Militant Tendency splits both in the UK and internationally...again

"When Alice nibbles the cakes, she suddenly shrinks down again. ... The Caterpillar crawls away into the grass, telling Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her taller and the other side will make her shorter. She breaks off two pieces from the mushroom."

When the Militant Tendency (now known as the Socialist Party of England and Wales) was operating deep inside the Labour it was said that members found themselves operating in ever decreasing circles of people until they finally reached the central committee. Or something to that effect as the organisation was hidden in open view.

Once the largest and most influential Trotskyist group in the UK with a small but growing number of subordinate organisations around the world their leadership was once able to hold a rally of some 8,000 people in the Royal Albert Hall. They had control of the Labour Party Young Socialists (Labour's youth wing) control of Liverpool council, a base in several major unions and three of their members had found their way into parliament as MP's. Heady days indeed.

Then came their expulsion as Neil Kinnock condemned the Militant for using taxi's to deliver redundancy notices to sack council workers in Liverpool. The organisation was proscribed. It's paper sellers identified as members. Indeed Militant had more full paid staff than the labour Party.

From that moment on the organisations membership and influence went into permanent decline losing many leading cadres to the Scottish Socialist Party and even managed of all things to lose it's founder in an acrimonious split with their general Secretary for life Peter Taaffe.

Ted Grant insisted on keeping his faction inside the Labour Party despite his own expulsion and so Socialist Appeal was born. It's still there with some two to three hundred or so adherents whilst Peter Taaffe has continued to be careless with his own troops.



The first sign of trouble, at least in public was their massive loss of leading trade unionists in the largest of the civil service unions the PCS. The purge of Militant/SPEW in PCS turned into a rout as they were left with just two NEC members and their supporters were quietly removed from office wherever they continued to be loyal to the party.

Then there came the news of the spread of "Mandelism" inside their version of the Fourth International know by the label Committee for a Workers International.  Ernest Mandel of course was a leader of a rival Trotskyist International until his death and his followers organised in the International Marxist Group/Socialist League now defunct and scattered to the winds.

Mandel urged his supporters to join the social and later environmental movements. These included the Feminists and Gays seen as "petty bourgeois" by many hard-line Marxists including Peter Taffe the leader of Militant/SPEW. The decision of Irish, Spanish and other sections of his "international" to go down this road led to horror of horrors Taffe being in a minority within his own organisation.



In a typical and very bureaucratic fashion the nine sections supporting Taffe managed to expel the other 31 who did not. The Socialist Party then went on to make this extraordinary claim on their website:

In the view of the Socialist Party, and the majority of CWI members internationally, it is vital to defend the CWI's historic approach to these issues in order for our international to be able to play a role in the struggle for socialism in the coming period.

The SPEW leadership have acted against any supporters of the international opposition by banning them from even meeting on pain of expulsion. 

Meanwhile at a special conference of their sect:

On Sunday 21 July over 200 delegates at a special conference of the Socialist Party (England/Wales) voted overwhelmingly, 173 - 35 with 0 abstentions, to sponsor an international conference to reconstitute the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI - the international organisation of which the Socialist Party is part).

There have been a number of expulsions though their supporters deny these are expulsions people are just "excluding themselves" despite Nancy Taaffe's edict that supporters of the opposition were not welcome at SPEW Branch meetings.

Already a over hundred former SPEW members have rallied to "reestablish" what they call the CWI, whilst the Taaffites "reconstitute" theirs. Two CWI's plus their founders International Marxist Tendency (IMT). No less than three rallying points to confuse the workers of the world. 

Gawd help us!