Word: callaghan
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Laborites fumed. Chief among them was former Prime Minister James Callaghan, who called the budget "the meanest the country has had since 1931." Surveying the new excise taxes, David Basnett, general secretary of the General and Municipal Workers Union, snapped: "Workers who live in a cave-if they don't smoke, if they don't drink, and if they drive an electric car-might say they were coming out better." Even business was chary over Thatcher's plan, which will be especially painful in the short term...
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...
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...
...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...
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...