A brilliant careerist (1996)

Degsy.

TV Review from the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outside the circles of orthodox Trotskyism and left-wing romanticism, Derek Hatton [has] been the subject of few hagiographies, especially in recent years. BBC2’s My Brilliant Career (Thursday, 8 February, 8pm) seems to have set out to redress the balance. If so, it achieved its aim with flying colours.

It portrayed Hatton as a Jack-the-lad character always with the interests of the working class at heart, now with his own successful PR firm and flash car since the Labour Party were foolish enough to dispense with his considerable talents a few years back. Perhaps understandably, to his father he could do no wrong— Hatton "could turn his hand to anything” and had never forgotten his roots. A local Church of England vicar—a friend of Hatton’s in his youth—compared him to Jesus, feted one day, crucified the next, but a real saviour nonetheless.

If Hatton’s PR firm had made this film, they couldn’t have done a better job. The nature of Militant (really the Revolutionary Socialist League) as a bunch of scheming elitists bent on power for themselves and their cronies was not touched upon. In fact, it wasn’t entirely clear whether Hatton had been a Trotskyist at all. or merely an errant Christian. Nor was the intimidation, the thuggery and abuse of other Labour Party members and trade unionists mentioned, all of which had been condoned by Hatton.

While Hatton's three-year term as a fire-fighter was referred to, his period as a youth leader in Toxteth didn’t rate a mention. Was this anything to do with the fact that during his time in charge £17,000 went walkabout and Hatton was eventually forced to leave after an internal inquiry found him guilty of incompetence? And why was his time as community development officer in Kirkby overlooked? Surely not because his undemocratic ways and treatment of the local community was such that they held a meeting to protest about his activities and actually banned him from two community centres?

Taxi!
Understandably, the programme centred on Hatton’s role as Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council in the mid-1980s, together with his various confrontations with the Tory government and the then Environment Secretary, Patrick Jenkin. What perhaps should have been made clearer was the way in which Militant, like other Trotskyist groups, attempts to mislead the working class into believing they can achieve the unachievable as a matter of course. This is, after all, their supreme tactic—one of discrediting existing leaderships which cannot deliver, thereby prompting further turns to the left. It is only in the light of this mistaken tactic that the real failure of the Trotskyists on Liverpool City Council can be understood.

After once initially winning more money from the government—to their own surprise— Hatton and his crew upped their demands for the following financial year in the correct belief that the government would tell them where to get off. As part of their tactic they sent redundancy notices out in taxis to 30,000 Liverpool Council workers, famously referred to by Neil Kinnock in his 1985 Labour Conference speech as "grotesque chaos", and which provoked fury in the city itself. Their miscalculation was that in threatening to sack their entire workforce the Militant leadership of the council only succeeded in alienating large sections of the left-wing that might have otherwise have rushed to their support. Far from setting an example of what other Labour councils should do to put pressure on the Tories and drive them out, it simply acted as an example of what local councils should not do if they wish to stay in power. Moreover, it was no coincidence that the years following Hatton’s ridiculous posturings in Liverpool saw an even further crackdown on the powers of local government in Britain.

If the makers of My Brilliant Career wished to make a valid point about Derek Hatton it would surely have been that his "success", such as it is, has been almost solely confined to his PR business, an occupation where he can arguably do less damage than he did as a councillor. As Liverpool's Deputy Leader he left behind debts, chaos and acrimony.

And to those who say Hatton still has the interests of the working class at heart, take note of this. Hatton claimed on Granada's Up Front programme a couple of years ago that his lasting legacy was that he had persuaded Barratt's and Wimpey's to build five thousand new council houses in Liverpool during his period of office (before the debts got too great and he was chucked out). “No. Derek," replied John Hamilton, nominal council Leader to Hatton’s Deputy in a rare moment of insightfulness, "Barratt's and Wimpey’s didn’t build those houses—the workers of Liverpool did.” So much for not forgetting your roots.

Dave Perrin

Leftist Wonderland: Militant in Liverpool (1986)

From the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

For those of you who are confused about what’s been going on at Liverpool City Council, here are the facts:

Militant is a newspaper. The people who sell it are members of the Labour Party, although they don’t support it, and supporters of Militant (the tendency, not the newspaper) although they are not members of it. The Labour Party leaders are neither members nor supporters of Militant (the tendency), and neither do they sell Militant (the newspaper), although you can never be sure since Militant newspaper sellers are notoriously shy about coming out.

The Labour Party leaders want to expel Militant supporters from the party since they think that they are wrecking Neil Kinnock’s chances of moving into Downing Street after the next general election. They claim that Militant (the tendency) is in breach of the Labour Party’s constitution since they operate as a party within the Labour Party, with different aims and objectives. But Labour’s leaders are worried that to expel Militant might upset other Labour supporters and also, presumably, damage Neil Kinnock’s election chances. So instead of expelling supporters of Militant, they have suspended the whole of the Labour Party in Liverpool—home of the Tendency’s most vociferous spokesperson, Derek Hatton, who they especially want to get rid of. (There are rumours that at least some supporters of Militant are no longer so keen on supporting Hatton, but maybe we shouldn’t make this any more complicated than it already is.)

Militant in Liverpool are very upset that the Labour Party is treating them in this way and assert that they, unlike the Labour leadership, are the real guardians of Labour Party conference decisions since they are resisting “Tory cuts” and fighting to “save the jobs and services for the people of Liverpool”, and want to institute Clause Four of the Labour Party’s constitution (the one stating that the Labour Party is committed to nationalisation). The Labour Party conference is supposed to be the main policy-making body of the party, but the leadership ignores conference decisions when they don’t like them. So, just to recap, Militant, which doesn’t agree with the Labour Party, is upholding its constitution and decisions made at conference, while the leadership, who do support the Labour Party, are ambivalent about nationalisation and Kinnock has said that he will ignore conference decisions if he doesn’t agree with them. But it is Militant that looks set to be thrown out of the Labour Party for a breach of the constitution, while Kinnock is increasingly regarded as the party’s saviour.

The Militant leaders of Liverpool City Council, as already mentioned, claim that they are fighting to preserve jobs and services. As part of their strategy to do this they sent out redundancy notices to 31,000 local authority workers and looked set to close down council-run facilities like day-care centres for the elderly and handicapped, children’s homes, libraries, sports centres and swimming pools. Their concern for the workers of Liverpool was such that they asked them to work for nothing after they received their redundancy notices. The workers however could not understand how this was helping them (not surprising, Militant would say, since to them workers are too stupid to recognise their real interests and so need leaders like Militant to protect their interests for them). Teachers in Liverpool took the City Council to court and managed to get an injunction against the redundancy notices. But it wasn’t just the teachers who were too stupid to understand that Militant were looking after their interests; just about every trade union with members working for the local authority have also shown signs of “stupidity” by expressing their hostility to the leadership.

Militant also claims to be working for racial harmony in Liverpool and to that end they appointed a community relations officer. That appointment has resulted in almost every community group representing black people in Liverpool refusing to have anything to do with either the council or the community relations officer and trade unions have advised their members not to co-operate with him. So much for racial harmony and community relations.

Finally, Militant claims to be “socialist”. Apart from the doubt cast on this idea by their membership of the anti-socialist Labour Party, their support for state-capitalism, their undemocratic organisation, their patronising attitude to their fellow workers, besides all that, this “socialist” tendency has just accepted £30 million from those well-known supporters of socialism, the Gnomes of Zurich, to bail them out.

So, to sum up: Militant are members of the Labour Party although they don’t agree with the Labour Party. Labour’s leaders want them out because they are in breach of the party’s constitution even though the leadership itself does not honour decisions made at the party’s conference. Derek Hatton and his fellow Militants on Liverpool City Council claim to be acting on behalf, and in the interests, of the working class of Liverpool and demonstrate this by threatening workers with the sack or asking them to work for nothing. They claim to be“socialist” but are quite happy to take money from a bunch of capitalist financiers who are no doubt rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of making a financial killing from all the interest they are going to receive on this loan.

Still confused? So you should be!

Janie Percy-Smith

Saints and sinners (1984)

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

From the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The government’s assault on the town halls of Britain is being dramatised by the Labour Party as an epic battle for democracy, civil rights and human dignity. Heroically resisting the Whitehall panzers are municipal guerrillas like Livingstone of London and Hatton of Liverpool who, if the government is ever unwise enough to prosecute them, will be rapidly raised from mere heroism to martyrdom and then, perhaps, to sainthood.

In July the guerrilla leaders held a council of war, appropriately in Sheffield. There they set out the basis of a campaign against the expenditure cuts which are being imposed on them. Boldly they faced the prospect of acting outside the law; the leader of the Islington council, supported by Livingstone and Lambeth’s Ted Knight, proposed that Labour councils should budget to protect services and jobs and refuse to make a rate. Any government, let alone one including Thatcher, Tebbit and Jenkin, would be bound to respond to this, perhaps by assuming the councils’ functions and, by more indirect means, by prosecuting the recusant councillors.

This all makes good material for Labour’s dramatists and it may even win some votes for their party (although it may also lose some; the working class have not always been grateful to councils which have been labelled as squanderers) but it is somewhat out of touch with reality. Capitalism 1984 is in a slump which affects every industrial country. As usual, workers are being subjected to an extra fierce attack called economising, living within our means and so on. As it is bound to, this attack falls partly on things which, whatever their deficiencies, do something to ease workers’ lives — medical and social services, libraries, education, recreation facilities, sanitary controls. So in a slump workers who need, say, domiciliary nursing or home help can’t get them; teachers are sacked and schools are forced to manage with disintegrating books and equipment, libraries are closed and streets left dirty, spilling uncollected rubbish. Labour resistance to these cuts is unreal because it assumes, against all the evidence and experience, that a Labour government would ride out the slump while protecting the working class and keeping all services intact. This assumption inspires Livingstone and Hatton as it inspired the Clay Cross councillors and, 40 years before them, the councillors of Poplar led by white-whiskered, benign George Lansbury.

In 1921 Lansbury was Lord Mayor of Poplar and an elected member of the Borough’s Board of Guardians. It was not the happiest of times to be mayor in any big British city and especially of a place like Poplar, disfigured by slums and grinding poverty. This was a dockland Borough, lying close by the East and West India docks; its mean houses were overlooked by gasworks and warehouses and veined with railway goods yards and canals. The docks were notorious for their insecurity, with employment handed out each morning at the gates. In August 1921, according to the dockers’ union leader Ernest Bevin, there were 62,000 registered dockers in London but on any day the most who were employed amounted to 29,000. It is common for workers in places like Poplar to be staunch supporters of the Labour Party, in the mistaken belief that that party can ameliorate their poverty. In 1921 Poplar had a Labour majority on its council and on its Board of Guardians, who administered the Poor Law relief which, like supplementary benefit today, was supposed to be a fail-safe when other benefits were not available.

The system of “outdoor relief’ was set up in 1834; it was collected through a local rate. The amount of relief varied from one Board of Guardians to another; most of them were not renowned for their generosity and to apply to them was excessively degrading, fraught with terror of being forced into the workhouse with its hard labour, starvation and brutality. By the 1920s the worst features of this system had supposedly been abolished by a series of reforms, among them the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1921, which effectively extended unemployment benefit to almost all workers and even promised “uncovenanted” benefits. This reform had seemed safe at the time; there was a mood of boom-induced optimism and the Act was designed to relieve short-term unemployment, allowing benefit for only 26 weeks. The few people expected by the experts to be still out of work after that could apply to the Guardians for “outdoor relief’.

But capitalism in the Twenties was no more under the control of the experts than it is today. The brief post-war boom was followed by a slump and in 1921 unemployment exceeded 2 million (about 17 per cent of the workforce) and it did not fall below one million until the Second World War. There was general surprise at the slump; “In April 1920,” said The Economist, “all was right with the world. In April 1921 all was wrong.” That year saw the emergence of the long-term unemployed who, as their 26 weeks of benefit ran out, were driven to apply for Poor Law relief; Between March and November the numbers on that relief rose from 224,000 to 831,000. As we have said, how these desperate people fared varied from place to place, with some Guardians being bullying and niggardly and others comparatively sympathetic and generous. Poplar was one of the latter sort; led by Lansbury, the Guardians there were prepared to allow a man and wife 33 shillings (£1.65) a week, compared to the state “uncovenanted” rate of £1.00 a week. One result of this was that in Poplar one person in five was on relief compared to one in 21 in England and Wales as a whole. The Poplar Guardians justified their policy in a defiant leaflet they published in 1922:

. . .  the duty of members of the Board of Guardians is to be Guardians of the POOR and not Guardians of the interests of property. In Poplar there is no cringing or whining on the part of those who apply for public assistance . . .  Relief is accepted without shame or regret — in fact in exactly the same spirit as that in which ex-Cabinet ministers, Royalties, and others accept their pensions and allowances from the Government. In Poplar it is well understood that the poor are poor because they are robbed, and are robbed because they are poor . . .

The snag in this generosity was, of course, that it offended against the vital principle of all capitalist administration, that the accounts must not get into the red — and definitely not, as was the case with the Poplar Guardians, be forced into the red. In places like Poplar the demand for relief was likely to be high but, for the same reasons, the local rate was likely to yield that much less. As the Borough slid inexorably towards bankruptcy the gutter press, already carrying on an eager crusade against official “squandermania”, coined the word “poplarism” for the policy of pampering workshy layabouts out of other people’s money (they could not, apparently, think up a word for the real layabouts in society — the class who lived in luxury off the unpaid labour of the working class and who, while the people of Poplar fought the ravages of poverty, were wining and dancing their days away at the smart restaurants of London). A judge, who clearly did not understand a word of what he was saying, later condemned the Poplar councillors as ' . . . motivated by eccentric principles of socialist philanthropy”.

These criticisms did not impress the Poplar Guardians, who now came up with an unconventional proposal to regard the relief of the poor as their first priority and to refuse to collect the Borough’s precept to such bodies as the London County Council, the Police and the Metropolitan Asylum Board. This policy was later described, in the report of a clearly outraged inspector to the Minister of Health, as “. . . in many instances foreign to the spirit and intention of the Poor Law statutes”; no attempts had been made to discriminate between the “deserving” and the “undeserving”; the council had supplied boots and clothing to people who needed them (and who, complained the inspector, might have pawned them to get money instead) and they had sent children, on the recommendation of their doctors, on holiday. They had even begun to feed the inmates of the Poplar workhouse adequately.

When the Poplar Guardians ignored a court order to pay the precepts Lansbury and 29 other councillors were sent to prison in September 1921 for contempt of court. As we all know, it is a heinous crime to defy a court, especially when it is a matter of the protection of property rights and the priority of profit above all else. But no sensible person could have expected the Poplar sentences to be deterrent. At their last meeting before the councillors went to prison there were excited, emotional crowd scenes and ten thousand people saw off the women councillors when they were arrested. The fate of the Poplar councillors did not deter their counterparts of Stepney and Bethnal Green, similarly impoverished parts of London. Although the London Labour Party advised against it, both Boroughs followed the example of Poplar. On behalf of the capitalist class, The Times of 3 September 1921 gave vent to its frustration:

The unlawful cause for which some of the Poplar Borough Councillors have gone to prison has confessedly been followed, not with the sole object of relieving distress — other and more temperate methods would better have served that end — but in order to vindicate the Communist doctrine of "full maintenance” for the unemployed.

But even this attack on the idea that unemployed people should be able to live somewhat above destitution did not help the government to wriggle out of an embarrassing situation. Lansbury and his fellow martyrs sat comfortably in gaol, while their supporters sang songs to them outside the wall, apparently for the offence of trying to keep working class people above actual starvation. On 12 October, although they had not “purged” their contempt, the Poplar councillors were released. This was celebrated as a great victory but there was rather more to it. On one hand the government gave way to one of the Poplar councillors’ demands and pushed through an Act which spread the cost of relief over all the London boroughs so that rich areas like Westminster contributed to relief in the East End. On the other hand there was legislation to allow an authority like the LCC to collect its precept over the heads of a recalcitrant council through a Receiver and the Minister superseded the Guardians in West Ham, Chester-le-Street and Bedwelty. In the end, there was no widespread attempt to imitate Poplar. A more serious effect of the affair was that it tended to divert attention away from the vital question of the cause of, and remedy for, unemployment and into a spurious, futile debate about how much, or how little, the unemployed needed to survive. There was much discussion around the definition of “not genuinely seeking work” and preoccupation with the “gap” between unemployment benefit and Poor Law relief. Such debates — which today still rage on — are the very stuff of life to the reformists but they do not touch on the basic issue of capitalism’s inability to satisfy people’s needs.

The Poplar Guardians emerged from gaol to find capitalism still there, its economy switchbacking with unemployment never falling below one million. The Local Government Act of 1929 effectively brought the end of the Guardians, substituting Public Assistance Committees which would be a lot less likely to pursue a maverick course. This was just in time for the Great Crash and unemployment rising over 3 million and the hated, degrading means test which, under another name, still operates today. By any standards, this is hardly a victory for the working class.

And what of Lansbury? If he was a saint it was one who displayed some devilish political guile and will to survive. In 1928, after the debacle of Labour’s 1924 term of office, he insisted that never again should they form a government dependent on Liberal support. But when they did form such a government, in 1929, Lansbury not only failed to object but actually accepted a job in the government. His attitude in the much-reported debate at the 1935 Labour conference, when his pacifism conflicted with his place as party leader on the issue of military sanctions against Italy, was not notable for its saintly consistency. It is true that he did offer to resign but, as Ernest Bevin noticed, he carefully worded his offer to leave himself open to being persuaded to carry on. Bevin’s famously brutal speech was designed to prevent that happening, with its sneer that Lansbury was “. . . taking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what to do with it”.

So the 1984 Labour municipal guerrillas are following a tradition made disreputable by its futility, not to mention its conflict and cynicism. Since Lansbury trod the martyr’s trail the working class have endured over 60 years of suffering for capitalism. After all that they might realise that there is a lot more to the history of this society that a conflict between saints and sinners.

Ivan

Inside Left (1988)

Book Review from the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Inside Left: The Story So Far. Derek Hatton (Bloomsbury, 1988, £3.95)

Any reader expecting to find incisive, political analysis within the 174 pages of this book will be disappointed. Anyone looking for an unbiased factual record of the events in Liverpool during the period when a majority Labour council was controlled by the Militant Tendency should seek elsewhere. Early in the book Derek Hatton tells how he almost became an actor. It is the misfortune of the working class of Liverpool that Hatton did not take up that profession, but became instead a member of a politically dishonest group of opportunists, the Revolutionary Socialist League, also known as Militant Tendency. Hatton himself displays all the traits of the professional politician - selective memory of past events and a constant desire to be shown in the best possible light. What this book chronicles is the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, self-interested careerist. For all Hatton's rhetoric about class interests, on the evidence presented here one can only come to the conclusion that Hatton would have done very well in the present Conservative Party.

Hatton purports to show how a gallant group of "socialists" engaged in a fight against capitalism, were defeated by the actions of reactionary servants of the ruling class - the Government and the Labour Party. In fact the book actually shows up the hypocrisy of those who seek to impose "socialism" from above. The political philosophy described by Hatton bears as much resemblance to socialism as Barbara Cartland does to literature.

"When the history books are written for the 1980s the names of Militant and Derek Hatton will be right there, alongside those of Kinnock and Thatcher", Hatton writes. When the working class finally achieves emancipation from the domination of capitalist class then Hatton, Militant et al. will be consigned to the dustbin of history where they belong.

Dave Coogan

The Eileen Critchley Show (1991)

It turns out that Channel 4 is currently repeating Alan Bleasdale's drama GBH on its More4 channel. Best known for his earlier TV drama Boys From The Blackstuff, which by common consent is considered one of the most important and best loved dramas in the history of British television, Bleasdale was lauded and condemned in equal measure for GBH because so many people thought it was little more than a knockabout attack on the local politics of his hometown, Liverpool, and the then Militant Tendency's domination of its Labour council. Reproduced below is a review of the drama that appeared in the Socialist Standard at the time of its original showing, which delves deeper and goes beyond the notion that Bleasdale was doing little more than writing ten hours of television drama so that he could stick the metaphorical boot into Derek Hatton.

The Off the Telly website carries an interesting article on GBH, as part of a series of articles on Bleasdale and his work.

TV Review From The August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Channel Four hyped it relentlessly as a Great Drama of our times. Militant renamed it BGH: Bleasdale Gets Hatton. Hatton himself went on Channel Four's Right To Reply to say that Michael Murray must have been based on him because the fictional character was a bullying, corrupt council leader. The Right wing objected because the series portrayed MI5 as being a shower of devious criminals - heaven forbid the thought. The SWP, who rarely comprehend anything that was not written by a dead Russian, denounced Bleasdale as a brown-nose who sold out to the ruling class. GBH (C4, Wednesdays and Sundays) seems to have upset them all. So does all great drama.

What was GBH about? Taken literally, it was implausible nonsense. Whole cities are not thrown into chaos by half a dozen or so Equity ruffians; Good and Evil rarely take on such vivid personal realisations as Murray and Nelson; even corrupt Labour leaders have more political know-how than Murray was shown as having. As fictional political history the series was drivel. Sadly, it is as fictional political history (FPH) that most lefties watched it and switched off in disgust. GBH was about power. It was about why people lust for political leadership, what they do with it, and how, after all the panting after it and delusion of luxuriating in it, most politicians come to discover that they do not really have it. Politicians are tools of power. The French professor, Maximilien Rubel, once wrote a letter to the Socialist Standard saying that the people who are our rulers are paranoid megalamaniacs who cannot be trusted. Maybe so, maybe not - certainly, even the most balanced of leaders must act like a madman if they are to dance to the cacophony of the profit system. Michael Murray, abused and beaten by power, became a political abuser and beater. It was the only way he knew. The political was personal. The brilliance of Bleasdale's writing was that Murray, the hateful petty tyrant, was so much more than that. He was more even than a comical, power-hungry stooge; a modern Chaplinesque Great Dictator. Murray was a man with whom we empathised. His was a world of the used and the users; he had been used and now he tried to use others. His world was our world: the world of human exploitation on every level.

Jim Nelson, Michael Palin's romantic hero of the series, was a man afraid and therefore strong because he understood - or began to do so - his fear. He spoke more than once of how in our society the poison is seeping down. The poison in question is the poison of power-madness and obsessive exploitation. The simplification that evil emanates from Tory bastards may have satisfied simple-minded rebels a decade ago, but now it is clearer to see just how the human perversions of power-madness are coming from all directions, including those movements which pose as being for the people. In short, the fleas from the Tory dog have rubbed off on to the Labour poodles who can only fight the Tories by being like Tories. As for Militant, it is infiltrating amongst the fleas, only able to get power by being more loathsome than the rest. They are playing the same game.

The message of GBH is that if you try to beat the Devil by dressing up as Satan you end up not being able to tell who is who. Murray thought he was being manipulated by Trots when he was really being used by MI5. The only reason he couldn't tell the difference is because there wasn't any. MI5 broke Murray. Bleasdale overstated the real power of the state to intervene in electoral politics. But then this was not FPH. What he got right was the power of the decent many to resist the arrogant few. That is one of the most hopeful political lessons; it must be, for workers are the many and the force against us is the very, very few. The scene in the final episode when the "decent workers", as the caricature portrayed them, stopped the "ignorant little gobshites", as the script referred to the thuggish Trots, from dictating to the majority was an inspiring moment. At that meeting leadership collapsed and illusory power was no shield: Murray wept and the boys who had only ever read one book and knew how to shout slogans were shown that democracy is bigger than them.

But wait a minute. Where was that great scene taking place? In the Labour Party hall. What was a bloke of principle and courage doing in that old wreck of a political whore-house? Here we see Bleasdale the faithful Labourite overcoming the writer of insight. On one level GBH was a series about why Labour should expel Militant. We socialists could not care less if they expel them or sleep with them or form a coalition with the Monster Raving Loonies, but if that is the political message which was being offered to us, then when are we to see the series about hypocritical, compromising, well-bribed Labour "moderates" who do not need to be crushed by MI5 because they are safe? You do not need state conspiracies to neutralise Neil Kinnock or Tony Blair - they come ready-neutered.

GBH will be talked about for a long time to come. It should be. Both Robert Lindsay (Michael Murray) and Michael Palin (Jim Nelson) performed in ways that we will not see again soon. The wit of the writing was a model of classical characterisation and symbolic plotting. It made us think, even though we were not all thinking the same thing. GBH was about a horrible corrupt country - "a cold land" - where the opposition was dirty and the "intelligence" people filthy and all of us either in it or against it.

Steve Coleman

Further Reading:
From the January 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard
Leftist Wonderland: Militant in Liverpool