Labor's radical voices resound with stridency—and division
We are facing the worst economic crisis in living memory," roared Marxist Union Leader Arthur Scargill. "Young people are being thrown on the scrap heap. We have to take the fight for jobs into the streets!" As Scargill stepped back from the podium, his audience of 2,000 Young Socialists jumped to their feet and broke into wild applause. Assembled at the seaside resort of Bridlington for their annual conference, the young foot soldiers of the Marxist left spent three days berating the established order. They joined in choruses of the worldwide revolutionary anthem, the Internationale. After each refrain, they raised their fists in a defiant salute and chanted: "Thatcher out! Out! Out!"
The walls inside the Spa Royal Hall were plastered with slogans depicting an array of causes: LABOR TO POWER WITH SOCIALIST POLICIES! NO CRUISE MISSILES HERE! U.S. HANDS OFF EL SALVADOR! Militant speakers went on to protest Prince Charles' upcoming wedding as a lavish indulgence at a time of high unemployment. Complained one: "This flaunting of wealth is obscene." Finally, with a lordly flourish, Andy Bevan, 29, the Young Socialists' national secretary, sounded the clarion call: "Comrades! We're at the beginning of the beginning. We see the workers flexing their muscles against unemployment and mass misery. They seek a workers' democracy like Lenin and Trotsky sought to build!"
This was all sloganeering hyperbole, to be sure. But there is little question that the Marxist left currently commands more influence than it has ever had since the Labor Party was founded in 1920. In the past year the Marxists have gained control of much of the party's machinery from its aging, moderately left leadership. They have forced rules changes that give them unprecedented power in the selection of the party leader—and potential Prime Minister—as well as strong leverage over Labor's elected representatives.
In local elections in May, militant leftists took control of London's municipal administration and installed a 35-year-old radical politician, Ken Livingstone, as leader of the Greater London Council.
Most disturbing to Britons is the fact that the radical leftists have injected many of their views into the party's national platform. Among them: withdrawal of Britain from the European Community, unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalization of all major British industry, and abolition of the House of Lords. Recoiling from the aggressive left's surprising ascendancy, four former Labor Cabinet ministers and a group of sympathetic M.P.s broke away last February to form their own center-left Social Democratic Party. Protested Shirley Williams, longtime Labor frontbencher and dissident leader: "The party I loved and worked for over so many years no longer exists."