s intraparty opponents and amplified by the national media. Here, it should also be noted that the direct and unflinching manner in which a ‘cancer’ metaphor was applied to Militant contrasted quite starkly with the more euphemistic attacks that had characterised much of Labour’s post-war discourse concerning the far-left.⁴²

The Labour Solidarity Campaign (LSC), which was formed in February 1981 and quickly became the most important grouping on the right of the party, played a central role in developing the narrative that Labour was suffering from a Militant-induced ‘illness’. Critically, the LSC extended the discursive link between Militant and Labour’s organisational ‘sickness’ to the party’s electoral maladies. Labour had been defeated decisively by the Conservative Party at the 1979 General Election. Following the ‘gang of four’ split in January 1981, the party lost moderate MPs and support to the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and it proceeded to suffer poor by-election results. On 19 June 1982, reflecting on his first speech for the LSC fifteen months earlier, Peter Shore noted that he had described how Labour had been ‘in a state of fever, a delirium, in which, in its rage and frustration, it was tearing only at itself and not at its political opponents’. Speaking on the day that the Hayward—Hughes inquiry into Militant had been published, Shore declared that ‘the fever is still there and the delirium too’.⁴³ The implications were clear: to relieve the ‘fever’ and increase the party’s political effectiveness and electability, the exclusionary recommendations made by the Hayward-Hughes report would need to culminate in Militant’s expulsion from Labour.⁴⁴ Within the LSC, Shore was certainly not alone in defining action against the Militant ‘threat’ in medical terms. Later in 1982, Roy Hattersley, who co-chaired the LSC with Shore, responded to Labour’s decision to adopt the prescribed register at the party’s conference in an analogous manner: ‘Very simply the Labour Party has begun to cleanse itself today’.⁴⁵ In this specific instance, Hattersley was, either knowingly or unknowingly, actually deploying a trope that had formed part of the rhetorical playbook that had been established by Labour elites in order to ‘other’ the hard left during the Second World War. Indeed, Andrew Thorpe has shown that, in 1943, the Communist Party’s ‘threat’ to Labour was articulated by Herbert Morrison in a way that stressed that Communist affiliation would make the party ‘unclean’.⁴⁶

Labour leader Michael Foot’s rhetoric was clearly influenced by the wider discursive environment that existed within the party. A clear distinction can be made between the different types of words that Foot was using to depict Militant across his first full calendar year as party leader in 1981. During this period, Foot modified and reshaped the key features and contours of his language on the Militant Tendency in a relatively short period of time. More specifically, Foot’s public discourse shifted from attacking Militant’s ‘methods’ to ‘othering’ the tendency in a more identifiably medical sense, albeit, at this stage, this occurred in a somewhat caveated fashion.

By the start of 1981, Labour politicians who were hostile to Militant had quickly grown frustrated at the moderacy of their new leader’s language. Even Foot’s most direct rhetorical attacks on the tendency—which, at the beginning of the year, included the idea that ‘“[Militant’s] activities should be highlighted and their methods denounced”’ – were deemed overly passive and insufficient in nature.⁴⁷ Yet, as 1981 progressed, Foot increasingly began to adopt and echo the language of ‘disease’ when discussing the tendency. Initially, this linguistic shift manifested itself via the application of a fairly tempered metaphor: to this end, on multiple occasions, Foot described the organisation as a ‘pestilential nuisance’.⁴⁸ Interestingly, with its deployment by a left-wing politician seeming to afford it an additional level of legitimacy, this metaphor would often be quoted by anti-Militant literature throughout the decade, even after Foot had left frontline politics.⁴⁹ Yet although Foot was, in effect, identifying Militant as a ‘pestilential’ sickness, he was, at the same time, via his depiction of the group as merely a ‘nuisance’, diminishing the necessity of taking immediate action. Here, Foot was, presumably intentionally and in order to convey oratorical gravitas by association, echoing the language of Winston Churchill’s famous depiction of Nye Bevan as a ‘squalid nuisance’ in a House of Commons debate in December 1945.⁵⁰ Foot, as a biographer of Bevan, would, almost certainly, have been aware of the similarities between his portrayal of Militant and Churchill’s quote.⁵¹ Wherever its linguistic inspiration lay, in November 1981, Foot’s tentative rhetorical approach manifested itself at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and he argued that ‘I have to be cautious about expulsions. Militant is a pestilential disease but surgery is messy’.⁵²

Foot’s initial reluctance to pursue the metaphorical medical ‘othering’ of Militant as a ‘disease’ to its logical conclusion that the party needed to be ‘treated’ can be explained by his previous experiences. Firstly, as he had demonstrated during his time as the editor of the left-wing Tribune magazine, Foot had always held a well-documented commitment to a level of political pluralism and open debate within the party. Secondly, Foot had played a significant role in establishing the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the late 1950s. CND was a politically-inclusive, albeit predominantly leftist, movement that brought together activists from a range of ideological backgrounds. In the early 1980s, in response to heightened Cold War tensions, it was undergoing a ‘second wave’ resurgence and this meant that the potentiality of pluralistic activism was at the forefront of Foot’s mind.⁵³ Thirdly, Foot had been a prominent figure within the party’s left-wing Bevanite faction, which, along with its leader Nye Bevan, had been subject to attacks from Labour’s right wing in the 1950s. All of these factors help to explain why Foot initially adopted a ‘cautious’ approach to Militant’s left-wing politics. Nevertheless, in late 1981, Foot was persuaded to establish an inquiry into Militant after ten senior MPs met with the Labour leader in his office and warned him of a further party split because Militant represented ‘“a deep cancer in the party”.’⁵⁴ It is also clear that, around this time, Foot was being placed under pressure by letters from Labour members that were reaffirming this type of language.⁵⁵ Even party members who were, ostensibly, hostile to ‘purging’ Militant, highlighted the accuracy and validity of Foot’s depiction of Militant as a ‘pestilential’ disease.⁵⁶

For the Labour leader, the publication of the Hayward—Hughes inquiry’s findings in June 1982 represented a critical turning point. From this moment onwards, Foot modified his language on the extent to which Militant represented a direct ‘threat’ to the party’s health and shifted to a more active rhetorical position. On 10 September 1982, in an important article in Labour Weekly, the party’s newspaper, Foot declared that he now believed that his ‘pestilential nuisance’ metaphor had been ‘putting it charitably’. A prescribed register was appropriate to combat Militant and act as a ‘remedy’ that could ‘guard against fresh outbreaks of similar sectarian disease in the future’.⁵⁷ Foot’s assessment of the Hayward—Hughes report indicated that he understood it to legitimise the type of language that had been circulating widely in the party. At a meeting of the PLP in December 1981, Alan Williams had proclaimed that ‘There was a sickness in the Party of Trotskyite infiltration … there were only months in which to save the party’.⁵⁸ Similarly, in March 1982, Gerald Kaufman had declared at a gathering of the Shadow Cabinet that Militant ‘was a poison in the party that had to be counteracted’.⁵⁹ It was in this discursive climate of sustained metaphorical medical ‘othering’ that the Hayward—Hughes report had been delivered and Foot’s position on the need to ‘remedy’ the Militant ‘disease’ had hardened.

Of course, these developments also need to be located in their wider political context. Whilst Labour had appeared divided and uncertain during the Falklands War that had occurred between April and June in 1982, at the same time, the public had responded positively to the Conservative Party’s unity and Margaret Thatcher’s direct leadership style. Thereafter, polling regularly suggested that support for Labour was declining amongst the electorate.⁶⁰ Given this worsening political environment, Militant’s opponents’ successful linkage of the idea of a Trotskyite-induced ‘sickness’ to an extended narrative, that stressed the potential impact that this affliction could have on the party’s future electoral performance, meant that the issue was always likely to become a greater source of concern for Labour’s leader.

Subhumanal ‘othering’

Due to the fact that it was, primarily, a political group that was structured around the publication and distribution of a newspaper, Militant had no official membership. As the NEC found repeatedly throughout the 1979 to 1983 period, this greatly complicated the legal and procedural identification of the tendency within Labour’s organisational structure.⁶¹ Furthermore, there was clearly a significant number of Labour members who, whilst not necessarily Trotskyites themselves, were sympathetic to much of Militant’s left-wing analysis of the failings of capitalism. Therefore, for Militant to be isolated and excluded, it was necessary to convince Labour’s rank-and-file that the tendency’s supporters were ‘different’ from ordinary Labour Party members. To this end, the Militant Tendency was often assigned either animalistic or insectile characteristics by its political opponents. This type of subhumanal ‘othering’ served as a mechanism by which to encourage party members (the ‘in’ group) to view Militant supporters (the ‘out’ group) as lesser entities. In turn, rhetorical degradation that lowered Militant’s relative status made it easier for exclusionary action to be taken. Of course, such language had historical precedents within Labour; for example, Nye Bevan’s description of the Conservative Party as ‘lower than vermin’ had received widespread coverage and notoriety in July 1948.⁶² It is also true that, during the period 1979 to 1983, Militant was not the only group that was ‘othered’ in Labour’s political discourse in a subhumanal manner. However, although the metaphors that were deployed were sometimes modified in a fairly similar fashion, the specific language that was directed at Militant was often highly targeted and related to the group’s perceived role within the party at this particular point in time. To take one example, whilst Scottish LSC material depicted the external SDP as a ‘hyena’ or ‘vulture’ that was circling Labour and ‘waiting for the kill’, it described Militant as parasitical ‘leeches whose power and prestige dwindles into insignificance when standing alone’.⁶³ In turn, this linguistic construction of the Militant Tendency contrasted with the rather more straightforward and nonmetaphorical ways that the LSC tended to attack the Labour Left. Indeed, when listing the groups that it perceived to be harming the party’s political fortunes, the aforementioned Scottish LSC pamphlet carefully discursively separated the Militant ‘leeches’ from Labour’s ‘Bennites’.⁶⁴ Elsewhere, the LSC’s approach to the Labour Left was to deplore its ‘lack of seriousness in facing major problems and devising major policies’ and to criticise the ‘whims and egos’ of its political figureheads, such as Tony Benn.⁶⁵

Subhumanal language that highlighted the covert ‘threat’ of Militant infiltration was particularly prominent in Labour’s internal debates. Most notably, a ‘cuckoo’ metaphor was deployed frequently to illustrate the perceived way that Militant had disguised itself within the Labour ‘family’ in order to achieve its nefarious political ends. When Richard Clements, who was the editor of Tribune, argued in January 1980 that no inquiry into Militant was required and that, instead, the tendency’s ideas should simply be challenged robustly, one letter writer to the paper noted mockingly that ‘It is as if the unfortunate host bird sought to persuade the intruding cuckoo that it really ought to behave like the rest of the nestings’.⁶⁶ This cuckoo metaphor was often repeated and extended in articles on Militant in the national press.⁶⁷ It was also very popular on the Labour Right. On the BBC’s Panorama show on 27 September 1982, which was televised in the aftermath of Labour’s conference vote to adopt a prescribed register, one especially combative exchange between Hattersley and Peter Taaffe, who was Militant’s editor and, therefore, expelled from Labour in 1983, involved the LSC’s co-chair declaring that it was ‘in 1960 that you decided your genuine beliefs could not stand on their own two feet, you decided to infiltrate the Labour Party and cuckoo in our nest’.⁶⁸ The same episode of Panorama had begun with footage of Roy Grantham, who was the General Secretary of the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff, declaring to conference that the inquiry’s report ‘opens the way to free this party from the cuckoos in our nest; to free us from those of a different species who wish to take us over’.⁶⁹

Although the Labour Right were particularly vociferous in their application of the subhumanal motif, the extent to which the non-Militant Labour Left also deployed similar tropes and metaphors to describe the tendency is highly interesting and illustrative of the degree of intraparty linguistic alignment and reciprocity that existed. To take one example, as early as 1977, the left-wing MP Ian Mikardo, whilst arguing that it was not possible ‘to stop to kick every dog that barks’ and thus expel Militant, noted that the ‘nearest thing to them [Trotskyite groups] is the amoeba’ due to the way that they often subdivided into further factions ‘ad infinitum’.⁷⁰ Nevertheless, a key rhetorical distinction must be made here: whilst the Labour Left tended to suggest that the subhumanal nature of Trotskyite groups and their ability to infiltrate and survive within the party was the product of pre-existing medical weakness and they outlined how ‘It’s much easier for a parasite to latch on to an anaemic, emaciated, lethargic body’, the Labour Right used similar metaphors to depict Militant as the cause of the party’s political illness. ⁷¹ Indeed, writing in Tribune in September 1982, Hattersley attempted to persuade left-wing Labour members that the mooted prescribed register would not represent a threat to their continued existence within the party and he stated that ‘Militant is a separate party that is a parasite on Labour. It is a rival organisation that lives off our vitality’.⁷² Here, as with much of the rhetoric that targeted Militant, the word ‘our’ operated implicitly in combination with more explicit forms of ‘othering’. Indeed, when articulated alongside subhumanal and medical metaphors that retained a level of cross-factional recognisability and availability, the word ‘our’ served a critical rhetorical function: it pulled both the Labour Left—the article was targeted at members of the left-wing Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) group—and the Labour Right into a collective Labour Party ‘in’ group and pushed the Militant Tendency into an alien ‘out’ group. This ‘in’ group/‘out’ group dynamic then served to legitimise exclusionary behaviour.

The aggressive subhumanal ‘othering’ of Militant formed part of a coordinated rhetorical strategy from the Labour Right to influence party opinion at critical junctures in the expulsion process. It was also the natural outgrowth of sentiments circulating in internal LSC communications that related to the strategic need to persuade the party of the threat posed by Militant by finding a ‘more emotive way of describing the presence of the Trot. cadre entrists’.⁷³ When, in late 1981, pressure was being placed on Foot to initiate an inquiry, Austin Mitchell, who was the LSC’s treasurer and a regular contributor to Labour Weekly, condemned the political ‘folly’ of ‘making the Labour Party fit for Militant or other termites to live in’, with the metaphorical implication being that the tendency’s supporters were undermining the foundations of any future electoral success.⁷⁴ However, this was a metaphor that, at this stage, seemed to aggravate more than resonate. Indeed, it served to trigger a lively discussion of which intraparty faction constituted the real ‘termites’ in a subsequent issue of Labour Weekly.⁷⁵ At other key moments, the Labour Right returned to articulating metaphors that were much more effective and readily understood across the party. Speaking at a widely-reported LSC fringe meeting the day before the key debate on the prescribed register at the 1982 Labour Party conference, both Shore and Hattersley adopted the language of parasitism when describing Militant. According to the Daily Express, whilst Shore ‘branded’ Militant ‘“a parasitic organisation”’, Hattersley extended the metaphor further by declaring that ‘“There are people … who have lived as parasites on the body of democratic socialism, [who] now believe that their best prospect is to live like carrion [sic] off the body of democratic socialism after they have done it to death”.’⁷⁶

Such language, once again reported and amplified by the national media (in this instance, the Express’s headline simply stated ‘PARASITES’ in capital letters), set the discursive climate for the conference debate that was conducted the following day. In a sense, it pre-empted and legitimised John Spellar’s widely-recorded proclamation from the conference podium that ‘What they [Militant] do not have a right to do is to live parasitically inside this democratic socialist party’.⁷⁷ Spellar was a PPC and a St. Ermins Group trade unionist who had played a central role in establishing the LSC.⁷⁸ Perhaps emboldened by the applause that was emanating from his audience, Spellar continued his speech by emphasising the level of metaphorical subhumanal ‘threat’ posed by Militant: ‘Parasites can live compatibly with some hosts, but some parasites will kill the body they live in—and Militant is killing us with the electorate’. In response, Labour conference provided the speaker with what was recorded in the annual report as further ‘Cheers’ and ‘Applause’.⁷⁹ By this stage, the subhumanal ‘othering’ of Militant ‘PARASITES’ had clearly become a pervasive feature of Labour’s intraparty discourse. Tellingly, in an editorial reviewing the conference, even the left-wing New Statesman, which had been highly critical of Labour’s attempts to expel Militant, openly condemned the tendency’s ‘strategy of living parasitically off the Labour Party’.⁸⁰

Emotional ‘othering’

Militant activists were frequently assigned stereotypical personality traits and emotional characteristics that were portrayed as abnormal and deviant. One of the most common discursive tropes revolved around the depiction of Militant supporters as ‘boring’ and regimented automatons. The idea that Militant’s supporters were particularly humourless and joyless gained political traction throughout the early 1980s and informed perceptions of Militant’s ‘threat’ to Labour’s collective emotional norms. In January 1980, with Underhill’s unpublished, but widely-quoted, report at the forefront of Labour political agenda, Patrick Wintour’s journalistic account of Militant’s capture of the LPYS in the New Statesman typified this emotional ‘othering’. In his article ‘The puritanical bores of the Militant Tendency’, Wintour highlighted Militant’s ‘dulling methods’, ‘turgid’ approach to politics, and ‘sterile attitude to youth’. He argued that the tendency’s stagnant emotional ‘puritanism’ had left it out of sync with the vibrancy of a new left-wing culture in Britain that celebrated diversity and was, increasingly, being drawn to issues concerning race, gender, and sexuality. In short, Militant’s ‘bores’ were alienating young Labour members who craved excitement and a fresh approach to politics.⁸¹ Wintour was not alone in adopting this kind of language. Two months later, Labour Weekly suggested that Underhill’s decision to distribute his report to CLPs represented ‘an effort to encourage those who he feels have been turned away from the party by the “boredom” initiated by Militant’.⁸²

Once again, the LSC played a prominent role in the construction of the Militant emotional ‘other’. In his speeches as LSC co-chair, Hattersley regularly highlighted ‘the tedium of Trotskyist diatribes’.⁸³ Furthermore, in its evidence to the Hayward-Hughes inquiry, the LSC declared that Militant’s organisational structure centred on the distribution of a ‘boring newspaper’.⁸⁴ More generally, as one letter to Labour Weekly noted, LSC leaders like Hattersley went to great lengths to suggest that Militant’s supporters were ‘not only politically undesirable but have some pretty unpleasant personal characteristics’ and that ‘instead of enjoying normal human pursuits like gardening’ they were ‘humourless fanatics [who] apparently spend all their spare time foisting their malign plans on passive, easily duped party and trade union committees’.⁸⁵ In turn, the perception that Militant’s supporters suffered simultaneously from both a lack of emotional empathy and a surplus capacity for tedium led to them being attributed machine-like characteristics by their opponents. Indeed, one of the most widely-quoted anti-Militant speeches at the 1982 party conference described the tendency as ‘an uncontrollable Frankenstein [sic] of programmed robots nibbling away at the very foundations of this great labour movement’.⁸⁶ Here, it should be noted that similar metaphors had, historically, been used to deride internal opponents within Labour; see, for example, Nye Bevan’s use of the phrase ‘desiccated calculating machine’ during the 1950s.⁸⁷ Yet, in the context of the struggle against Militant, such depictions were not simply about constituting ‘difference’: they related to genuine and tangible fears that the tendency’s supporters held such strange emotional norms and robust levels of ‘discipline’ that they could remain in party meetings long after other members had been ‘bored. into leaving’.⁸⁸ It was believed that, strategically, this high boredom threshold enabled Militant to shape the critical votes that were held at the end of Labour’s gatherings decisively.⁸⁹ In such a manner, the Trotskyite Left’s ‘tactical voting discipline’ was widely acknowledged by its political opponents as a source of great concern.⁹⁰ Moreover, Militant’s standardised and uniform approach to speech writing and delivery seemed to play a considerable role in providing the level of message discipline that ensured the tendency’s key ideas were communicated effectively to party audiences.⁹¹

At the same time, Labour commentators and politicians who opposed Militant were often quick to emphasise that the tendency was comprised of exceptionally angry and ‘intolerant’ individuals.⁹² Peter Shore talked about ‘reason’ being a casualty of the rise of Militant and Labour politics being conducted against a general ‘background of basic impatience [and] intolerance’.⁹³ Furthermore, the LSC literature on Militant also attempted to generate the impression that, when compared to other ‘honest supporters of the Labour Party’, the tendency’s supporters were ‘lying in their teeth’ and deceptive and ‘dishonest’ about their true organisational structure and political intentions.⁹⁴ Elsewhere, Hattersley suggested that Militant attended ‘“its own speaking school where the senior lecturer is Pinocchio”.’⁹⁵ These sentiments seem to have resonated: one PPC, who was a former member of the RSL, argued in Labour Weekly that this dishonesty represented a ‘direct threat to the myriad [of] more honest, organised left groups in the party’.⁹⁶ Another PPC put it more bluntly: ‘[Militant] eat up the moral fibre … of the Labour Party’.⁹⁷ The idea that Militant contained individuals who were both intolerant and deceptive and, therefore, represented a considerable ‘threat’ to Labour was also reinforced by the national press: one satirical poem in Punch, written from the viewpoint of a supporter of the tendency, described how ‘I also used to shout abuse and carry on alarmingly. But learned the trick … of always acting charmingly’.⁹⁸ Moreover, significantly, there were points at which this type of language manifested itself at Shadow Cabinet meetings. The impact of Militant’s dishonesty and its role as the ‘unpleasant and intolerant face of the Labour Party’ on the perceptions of the ‘ordinary Labour voter’ were discussed with disquiet.⁹⁹

When compared to other party members, Militant supporters were depicted as emotionally immature and mentally unstable: the ‘mad men of the left’ as the trade unionist Sidney Weighell scathingly put it.¹⁰⁰ Even prominent commentators on the left of the party denounced Militant’s ‘infantile revolutionary bletherings’.¹⁰¹ As one ‘London left-winger’ put it to the Financial Times, Militant’s supporters were ‘“a bit boring, the wrong class for some people and, you know, a bit odd”.’¹⁰² Evidence of this type of emotional ‘othering’ was also contained in the letters that Michael Foot received about the tendency from Labour members. A significant volume of this correspondence implored him to ‘cleanse our party of all the cranks and oddities who shelter under the Labour umbrella’ and to ‘act now against the trojan horse of the lunatic fringe’.¹⁰³

Herein lay a key discursive tension that, potentially, jeopardised the coherence and success of the emotional ‘othering’ of Militant. On the one hand, Militant’s supporters were portrayed as dull and humourless automatons who, if left unchallenged, would pursue their political objectives relentlessly, systematically, and rationally. On the other hand, the same individuals were characterised as mentally weak and prone to unstable, hysterical, and irrational behaviour. To a certain extent, efforts were made to square this tension by linking the tendency’s perceived organisational and behavioural uniformity to examples of collective emotional deviancy and cult-like behaviour; for example, Wintour wrote about how the tendency’s meeting ‘is usually not unlike a Billy Graham revival meeting’ with ‘hysterical 15 minute standing ovation[s]’ for Ted Grant (Militant’s Leader).¹⁰⁴ Likewise, in contrast to the ‘shades of difference’ that he believed existed in the rest of the party, Philip Whitehead MP condemned the ‘metronome Moonies of the Militant’.¹⁰⁵ Thus, in a sense, if Militant members were afflicted by ‘lunacy’, they were, as Hattersley would later put it, part of a very well-organised and ‘collective lunacy’ that was deemed a considerable ‘threat’ to the party.¹⁰⁶

Ideological ‘othering’

The final two discursive motifs for ‘othering’ Militant that this article will discuss—ideological and historical—were intrinsically linked. As we shall see, Militant’s opponents went to great lengths to establish a narrative of historical lineage that separated Labour’s traditions of democratic socialism from those of Trotskyism. Yet the presentist dimension of the construction of Militant’s politics as both ‘other’ and a ‘threat’ to Labour requires consideration in its own right. Although it is perhaps unsurprising that the Labour politicians and members who wished to see Militant expelled from the party emphasised the ideological differences that existed, the language in which ‘difference’ was articulated was significant and resonated within a broader understanding of Militant’s Trotskyism as ‘entirely alien to the concept of democratic socialism’.¹⁰⁷ To this end, the tendency’s ideology was regularly condemned in severe metaphorical terms and depicted as, amongst other things, the product of ‘The Leninist school of Marxism and its ugly mutation Trotskyism’.¹⁰⁸

Throughout the 1979 to 1983 period, the Labour Right consistently made the point that Militant’s advocation of revolutionary extra-parliamentary action conflicted with and threatened Labour’s commitment to parliamentary democracy. This ideological ‘othering’ was often conducted in combination with the discursive motifs that this article has already discussed: in 1981, one particularly influential Fabian Society pamphlet concluded that Labour’s hope for electoral victory might be ‘set back for a very long time’ by the ‘degrading and inhuman ideas of political Marxism, the totalitarianism and the intolerance, the acceptance of violence, [and] the glorification of conflict’.¹⁰⁹ Similarly, when the Shadow Cabinet was reflecting on Labour’s Glasgow Hillhead byelection defeat in March 1982, Shore attempted to place Militant in an ideological ‘out’ group by attributing considerable blame to a speech that had been made by Pat Wall, who was a key figure in Militant and had been selected as a parliamentary candidate in Bradford North, in support of the legitimacy of revolutionary struggle and violence. Shore was recorded as declaring that ‘Wall’s speech “blood in the streets” was the worst since Enoch Powell’s “Tiber flowing with blood” speech. People who expressed these views were not a part of his, Peter Shore’s, Labour Party’.¹¹⁰ To a certain extent, Shore was also, perhaps, drawing upon contemporary narratives, which were more prominently expressed by the media and Labour’s political opponents than within the party itself, that attempted to link Militant to episodes of civil disorder in the early 1980s, such as the 1981 riots in Brixton in Toxteth.¹¹¹ Elsewhere, Militant’s heightened ideological vitriol and its revolutionary zeal were portrayed by the LSC as deviant and strange when compared to ‘ordinary members … who do not want to sit for hours in the full fervour of revolutionary socialism … when they could be down the pub’.¹¹² Once again, this ideological ‘othering’ seemed to reached its apotheosis in the 1982 conference debate with Roy Grantham’s proclamation that ‘Yes, Militants are a different species … They support a Trotskyist revolutionary philosophy and the creation of a Bolshevist leadership. It is to further those alien undemocratic ideas that they have carved out their entryism’.¹¹³

More often than not, Labour’s commitment to political pluralism was contrasted with Militant’s singular and dogmatic approach to ideological debate. This analysis sometimes had cross-factional origins and resonance: in his 1977 article in Tribune, Mikardo emphasised that, unlike Labour, Trotskyists ‘pursue their heretics with the fanatic, merciless dedication of a Torquemada’.¹¹⁴ Elsewhere, it was noted that Militant’s ‘fanaticism’ led to a ‘world’ that ‘contains no light and shade’ and allowed for no divergence of opinion.¹¹⁵ Of course, such portrayals risked raising potential paradoxes and contradictions when the ‘threat’ of Militant’s ideological ‘otherness’ was understood to override Labour’s commitment to internal political discussion and pluralism. Indeed, when he was intervening in the national media discussions surrounding Underhill’s report in late 1979, the politically-moderate trade unionist Frank Chapple suggested that Labour drew its strength from its ‘broad church’ approach to politics, but he also declared that ‘neither, to continue the metaphor, do I think that a broad Church can admit atheists’.¹¹⁶ In the event, this was, more or less, the position that Michael Foot had reached by mid-1982. Foot had received letters from Labour members who argued that ‘The tone of [Militant] pamphlets and the mentality of those who believe in them and idolise Trotsky are plainly alien to democratic socialism’.¹¹⁷ Under pressure from elements of his party, he had become increasingly convinced that there was no ideological room for an organisation like Militant in a ‘party determined to remain truly democratic and tolerant and liberal in its proceedings’.¹¹⁸ Clearly, this was a position that was at odds with legally-informed NEC documents that stated that the ‘test of acceptability is not ideological … but organisational’.¹¹⁹ Instead, Foot’s own words suggested that Militant’s ideological ‘otherness’ represented a critical component of the tendency’s ‘threat’ to Labour and, thus, legitimised their expulsion.

Historical ‘othering’

Systematic and rigorous efforts were made to separate Militant’s political ideology from Labour’s understanding of its own past. In 1982, when responding critically to Tony Benn’s argument that Trotskyites should be ideologically accommodated within Labour, Shore declared that ‘Marxism-Leninism is a political tradition that has absolutely no place in the history of the Labour Party’.¹²⁰ Here, Shore was drawing upon exclusionary historical narratives that had been developed in an extensive body of LSC material in the early 1980s. Much of this literature was written with the central aim of providing a robust and authentic framework for persuading Labour’s membership that Militant represented a historical ‘other’ and a ‘threat’ to the party’s democratic and parliamentary traditions.¹²¹ As Shore put it, Labour needed to ‘define’ its political ‘frontier’ in a way that isolated those ‘who simply do not share the basic principles on which the Party is founded’.¹²² In contrast to Labour’s rich and vibrant democratic lineage with its historical ‘roots … in the free trade union movement’, Militant’s ideology was portrayed by the LSC as historically separable because it had ‘never deviated in any significant respect from the ideas of Leon Trotsky expressed by him in the course of the Russian Revolution … frozen at the point of time when Trotsky was assassinated by Stalin [in 1940]’.¹²³ This kind of historically-oriented analysis was particularly prominent in the LSC’s submission to the Hayward-Hughes inquiry.¹²⁴ Moreover, notions of Militant’s historical ‘otherness’ were often reinforced by the LSC via widely-reported rhetoric that emphasised the ideological ‘threat’ that Militant posed to the sanctity of Labour’s 1918 Constitution.¹²⁵

Increasingly, a sense of Militant’s historical separateness permeated discourse at all levels of the party. It was reflected in the letters from LSC supporters that were published in the group’s Labour Solidarity magazine: ‘the existence of the Militant tendency … [has] nothing to do with the Labour Party that has given us universal suffrage, the welfare state, comprehensive education and free trade unionism’.¹²⁶ Yet it was also articulated in the correspondence that Michael Foot received from party members that implored him to protect Labour from ‘infiltrators’ who wished to ‘destroy the traditional democracy of the Labour Party’.¹²⁷ This material, couched in the language of immediate ‘threat’, was often highly vitriolic in nature: one letter writer instructed Labour’s leader to hold ‘a complete purge of all undesirable organisations and persons and bring the Labour Party back to the quality of a period from its foundation to the end of World War II’.¹²⁸

By late 1982, with the move to expel Militant gathering pace, it was clear that a moderated version of this type of historically-informed understanding of imminent ‘threat’ had achieved a level of acceptance within the party, even amongst those who described themselves as left-wingers.¹²⁹ This acceptance had been solidified by the Hayward-Hughes report’s findings that Militant was in contravention of the wording of Clause II Section 3 of the party’s constitution, a rule that had been implemented in 1946 as a mechanism to prevent Communist affiliation.¹³⁰ Significantly, by the time of Foot’s speech on Militant at Labour Party Conference on 27 September 1982, the idea that ‘It is our constitution, given to us by our forebears, that has served us at such moments of strain, and we have a duty to protect it now’ had become central to the Labour leader’s rhetoric.¹³¹ Furthermore, in one televised interview that followed the conference, Foot declared that ‘the Militant Tendency seeks to impenetrate the Labour Party with policies which are anti-democratic, opposed to our traditions, opposed to our socialist traditions’.¹³²

Inevitably, Militant contested the validity of this historical ‘othering’. Somewhat ironically, given their proclivity for Leninist ‘democratic centralism’, they responded to the annual conference’s ratification of the prescribed register by inverting the criticisms that the tendency faced and describing the organisational mechanism that had been adopted as an ‘attempt, in fact, to introduce into the Labour Party the methods of bureaucratic centralism, methods which are entirely alien to the democratic traditions of the labour movement’.¹³³ At other times, in an attempt to dispel the notion that they were unattuned to Labour’s political heritage, Militant activists made a considerable effort to stress their historical-mindedness and sensitivity to the party’s collective nostalgia.¹³⁴ To take one example, in June 1982, Pat Wall was, following a rerun of the party’s selection procedures in response to ‘allegations of irregularities’, voted in, once again, as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Bradford North.¹³⁵ Speaking to the Guardian, Wall was keen to emphasise how proud he was to be standing in Bradford where Keir Hardie, who had gone on to play a central role in the founding of the Labour Party, had been a candidate for the Independent Labour Party in 1896. Wall promised publicly to ‘reprint Hardie’s election address, verbatim, and sign it’ if he was endorsed by the NEC.¹³⁶

There were also a number of politicians on the CLPD Left of the Labour Party who, although not aligned with Militant directly, challenged the historical ‘othering’ of the tendency and stressed the role that had been played by figures sympathetic to Marxism in Labour’s past. Whilst this group was led by Benn, it also included other senior figures within the party, such as Frank Allaun MP, who commented sarcastically that ‘We are told that they [Militant] hold Marxist discussions. Dear me! That’s going too far. Aneurin Bevan would have been terribly shocked to hear it—not to mention George Lansbury or Fred Jowett of Bradford, a former party chairman’.¹³⁷ Nevertheless, this rhetoric was comparatively ineffective in shaping Labour’s trajectory. By late 1982, the party’s NEC was producing documents that were mobilising Nye Bevan quotes against Militant and promoting narratives that served to ‘other’ the tendency historically.¹³⁸ Undoubtedly, this material was indicative of the way that LSC-led narrative had emerged victorious: Militant had been successfully separated from the broader Labour Left and pushed decisively into a historical ‘out’ group. Accordingly, when the NEC’s John Golding was presenting the case at the 1983 Labour Party Conference for expelling the five members of Militant’s editorial board, he was quick to emphasise that the Labour Left had a ‘place within the tradition of the labour movement’ in a way that Militant did not.¹³⁹ More generally, in line with the motif of emotional ‘othering’ that was noted earlier, there was a sense that, in any case, Militant’s historical analysis could simply not be trusted and that the tendency was prone to manipulating and distorting the past. In September 1983, the party publication Labour Weekly noted, only half-jokingly, that a banner at a Militant rally, which had, on its one-hundredth anniversary, erroneously attributed the year of Karl Marx’s death to 1881 (not 1883), had served to bolster ‘Rumours that Militant supporters are rewriting history’.¹⁴⁰

Counter discourse: the ‘witch hunt’ narrative

Throughout the 1979 to 1983 period, Militant’s supporters claimed that the tendency was the victim of a ‘witch hunt’. This was Militant’s central counter-discursive strategy and its mobilisation was characterised by linguistic uniformity and repetition. To this end, during these years, the vast majority of articles and speeches that Militant’s supporters produced deployed the ‘witch-hunt’ metaphor to attack individuals and groups, such as the LSC, who were advocating their expulsion from the party. In order to lobby the party leadership, letters and telegrams were sent to senior party figures, like Foot, containing standardised and, seemingly, coordinated language that condemned the ‘witch hunt’ unequivocally.¹⁴¹ The more Militant felt threatened, the more consistently and vigorously the ‘witch hunt’ metaphor was expressed. Following the Hayward-Hughes report, in every weekly edition of its newspaper, Militant even began to implore readers to ‘send cash to fight [the] witch-hunt’.¹⁴² By the time of the 1983 Labour Party Conference, this metaphor had become critical to Militant’s rhetorical efforts to persuade Labour members that they should not be ejected from the party: the members of Miltant’s editorial board who faced expulsion used the phrase repeatedly and an alternative composite motion calling for ‘an immediate end to all witchhunts’, although unsuccessful, was debated by delegates.¹⁴³

The ‘witch-hunt’ narrative had a number of interrelated rhetorical components. Supporters declared that Militant’s ‘threat’ to Labour was being exaggerated deliberately by the Labour Right. This was linked to the idea that attacks on Militant were part of a broader ‘witch-hunt’ against the Labour Left and central to a wider strategic powerplay to ensure right-wing control of the party. Within Labour, this claim was largely endorsed by, amongst other hard left groups, the CLPD. Writing in Labour Weekly, Frank Allaun mixed his metaphors and argued that the Labour Right’s ‘hunters were after bigger game’ than Militant.¹⁴⁴ Elsewhere, the idea that a more expansive ‘witch hunt’ was being conducted was reinforced by the pseudo-conspiratorial suggestion that there were figures on the Labour Right, such as the LSC, who were coordinating their attacks with and working alongside right-wing national media outlets.¹⁴⁵ Moreover, Militant’s ‘witch-hunt’ narrative was often supported via the articulation of historical antecedents that indicated that Labour had been through all of this before. Alongside references to the Zinoviev Letter and American-style McCarthyism, the fact that Labour had, in the past, expelled a number of totemic left-wing political figures was referenced to generate the sense that history was repeating itself. ¹⁴⁶ Indeed, on the day that the Hayward-Hughes report was due to be published, Militant’s Peter Taaffe was keen to pre-empt any criticisms by claiming that, within Labour, ‘There was a long and honourable tradition of defiance, including such Labour heroes as Aneurin Bevan and Sir Stafford Cripps [who were both expelled for a brief period in 1938]’.¹⁴⁷ At other critical moments, Militant drew direct historical parallels with the attacks that were made on Labour’s Bevanites in the 1950s: the register was described as a return to ‘the system of right-wing thought-control which existed in the party in 1950s and early 1960s’ in a way that played on the pre-existing fears of left-wing members.¹⁴⁸

Despite its prominence in Labour’s intraparty debates, by 1983, the ‘witch-hunt’ counter-narrative had been largely unsuccessful. It had failed either to persuade party elites that no action should be taken against the tendency or to move party sentiment decisively in favour of Militant in a way that might have forced Labour’s leadership to review its position on expulsions. There were five main reasons why this was the case.

Firstly, above all, the discursive motifs for ‘othering’ that this article has outlined served to construct the Militant ‘threat’ in a much more rigorous and systematic manner and nullified the effectiveness of counter-rhetoric. Moreover, this discursive construction enabled and was, also, bolstered by procedural developments; most notably, the Hayward-Hughes report’s findings that the tendency was in violation of the party’s constitution. This meant that, across the period, a shift in the party’s willingness to accept and adopt Militant’s ‘witch hunt’ narrative was evident. In 1980, Labour Weekly - Labour’s own inhouse newspaper—ran the frontpage headline ‘NO WITCH HUNT’.¹⁴⁹ Yet, by December 1982, it was making jokes about the same metaphor and providing a satirical Christmas game for its readers entitled ‘Witch hunt: the game nobody plays’.¹⁵⁰

Secondly, there was a sense that the ‘witch-hunt’ metaphor was being applied inappropriately. Militant’s opponents suggested that it represented ‘a terrible abuse of the English language’.¹⁵¹ Furthermore, the LSC put a considerable amount of effort into addressing and undermining the ‘witch-hunt’ narrative directly.¹⁵² This strategy seems to have worked: Labour members often noted that the phrase was divorced from the reality of the situation that the party faced. One letter writer to Labour Weekly attacked Militant supporters for their resort to ‘innuendo, cliché, metaphor and even insult’ and stated that ‘witches do not exist, but Trotskyites do’.¹⁵³ Another party member claimed that the metaphor was an ‘emotive’ diversionary tactic that was designed to draw attention away from the ‘irrefutable facts’.¹⁵⁴ Ultimately, this meant that, once Michael Foot had decided to act, the reality of Militant’s behaviour meant that the Labour leader was able to invert the ‘witch hunt’ metaphor with relative ease. Militant, Foot argued, had ‘sometimes used its organisation to start witch hunts against individual MPs, local councillors and quite a number of properly elected office holders in the party’. He went on to note, somewhat sardonically, that ‘If the Militant Tendency itself had been opposed to witch hunts of any kind, much of the present trouble would never have arisen’.¹⁵⁵

Thirdly, the fact that Foot was from the party’s left-wing Bevanite faction served to undermine the more historically-oriented aspects of the ‘witch-hunt’ narrative. It is true that, initially, Foot’s own past experiences shaped his reluctance to expel members.¹⁵⁶ However, at the NEC meeting to discuss the Hayward-Hughes report in June 1982, Foot dismissed the idea of historical parallels and argued that ‘The charge was different against himself and Nye Bevan. Militant was a party and they were not’.¹⁵⁷ Later that year, at Labour’s annual conference, Foot received widespread applause for delegitimising Militant’s arguments and declaring that ‘There was no secret conspiracy with Stafford Cripps or Aneurin Bevan; they wanted everybody to know what they were doing’.¹⁵⁸

Fourthly, the lack of rhetorical creativity inherent in Militant’s constant and repetitive deployment of the ‘witch-hunt’ phrase devalued the effectiveness of the metaphor and played into the hands of the type of ‘metronome Moonies’ accusations that were noted earlier in this article. As John Gastil has shown, whilst the repeated use of ‘political metaphors can cause the listener to make unconscious assumptions about the relationship of the two phenomena under comparison’, the overuse of these metaphors can also be problematic for the mobiliser.¹⁵⁹ Moreover, the ‘witch hunt’ metaphor itself sometimes seemed to trigger and facilitate supernatural imagery in a way that was counterproductive to Militant’s rhetorical agenda. Reporting for the BBC on the outcome of the 1982 party conference debate, Fred Emery described how ‘if it’s not the start of a witch-hunt … there has been a whiff of political exorcism today. The Labour leadership … has become haunted by the thought that voters are being scared off Labour’.¹⁶⁰

Fifthly, Militant’s efforts to encourage Labour members to believe that the attempts to expel it were part of a broader ‘witch-hunt’ against left wingers actually worked against the tendency’s immediate political interests. Indeed, when there was a willingness amongst people on the non-Militant left of the party to adopt this narrative, this meant that the tendency lost ownership and control of the metaphor. This situation was nowhere more clearly illustrated than by the split that occurred between the Labour Left’s ‘Labour Against the Witch Hunt’ and Militant’s ‘Labour Steering Committee Against the Witch Hunt’ in November 1982.¹⁶¹

Conclusion: discursive patterns/discursive flows

This article has assessed the nature, development, and significance of the discursively-constituted ‘threat’ that a range of political actors argued that the Militant Tendency posed to the Labour Party. In doing so, it has attempted to provide linguistic context and depth to previous studies of the organisational and procedural developments that occurred between 1979 and 1983. Without a doubt, Militant’s Trotskyite ideology, its ‘party within a party’ status, and its degree of organisational success presented an elevated level of political peril for Labour in a very real and substantial way. Militant represented a tangible other to Labour in the sense that it was a separate organisation, with a commitment to entryism, that violated the party’s constitution. Yet it was not until Militant was identifiably and routinely assigned the characteristics and features of a discursively-constituted ‘other’ that the tendency became more widely accepted as a danger to the party. In such a manner, the tendency had to be both articulated and interpreted as a ‘threat’ for action to be taken against it, particularly in a Labour Party that was, initially, largely sceptical of the need for expulsions. What emerged, then, was a pattern of clusters of rhetoric that were unified by and gave coherence to the overarching notion that Militant represented Labour’s malignant ‘other’. This pattern grew more pronounced throughout the period and, ultimately, the discursive climate that surrounded Labour developed in a manner that legitimised and facilitated substantive action against Militant. Perhaps just as significantly, this pattern also provided the rhetorical template that would be applied during the more extensive efforts to exclude Militant that would take place later in the decade.

The Militant ‘other’ was culturally constructed in the sense that there was an interplay between various levels of party and non-party discourse that served to generate an increasingly hegemonic narrative concerning the tendency’s imminent ‘threat’ to Labour. To this end, although there is no evidence to support the more conspiratorial claims that were made by left-wingers who suggested that action was coordinated, the Labour Right and the national media clearly existed in a mutually-beneficial discursive relationship. Whilst the Labour Right’s hyperbolic metaphors for ‘othering’ provided the media with sensational headlines and content, the press’s dissemination of this material to a broader audience, which included Labour members, supported the Labour Right’s rhetorical agenda. It was also the case that discourse flowed in a circular and symbiotic manner throughout the Labour Party. Party elites constructed the Militant ‘other’ both verbally and in writing in a way that shaped Labour’s internal discussions. In turn, the same language was mobilised by non-elites in letters’ pages and private correspondence in a way that placed pressure on senior figures, including Foot, to reciprocate linguistically. As this article has highlighted, although the topic represented contested discursive terrain, when it came to the Militant ‘other’, there was also a level of shared metaphorical interaction and understanding that existed across Labour’s political factions.

This series of two-way linguistic flows could be understood to represent a snowball-like process whereby the language of the Militant ‘other’ became predetermined and all-pervasive within Labour. However, such a conceptualisation would deny individual party actors the rhetorical agency that they manifestly possessed. To various degrees, Militant’s opponents, who included Underhill, figures within the LSC, and, belatedly, Michael Foot, adopted active and purposive strategies that shaped the nature of the linguistic dynamic that existed within the party. Furthermore, the discursive ‘othering’ of Militant was at its most successful when a clear relationship between rhetoric and reality existed; for example, the language of ‘parasitism’ was particularly effective because it was widely understood to reflect Militant’s ‘party within a party’ status. Similarly, tangible real-world events, such as the publication of the Hayward-Hughes report, encouraged and allowed party figures—most notably, the Labour leader—to modify their rhetorical positions in a way that made Militant’s exclusion more likely. More broadly, although it shared a degree of lexiconic correlation with previous historical efforts to ‘other’ hard-left ‘threats’ within the Labour Party,¹⁶² the specific pattern of the language that was adopted to attack Militant was shaped markedly by contemporary circumstance. Indeed, when combined with the significant issues that were serving to frustrate Labour’s ability to isolate Militant’s supporters organisationally, the sense of urgency that underpinned the perceived need to reverse the tendency’s ‘infiltration’ of the party culminated in the creation of a particularly systematic, pronounced, and aggressively-applied framework for rhetorical ‘othering’.

Around one-tenth and one-third of CLPs voted to take action against Militant at the 1982 and 1983 Labour Party Conferences respectively.¹⁶³ Labour’s leadership relied on the union block vote to push through its exclusionary agenda. Although they are complicated by uncertainty surrounding the level of Militant influence on conference delegates at the time, these numbers have sometimes been understood to reflect a limited willingness amongst party members to eject the tendency from Labour’s ranks.¹⁶⁴ Nevertheless, when viewed in a different light, the same statistics also indicate that a clear trajectory had been established towards Militant’s exclusion. Moreover, a historical evaluation of Labour’s internal discourse during the period 1979 to 1983 highlights how Militant became increasingly isolated and viewed as Labour’s unwanted ‘other’. To this end, the pattern of interrelated discursive motifs that would enable Labour to eject Militant had been successfully and, perhaps irreversibly, established by the tendency’s opponents. Tellingly, by late 1982, Neil Kinnock, who would become Labour leader within a year, was receiving letters from party members that read: ‘I plead with you and all your comrades to increase the fight to rid the Labour Party of the cancer of Militant’.¹⁶⁵

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Richard Toye and Mark Wickham-Jones for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Raymond Walter Apple Jr., ‘British Labourites move against Left: Party approves plan to Purge’, New York Times, September 28, 1982, A7.

2. The classic account remains Crick, Militant.

3. Focusing on an earlier period in Labour’s history, one notable exception here is Thorpe, “Locking out the Communists.”

4. Neil Kinnock, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1985, 120–129; Labour Party, Investigation into the Liverpool District Labour Party. For more on Militant in Liverpool, see Pye, “Militant’s Laboratory.”.

5. For more on this, see Smith, “Neil Kinnock and the Modernisation of the Labour Party,” 557.

6. Massey, “The Labour Party’s Inquiry”.

7. For example, see Shaw, “The Labour Party and the Militant Tendency”; Massey, “The Militant Tendency”.

8. Massey, “The Militant Tendency,” 239.

9. See Crick, Militant, 116–117, 141–144; Massey, “The Militant Tendency,” 241. In 1985, “Cambridge Heath Press Limited” was replaced as the listed printer by “Militant Publications”.

10. Shaw, “The Labour Party and the Militant Tendency,” 181.

11. For a contemporary study of Militant’s influence in the early 1980s, see Paul Whiteley and Ian Gordon, “Middle class, Militant and Male,” New Statesman, January 11, 1980, 41.

12. Kassimeris and Price, “A New and Disturbing form of Subversion,” 363.

13. See diary entry for 17 May 1977 in Benn, Conflicts of Interest, 140.

14. Healey, The Time of My Life, 169; Straw, Last Man Standing, 144.

15. Labour’s NEC devoted a considerable amount of time to the Militant issue after 1981, see Wickham-Jones, Economic Strategy and the Labour Party, 166.

16. Labour History Archive (hereafter LHA), Manchester, Michael Foot Papers, MF/L14, National Executive Committee, “Militant Tendency Report,” June 23, 1982, 1.

17. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, NEC, “Militant Tendency Report,” 3.

18. Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 52.

19. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, Alexander Irvine and Anthony Blair, “Opinion,” January 7, 1983.

20. Labour Party, LPACR 1983, 66.

21. Massey has stated that “these expulsions were not followed with an immediate purge of Militant members from the Labour Party and left Militant’s constituency organisation, particularly its stronghold in Liverpool, largely untouched.” See Massey, “The Labour Party’s Inquiry,” 301.

22. Hay, “Narrating Crisis,” 255, 268.

23. Weldes, “The Cultural Production of Crises,” 40.

24. See Hay, “Chronicles of a Death Foretold,” 456.

25. See Hall, “Encoding and Decoding,” 259.

26. Toye, Rhetoric, 4.

27. Finlayson and Martin, “It Ain’t What You Say…,” 450.

28. See Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 3.

29. See Lacan, Écrits, 76.

30. See Kenny, The Politics of Identity, 140–141.

31. Connolly, Identity/Difference, xiv, 65–66.

32. See van Dijk, “Political Discourse and Racism,” 61–62.

33. Waters, “Dark Strangers’ in Our Midst,” 208.

34. See Benveniste, Lazaridis, and Puurunen, “Populist othering and Islamophobia,” 66.

35. Riggins, “The Rhetoric of Othering,” 8.

36. Desmond Harding, “Labour Tackles the Trots,” Sunday Telegraph, November 23, 1975, 19.

37. Anthony Shrimsley, “Labour’s fifth column,” Daily Mail, November 26, 1975, 6.

38. Gordon Grieg, “Denis blames Left for all Labour’s ills,” Daily Mail, November 10, 1979, 19.

39. Following an NEC decision on 27 February 1980, Underhill would circulate his findings to CLPs: see LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L25/6, Reg Underhill, letter to CLPs entitled “Entryist activities of the Militant Tendency,” March 1980.

40. See Philip Rawstone, “Labour told to combat Trotskyist ‘cancer’ in party,” Financial Times, January 14, 1980, 4.

41. Joe Haines, ‘Militants in Takeover Plot: Labour’s Hidden “Cancer”’, Daily Mirror, January 14, 1980, 1.

42. For example, see Harold Wilson’s comments in ‘“Politically motivated” pressure behind seamen’s strike’, Guardian, June 21, 1966, 2.

43. London School of Economics (hereafter LSE), Peter Shore Papers, Shore 13, 113; Peter Shore, “Speech to the St Pancras Town Hall, Euston Road on Sat 19 June 1982,” 5.

44. In reality, internal briefing documents show that there were those in the LSC who, in private, had doubts that the prescribed register would work. See LHA, Dianne Hayter Papers: Nick Butler Papers, DH14/2, “Militant: What Now?,” n.d. [June 1982].

45. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, Roy Hattersley, quoted in Panorama transcript, BBC1, September 27, 1982, 21.

46. Thorpe, “Locking out the Communists,” 237–238.

47. Anthony Bevins, “Frantic Foot offers deal,” Daily Mail, January 22, 1981, 9.

48. See, for example, “Foot puts Williams beyond pale. But the Militant Tendency—a “pestilential nuisance” – does not escape censure either,” Guardian, February 14, 1981, 30; “Trots face offensive,” Daily Telegraph, March 19, 1981, 11.

49. Modern Records Centre (hereafter MRC), University of Warwick, James Mortimer Papers, MSS.525/Box 5/1, Frank Ward, “The Labour Party and the Militant Organisation,” (London, n.d. [1988–89]), 1.

50. Winston Churchill, quoted in Hansard, HC Deb. 6 December 1945, vol. 416, col. 2544.

51. Churchill’s 1945 quote is discussed, along with his use of the same phrase to describe Bevan during the Second World War in Foot, Aneurin Bevan, 61.

52. Diary entry for Wednesday 18 November 1981 in Benn, The End of An Era, 173.

53. See, for example, Nick Davies, “Buoyant CND pledges more pressure,” Guardian, October 26, 1981, 1.

54. Hayter, Fightback!, 30.

55. See, for example, LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, letter from participant in Labour politics (possibly member) from Bermondsey, London dated 12 December 1981. Peter Tatchell, the PPC in Bermondsey, had been wrongly identified as a Militant supporter.

56. See LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L6, letter from Labour member from Canterbury, Kent dated 15 December 1981.

57. Michael Foot, “The Militant Report,” Labour Weekly, September 10, 1982, 7.

58. British Online Archives (hereafter BOA), Alan Williams, in Parliamentary Labour Party Minutes dated 17 December 1981, 3.

59. BOA, Gerald Kaufman, in Labour Party, Shadow Cabinet Minutes dated 29 March 1982, 2.

60. Cronin, New Labour’s Pasts, 234–235.

61. These issues were discussed in depth: see LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, National Executive Committee, NAD/66/1/83, ‘The definition of a member of the “Militant Tendency”’, January 26, 1983.

62. For example, see “Mr. Bevan’s bitter attack on Conservatives,” Manchester Guardian, July 5, 1948, 3.

63. Hull History Centre (henceforth HHC), Labour Solidarity Campaign Papers, U DX315/1, Scottish Labour Solidarity Campaign, Labour Solidarity 1, February 1982, 2.

64. HHC, LSC Papers, U DX315/1, Scottish Labour Solidarity Campaign, Labour Solidarity, 2.

65. LSE, Shore Papers, Peter Shore, SHORE 13:113, “Speech at St Pancras Town Hall,” June 19, 1982, 6; Austin Mitchell, “Stand Solid!,” Labour Weekly, March 6, 1981, 9.

66. Don Weedon, ‘You“re telling us: is Tribune unfair to Militant?,” Tribune, January 25, 1980, 9.

67. See, for example, Terence Lancaster, “Labour cuckoo turns vulture,” Daily Mirror, June 25, 1982, 2.

68. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, Roy Hattersley, quoted in Panorama transcript, September 27, 1982, 11.

69. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, Roy Grantham, quoted in Panorama transcript, September 27, 1982, 2; see also Roy Grantham, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 43.

70. Ian Mikardo, “What are we going to do about the Trots?,” Tribune, February 19, 1977, 5.

71. Mikardo, “What are we going to do,” 5. The New Statesman would later make the same point that “The cause lies not in the vigour of the infection, but in the enfeeblement of the host,” see Editorial, “Labour’s weakness,” New Statesman, February 26, 1982, 2.

72. Roy Hattersley, “Why I want to purge Militant and not the CLPD,” Tribune, September 24, 1982, 2.

73. LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:114, Unnamed author, “The Case Against Militant: Notes,” (n.d.).

74. Austin Mitchell, “Militant and other termites,” Labour Weekly, November 20, 1981, 12.

75. See Dave Smith, ‘Viewpoint: “Termite” hits back’, Labour Weekly, November 27, 1981, 13.

76. ‘Parasites: Shore and Callaghan lead attack on far Left’, Daily Express, September 27, 1982, 2.

77. John Spellar, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 43.

78. See Hayter, Fightback!, 131.

79. Spellar, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 43.

80. Editorial, “From here to the ballot box,” New Statesman, October 1, 1982, 2.

81. Patrick Wintour, ‘The Puritanical bores of the Militant Tendency’, New Statesman, January 18, 1980, 77.

82. Chris McLaughlin, “Muffled Report: Underhill goes for Militant,” Labour Weekly, March 21, 1980, 1. McLaughlin would later become the editor of Tribune in 2004.

83. HHC, LSC Papers, U DX315/2, Roy Hattersley, “Speech by the Rt Hon Roy Hattersley MP at the Labour Solidarity Campaign Meeting at Camden Town Hall, 12.30 pm on Saturday 7 March, 1981,” 3.

84. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, Labour Solidarity Campaign, “Evidence of the Labour Solidarity Campaign to the Labour Party enquiry into the activities and organisation of the Militant Tendency,” n.d. [1982], 2.

85. Steve McGrail and Keith Ryall, “View point: two-way trust,” Labour Weekly, May 15, 1981, 12. My emphasis added via italicisation.

86. Ricky Ormonde, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 47.

87. It has often been thought that this phrase referred exclusively to Hugh Gaitskell, but it was initially used by Bevan in an implicit attack on Clement Attlee in 1954: ‘Mr. Bevan Attacks Party Leader: “Desiccated Calculating Machine”’, Daily Telegraph, September 30, 1954, 1.

88. “Hattersley plan to beat extremists,” Daily Telegraph, January 26, 1981, 8.

89. HHC, Hattersley, “Speech at Camden Town Hall,” March 7, 1981, 5.

90. Webster, “The Labour Party,” 21.

91. See Gould, The Witchfinder General, 185.

92. See Wintour, “Puritanical bores,” 77.

93. LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:113, Shore, “Speech at St Pancras Town Hall,” 6.

94. LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:142, Labour Solidarity Campaign, “You, the Labour Party and the Militant Tendency” (London, n.d.), 2; LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:114, The Labour Solidarity Campaign, “The Political Identification of the Militant Organisation,” n.d., 12.

95. “Hattersley plan,” 8.

96. Alex Wood, “Tilting at the Militant Windmill,” Labour Weekly, July 9, 1982, 12.

97. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, Brian Wilson, quoted in Panorama transcript, September 27, 1982, 19.

98. Alan Melville, “Thoroughly Modern Militant,” Punch, January 6, 1982, 9.

99. BOA, Denis Healey and Gwyneth Dunwoody, quoted in Labour Party, Shadow Cabinet Minutes dated 29 March 1982, 3.

100. Sidney Weighell, “Get rid of the crazy left, before they get rid of you,” Daily Mail, January 4, 1983, 6.

101. Richard Clements, ‘The truth about “entrism”’, Tribune, January 18, 1980, 6.

102. Margaret Van Hatten, “Inside the Labour Party: Why the left is gaining ground,” Financial Times, November 3, 1980, 17.

103. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, Letter from Labour member from South Wirral dated 11 December 1981; LHA, Foot Papers, letter from Labour member from Bamford dated 4 December 1981.

104. Wintour, “Puritanical bores,” 77.

105. Philip Whitehead, “Letters: Metronome Moonies,” Labour Weekly, July 23, 1982, 16.

106. Hattersley, Who goes home?, 235.

107. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, Neil Kinnock, quoted in Panorama transcript, September 27, 1982, 14.

108. LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:142, ‘Marxism, Leninism and the Labour Party’ (n.d.).

109. Webster, “The Labour Party,” 33. My emphasis in italics.

110. BOA, Peter Shore, in Labour Party, Shadow Cabinet Minutes, March 29, 1982, 2.

111. See, for example, Jack McEachran, “Hunt for masked riot leaders.” Daily Mirror, July 11, 1981, 2; Stuart Greig and Alistair McQueen, “Marxist: Why I was in Toxteth,” Daily Mirror, July 10, 1981, 3.

112. Austin Mitchell, Untitled, Labour Weekly, April 8, 1982, 16.

113. Roy Grantham, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 42.

114. Mikardo “What are we going to do about the Trots?,” 5.

115. Patrick Wintour, “Marxism and the petrol bomb,” New Statesman, April 24, 1981, 5.

116. Frank Chapple, “If we don’t throw out the left, they’ll bury us,” Daily Mail, 4 October 1979, 6.

117. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, Letter from Labour member from Edinburgh dated 4 December 1981, 2.

118. Foot, ‘Militant Report’, 7.

119. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, NEC, “Definition of a member of the “Militant Tendency,” January 26, 1983, 1.

120. LSE, Shore Papers, “Marxism, Leninism and the Labour Party,” (n.d.). This was a response to the ideas expressed by Benn in his Marx Memorial Lecture and the coverage that it received in the Guardian: see LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:114, Tony Benn, “Marxism: the “antichrist” few comprehend,” Guardian, March 22, 1982, 6–7.

121. For the centrality of this objective to the LSC’s agenda, see LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, Labour Solidarity Campaign, “The Future of the Labour Solidarity Campaign,” December 1981, 4. According to Hayter, this document was written by Roger Godsiff: see, Hayter, Fightback!, 141.

122. LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:113, Shore, “Speech at St Pancras Town Hall,” 10.

123. LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:142, LSC, “You, the Labour Party,” 2; LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:142, Unnamed author, “The Political Philosophy of Militant,” (n.d.), 1.

124. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, LSC, “Evidence of the Labour Solidarity Campaign,” 2–3.

125. See “Parasites,” Daily Express, 2.

126. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, Enid Beere, “Solidarity supporters write …, ” in the Labour Solidarity Campaign, Labour Solidarity 2, no. 1, May 1981, 6.

127. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, letter from vice chairman of Newcastle East CLP dated 10 December 1981.

128. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, letter from Labour member from southwest London dated 14 December 1981, 2.

129. See, for example, Jim Mortimer’s General Secretary speech on Militant, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 41–42.

130. See Thorpe, “Locking out the Communists,” 246–247.

131. Michael Foot, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 52. See also Foot, “Militant Report,” 7.

132. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, London Weekend Television, Weekend World Transcript: Michael Foot Interview, October 3, 1982, 18.

133. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, Peter Taaffe, letter to Jim Mortimer dated 9 October 1982, 6.

134. For a discussion of Labour’s nostalgically-imbued identity, see Jobson, Nostalgia and the post-war Labour Party.

135. Crick, Militant, 202.

136. Terry Coleman, “Mr Pat Wall and his Militant Tendencies,” Guardian, June 29, 1982, 17.

137. Frank Allaun, “Militant is no threat,” Labour Weekly, March 28, 1980, 12.

138. See LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5, NEC, NAD/23/11/82, “The Labour Party and Parliamentary Democracy,” November 24, 1982, 1–3.

139. John Golding, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1983, 65.

140. ‘Militant 2% out’, Labour Weekly, September 16, 1983, 6.

141. To take one representative example, Manchester Polytechnic Labour Club declared simply ‘We oppose witchhunt and any expulsions’ in their telegram to Michael Foot dated 21 June 1982. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L5.

142. See MRC, Militant Tendency Papers, 601/C/5/5/13, Militant, July 9, 1982, 1.

143. See Lynn Walsh, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1983, 61; For the composite, see Labour Party LPACR 1983, 67.

144. Allaun, “Militant is no threat,” 12. This was an argument that was quite popular amongst left-wing party members: see, for example, Robert Jones, “You’re telling us: is Tribune unfair to Militant?,” Tribune, January 25, 1980, 9.

145. Peter Taaffe, “Why Labour needs to keep its Militants,” The Times, June 23, 1982, 10; For the CLPD line, see Allaun, “Militant is no threat,” 12.

146. For the Zinoviev letter, see Nick Bradley, “Letters: Militant,” New Statesman, January 25, 1980, 127; For McCarthysim, see Lynn Walsh, quoted in LPACR 1983, 58; and Jim Hollinshead, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1983, 70.

147. Peter Taafe, quoted in “Labour faces re-run of 1950s struggles,” Financial Times, June 19, 1982, 3.

148. Taaffe, letter to Mortimer, 6; Clements ‘Truth about “entrism”’, 6; for the pre-existing fears, see Mikardo, ‘What are we going to do about the Trots?’, 5.

149. Harold Frayman, “No witch hunt,” Labour Weekly, January 15, 1980, 1.

150. “Witch hunt: the game nobody plays,” Labour Weekly, December 23, 1982, 10–11. It should be noted that this turnaround was partly due to the PLP’s disquiet on the paper’s position: see BOA, Labour Party, PLP minutes dated 8 July 1982, 2–3.

151. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, Wilson, Panorama transcript, September 27, 1982, 19.

152. See LSE, Shore Papers, SHORE 13:142, LSC, “You, the Labour Party,” 1.

153. John Creamer, “Viewpoint: Witches,” Labour Weekly, May 23, 1980, 13.

154. Martin Parnell, “Letters: Emotive protests,” Labour Weekly, September 17, 1982, 17.

155. Foot, “Militant Report,” 7.

156. See “Foot puts Williams beyond pale,” 30; Golding, Hammer of the Left, 354.

157. Diary entry for 23 June 1982 in Benn, The End of an Era, 235.

158. Michael Foot, quoted in Labour Party, LPACR 1982, 52.

159. Gastil, “Undemocratic discourse,” 488–489.

160. LHA, Foot Papers, MF/L14, Fred Emery, quoted in Panorama transcript, September 27, 1982, 1.

161. Chris McLaughlin, ‘Militant facing “isolation”’, Labour Weekly, 5 November 1982, 4.

162. See Thorpe “Locking out the Communists,” 249.

163. See Shaw, “Labour Party and the Militant Tendency,” 193.

164. Contemporary articles probably put Militant’s influence at an overly high level, see Whiteley and Gordon, “Middle class, Militant and Male,” 41; Joyce Gould has been particularly critical of the limited nature of the party’s move against Militant before 1983: see Gould, Witchfinder General, 220–221.

165. Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Kinnock Archive, KNNK 2/5/1, letter from party member from Southport, Merseyside, dated 23 October 1982.