Letting Derek Hatton back into the Labour Party is a big deal – here's why

Labour activists like me rather admired Militant. They were hard-working and disciplined and serious about their Marxism-Leninism, even if they were rarely open about it

For readers who weren’t around in the 1980s, allow me to explain why letting Derek Hatton back into Labour Party membership is a big deal. The story of Militant, the movement Hatton was a prominent part of, is intertwined with the creation of New Labour and the long struggle that culminated in Tony Blair winning three elections and, in my view, changing the country for the better.

Blair cut his teeth – “right down to the gums”, as Neil Kinnock, Labour leader from 1983 to 1992, put it – as a commercial barrister who lent his legal expertise to the Labour Party in its fight against the Militant tendency.

When Michael Foot and then Kinnock tried to expel Trotskyists who had infiltrated the party, Militant fought back in the capitalist courts and the Labour Party needed good legal advice on how to get rid of them. This was difficult because people such as Hatton were secretive about the organisations to which they belonged, and accused the leadership of carrying out a witch-hunt against them because of their ideas.

One of the most active in the welter of so-called hard-left groups in the Labour Party who defended Militant was Jeremy Corbyn. At one point he signed himself “provisional convenor, Defeat the Witch-Hunt Campaign”. They argued that supporters of the Militant newspaper were merely good socialists who were being victimised because they advocated ideas that were too left-wing for the Labour leadership.

They may have been, but Militant was not just a newspaper with readers and supporters. It was the propaganda vehicle of a Trotskyist organisation whose real name was the Revolutionary Socialist League and which had since its origin around 1950 pursued the strategy of entryism.

This meant its members would join the Labour Party as individuals and seek to win control of local parties and local councils. These were covert operations and so it was legally complicated for Labour to prove who was a member of RSL, especially as the group developed tactics of working with other groups – taking them over or, if it was useful to them, not doing so.

Thus, on Liverpool city council, the group known to the public as Militant never appeared to hold a majority of seats, and John Hamilton, who was not an RSL member, continued to serve as council leader, while the real power was wielded by his deputy, Derek Hatton. But the RSL controlled the council and was responsible for its disastrous policy of defying the Conservative government, and ultimately the law, by setting an illegal budget and bringing the city to a state of chaos denounced by Kinnock in his 1985 party conference speech.

Militant was never very successful. It succeeded in getting two to four MPs elected under Labour colours (it was hard to know how many were actually RSL members) and Liverpool was the only big council it ever controlled. But it did a great deal of damage to Labour’s reputation.

Labour activists like me rather admired Militant. Its adherents were hard-working and disciplined and serious about their Marxism-Leninism, even if they were rarely open about it. As a “soft-left” supporter of Foot and Kinnock, I was involved in factional struggles against them – in my case defending Peter Shore, the Labour former cabinet minister, from attempts to deselect him in east London.

But the people we party loyalists really despised were the even softer left: people such as Jeremy Corbyn, who insisted that the party should have no boundaries to the left and that anyone who claimed to be a socialist had to be accepted as one. It was people like Corbyn who allowed Militant to do so much damage to the Labour Party, and it was Foot, Kinnock and Blair who saved the party and turned it, slowly, into a machine capable of winning elections and changing the country.

That is why letting Hatton back into the party matters to people like me.