ILP conference¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter reports on the 1944 ILP conference, arguing that the leadership’s steady rightward drift, combined with theoretical confusion among the rank and file, rendered the party incapable of rising to the historic tasks of the moment. The core narrative thrust is that Britain is entering an unprecedented period of class struggle, signalled by a wave of strikes, yet the ILP leadership failed to place this at the centre of discussion. The author contends that a self-styled revolutionary party should have sharpened perspectives and prepared militants for leadership, but the centrist leadership neither understood the stormy period ahead nor the dangers and opportunities it presented.
A key claim concerns the leadership’s handling of the capitalist government’s attack on Trotskyists and trade union militants. The rank and file, particularly the revolutionary left-wing—exemplified by Alec Auld, Ted Fletcher, and Bill Loughlin—instinctively recognised this as an assault on working-class rights and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Trotskyists. The leadership, by contrast, was terrified of being labelled “Trotskyist” and offered only individual support, refusing open solidarity with the political tendency. The author notes that John McGovern alone showed courage, but even he avoided naming the Revolutionary Communist Party, as if by pre-arrangement. A Leeds delegate exposed the Standing Orders Committee’s manoeuvring to exclude mention of the political tendency from a protest resolution.
The chapter draws on the historical context of interwar revolutionary defeats, citing the Allied starvation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic and the blockade of the Soviet Union to argue that UNRRA, defended by Tom Taylor and others as a humanitarian body, was in fact a weapon of imperialist blackmail. This polemic targets the open reformist wing, led by Maxton, Taylor, and Carmichael, who argued that Anglo-American imperialism had set up UNRRA purely to feed starving Europeans.
The left-wing scored a decisive victory on Common Wealth, passing a resolution opposing the NAC’s electoral pact with this petit-bourgeois pro-war party. However, the author’s central concern is that the left-wing itself is not homogeneous, firmly knit, or theoretically clear. It reflects new industrial members attracted by the ILP’s anti-war stand and older elements pushed left by events, but unless this nucleus hardens theoretically and struggles consistently against reformist and centrist currents, it will disintegrate. The chapter concludes that the left-wing’s main task is to struggle for theoretical clarity, teach industrial militants the perspectives of the revolutionary current, and prepare the way for fusion of all genuine revolutionary elements into one party. The affiliation of the ILP to the Labour Party, the author argues, would be progressive—accelerating the emergence of a revolutionary left-wing and clarifying the demarcation between revolutionaries and reformists.