Militant Moles

Labor fears of a party split

Since its defeat in last May's national election, Britain's Labor Party has been continuously torn by an internal struggle for power between its left wing and a moderate-to-right contingent headed by former Prime Minister James Callaghan. Last week Labor's left won another round in the skirmish, but in so doing raised anew the prospect of a permanent split in the party, which could come as early as the annual conference at Blackpool next fall.

In a humiliating defeat for Callaghan, Labor's 29-member National Executive Committee voted not to publish a report documenting plans by a cadre of Trotskyite zealots to infiltrate the party. The N.E.C. also reneged on a promise to replace some leftists with moderates on a special committee that is studying the organization and finances of the party, and it restored to good graces a militant leftist who had been expelled for radical activism. Moderate Laborites were outraged. Neville Sandelson, a Member of Parliament for nine years, charged that the N.E.C. had "given their approval and support to subversive and diseased elements" that sought "to overthrow Labor's democratic tradition and ultimately to destroy the parliamentary system."

At the center of the controversy is a semisecret, radical left-wing group called the Militant Tendency. Although it is thought to have only 2,000 members, Militant has acquired disproportionate influence inside the 284,000-member Labor Party by doggedly infiltrating it at the local level. Labor's youth organization, the Young Socialists, is now believed to be controlled almost completely by Militant.

Militant's goals are spelled out in ten documents that a former Labor Party official, Lord Underhill, uncovered nearly three years ago. These plans of action, which Callaghan categorized as "so turgid they were unbelievable," outlined methods for capturing Labor at the grass roots. The program of the group, dubbed "Red Moles" by London's Daily Mirror, also includes fomenting an economic and political crisis in Britain that would result in the apocalyptic collapse of capitalism. One key tactic advocated is "entryism," a neologism coined by Leon Trotsky in 1934 to describe the infiltration of legal political organizations for subversive purposes. Some defectors from Militant accuse it of crudely totalitarian goals. Said one: "There would be less freedom than there is under capitalism. There would be more dissidents in prison than there are in the Soviet Union."

Lord Underhill and other moderates argued that infiltration of the party by any group with its own "program, principles, and policy" was expressly prohibited by Labor's rules. By suppressing a report on Militant's documents, the N.E.C. rejected this argument by a vote of 14 to 12. In another rebuke to the party's center-right, the N.E.C. reinstated "Red Ted" Heslin, who was thrown out of the party a year ago on charges that he espoused revolution.

Labor's N.E.C. is dominated by leftists; their guiding light is proletarian aristocrat Tony Benn, an M.P. who aspires to succeed Callaghan as party leader. The internecine squabbling has led to fear that the party could split into two irreconcilable segments: a centrist group of Social Democrats, some of whom favor an alliance with the Liberal Party, and an openly leftist party that would tolerate the Red Moles and other extreme Marxists. A poll by the London Times showed that 54% of Britons favor a new centrist party in the political lineup. The N.E.C.'s high-handedness may have galvanized the moderates into action. Leaders of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers immediately mounted a campaign to elect moderates to its 1 million-vote conference bloc; that move could swing the balance once again to the cautious socialism of the right.

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