Most people who have any interest in left-wing or trade union politics will remember Arthur Scargill former President of the National Union of Mineworkers. During the great miners strike back in the eighties Scargill led his members into industrial action without a ballot thereby casing a division in the NUM and helping laying the foundations for a massive defeat not just for the union but the trade union movement in general.
The failure of the NUM was a watershed in British politics that cemented Thacher's government and began the wearing down of trade union power and influence to the almost negligible level it has today, though there are some exceptions to the rule.
This was also the period in which the left attempted to and failed to take control of the Labour Party. Militant, a parasitical Trotskyist organisation was purged and Labour entered years of opposition until the rise of Tony Blair.
In 1996 Arthur Scargiil split from the Labour Party and set up a new organisation known as the Socialist labour Party and at the beginning there were high hopes as various smaller groups and individuals joined up. However from the start the SLP was ruled by an Scargill with an iron fist and his Stalinist politics led him to purge not just the various Trot groups inside his party but anyone who dared oppose him.
Scargill was aided in this by one Harpal Brar who himself split with the SLP in 2004 to form the ultra-Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) as Scargill refused to back North Korea.
The party failed in it's attempts to gain any traction electorally and there has always been some mystery about it's financing but this year the SLP is standing but one candidate in Hartlepool where it has a small group of ex-Labour councillors.
The SLP website can be found here: www.socialist-labour-party.org.uk
The CPGB (M-L) can be found here: thecommunists.org
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