Word: benn
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Williams' departure drew strong criticism. Radical Left-Wing Leader Tony Benn accused her of "aiding the Tories." Some party moderates argued that it would have been wiser to stay and fight the left from within. Complained one executive committee member...
...party's leadership is already dominated by moderate leftists who hesitate to discipline troublemakers. The 30-member national executive committee, for example, is controlled by its 19 leftist members, including Heffer and Benn. Four of the twelve major unions in the party vote consistently with the left. Of Labor's 635 constituency parties, the militants already control some 100 and carry weight in another...
...consequent impact of a mere 10,000 militant activists has been out of all proportion to their numbers. The heaviest hitters are the followers of Tony Benn and a loosely organized group of Trotskyites called the Militant Tendency. Militant Tendency runs its own weekly newspaper, maintains a full-time paid staff of 66 whose prime task is to recruit students to the cause, and controls some 2,000 regulars. Predicts M.T. Leader Ted Grant, 67, a balding South African-born revolutionary: "In another five to ten years the Marxists will have real influence in the party...
What conditions have fostered the radical transformation from the libertarian tradition of Aneurin Bevan to the hot-eyed radicalism of Benn and Scargill? Some believe that Britain's freewheeling, free-spending years under a succession of Labor governments raised illusory expectations for the young. Others think the party became devoid of serious ideas. "There was an ideological vacuum in the Labor Party," says Peter Shipley, a conservative expert on British revolutionaries. "Labor had come to a full stop. The extreme left claimed to have the answers and started to fill the vacuum." Says Alfred Sherman, director of Britain...
Despite the protests, the young activist won the job by a 15-to-12 vote of the Labor Party national executive committee. Backing him were three mainstays of the party's radical wing: Tony Benn, Eric Heffer, and Labor M.P. Frank Allaun, a pacifist often suspected of pro-Moscow views. Bevan thus became chief Marxist proselytizer among the nation's youth. Says he: "I'm trying to convince young people to fight for real socialist policies where it counts. We have to transform the Labor Party...