The emergence of the post-1968 left
Talks2010sAlan Thornett at a Socialist Resistance meeting that brought together speakers from the Fourth International and former members of the SWP: Jane Shallice, David Renton, Penny Duggan, Ernie Tate, Ian Birchall and Alan. He speaks on the class struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, why the Cowley stewards chose Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League in 1965, and the far left's need to unite. He answers points made by earlier speakers, among them Ian Birchall and Tony, who is not otherwise identified. The recording begins as he starts. Recording on the SocResVideo YouTube channel; transcript corrected from the automatic captions, 10 Oct 2026. Square brackets mark words supplied or not clearly heard; figures are as he gave them.
A corrected transcript of the recording. The recording is the authority.
00:00 Alan Thornett: Yes, one thing before I forget, about that [fusion]. Having just read [Ian's] biography of Tony Cliff, the point he makes in there is that actually there were no discussions as part of that fusion at all. As he describes it, Tony Cliff [inaudible] a few words, and it was a done deal, and that was it, and everybody found out about it afterwards. And I certainly
00:30 think that, whether that would ever have been fruitful is another matter, but it certainly isn't the way to approach a future [fusion]. I strongly agree with the point Ian has made about the significance of this meeting: that we need to more thoroughly understand our history, and we need to start to work together in a much more collaborative way. I think that's going to be important. And I think in a
01:00 modest way this meeting is quite significant, in that we can have this kind of meeting, coming from different traditions, maybe kicking chunks out of each other in the past, but we have a civilised discussion and start to discuss all this. This is actually rather important. There are not many examples of this that have happened in the past. So I think that, last week, when I started to think about what I was going to say here, I
01:30 thought, well, [inaudible] who was here earlier, who spoke to you earlier and has had to go now, said the problem for this meeting is: what would we say about Gerry Healy, and what would we say about the SLL? Because for the last 30 years I've never said a single positive thing about that whole tradition. And I think there isn't [much] positive to say about
02:00 that tradition. However, if we're going to look at it a bit more, and I'll come to this a bit later, I think there are some things, at least indirectly, [inaudible]. Some things they did from a very bad political position, some things they actually did which were very good things, which happened at the time. Now, the thesis I want to argue in
02:30 this contribution is that what this period of the sixties and the seventies, and actually up to the mid-eighties, actually represented was that for the first time for many years there was a possibility of developing in the trade unions a kind of trade unionism which went beyond the old constraints of economism and organisation: a more
03:00 politically based trade unionism. And in my opinion that was developing throughout the sixties, certainly developing, well, I would even say the sixties, certainly through the seventies, and then was smashed with the defeat of the miners. It was brought to an end. So I think that period was an incredible period of lost opportunity, I'd like to argue. Because I agree with everything that has been said here about what brought a new left forward in that period, a new left in terms of
03:30 all the forms of political ferment that have been described here, the New Left Review and all that, and the emergence of Trotskyism, the growth of Trotskyist organisations. I agree that there's a multiplicity of factors which brought these forward, and I agree with what's been said: the Hungarian revolution, Khrushchev's speech, hugely important. The Communist Party lost 10,000 members after Khrushchev's speech, 10,000 members,
04:00 disproportionately industrial workers they were, and the Healy movement took more of them than anybody else, and worked with them for a period more than anybody else. But I'll come back to that later. And then there's what's already been mentioned: the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, May–June '68, the Prague Spring. And you could go on to say, in a negative way, the fall of Allende in '73, and the Portuguese revolution in '74. These
04:30 were things which were developing people politically, and developing a new left politically, and were hugely important. But there was another factor as well which in my opinion underpinned that development, and without which it wouldn't have developed in the same way. And that is that right through the sixties and the seventies there was a rising level of militancy in industrial struggle. I think it
05:00 underpinned the whole thing. It was by no means the only factor, but it underpinned the whole thing, and it meant that people developed politically very rapidly. I mean, I could take my own situation. I came from a conservative background, a Tory-voting family. Worked on a farm milking cows, went into the army, came out of the army in '59, went into the car
05:30 factory at Cowley: just a completely different world. And within three years of going in there I was a member of the Communist Party and a shop steward, and leading strikes on a regular basis. And that wasn't, I wouldn't say everybody joined the Communist Party, but in terms of a turn to politics, that wasn't by any means an
06:00 unusual situation. I then left the Communist Party in '65, just before getting expelled from it, accused of consorting with Trotskyists. And what happened after that was that a group of us, a group of CP shop stewards in Cowley, six or seven shop stewards in Cowley, left the Communist Party. We asked Tony Cliff for discussions; we had discussions with Tony Cliff, and we had discussions
06:30 with Gerry Healy, and we chose Gerry Healy. [inaudible] The discussions didn't amount to much in themselves, because they were all about, both discussions were about, either state capitalism or deformed workers' state. That's what it was all about. This was such a dominant thing in terms of who you joined that this had to be sorted out. I'm not sure, though, in actual fact, that that was
07:00 why we went the way we did. Because what impressed us, maybe in a naive way, but nevertheless what most impressed us, was the SLL's industrial involvement, even from the SLL [inaudible] through the mid-1950s, and particularly after the Communist Party [split], when people like Brian Behan and
07:30 Harry Constable and people like that went in. And we knew they were heavily industrially involved. They had people on the docks, they had people in the railway workshops in Swindon. And it was that connection, and what appeared to be a very serious attitude towards industrial organisation, that had a kind of attractiveness in that way. And
08:00 the militancy: there were some very important strikes, actually, in the 1950s. There were strikes in the car industry, both defending convenors who'd got victimised for getting organised. There were also a number of big strikes against redundancy, because people had come out of the war and didn't think they'd start getting made redundant again, and a big reaction against
08:30 redundancies. And there were actually some big strikes on the building sites, including the building sites in London. Brian Behan, in fact, I think he was jailed for organising the Festival of Britain strike, for holding up the completion of the Festival of Britain site. So these were serious. And also what the SLL had done in terms of the blue union in the northern ports, where they'd
09:00 fought for the independence of the blue union against the T&G, which of course was under a very anti-communist leadership. So all these things had an effect on us. And then there was what we were seeing in front of us in our own factory. By the mid-sixties the number of strikes in the factory I was working at was an average of 250 a year, and by '69,
09:30 according to the Ministry of Labour figures, there were 624. Which was, you know, at least two a night, it's three a night on the night shift, [inaudible]. It drove the situation. But, like Tony was saying this morning, it was also incredibly contradictory. I became a
10:00 full-time convenor of stewards in '68, well, [deputy], and I was there then for ten years. One of the first strikes I was called to, one of the tracks had stopped: a group of workers saying, we're not working with these Pakistanis because they smell of curry. And we said, that's not a problem: go home now, and we'll cover your jobs, and don't come back.
10:30 And that was not the only one; there were quite a few such strikes, racist strikes of various forms, which took place, actually. And we were able to break the colour bar. The colour bar in Cowley was actually worse than Tony described in [Southall]. In Cowley they only employed black people on cleansing, only on cleansing, which was broken by the
11:00 unions. And then black workers went onto the tracks, and then there were strikes on the tracks: we don't want to work alongside them. And then there was this: workers continuously taking action and driving up their own working conditions, getting huge victories in terms of imposing [their] conditions. And also, I mean, in terms of the development of political consciousness, which is why I would argue about what had been possible in that period:
11:30 a number of things. After the Wilson government attempted to impose anti-union laws with In Place of Strife, and then Heath with the Industrial Relations Act, between '69 and '74 there were 13 national, mostly unofficial, strikes, directly against the government, to stop the imposition of anti-union laws. And both of those bills were defeated. Both of them were defeated by major, mostly
12:00 unofficial, industrial action. And the biggest of the strikes against the Industrial Relations Act, in Oxford, a little place, on top of [that], 27,000 out, 13,000 of which were in the car industry on that day. So those were political strikes, directly political strikes, which were obviously raising consciousness. There were solidarity actions, which were fairly common, just
12:30 where we would come out for a day in solidarity with that factory over there that needed some support, which is actually quite an advanced form of action. There was a series of occupations throughout the engineering industry in the 1970s, which also, again, points towards a development of political consciousness. In the Cowley assembly plant I worked in, in the oil crisis, the factory was occupied. I think it's the
13:00 only example of a major car assembly plant being occupied; I don't know of another one. And then there were the other events, like the Pentonville Five in '72, which was a huge consciousness-raiser, absolutely huge. The night shift actually in Cowley, [where I was], the night shift walked out spontaneously in solidarity when they heard about the Pentonville Five: spontaneously,
13:30 immediately. And the Shrewsbury pickets, the building workers, which was another really big campaign, and [a raising] of consciousness. Then of course there was the Winter of Discontent. And, I mean, you might know I'm not a [supporter of] Tony Cliff's downturn theory of the mid-seventies, because actually, in my view, the Winter of Discontent was a bigger mobilisation even than the early seventies. Because '72 saw 23 million days of
14:00 strike action; '79 saw 30 million, 30 million days of strike action. And you had a seven-week strike of Ford workers which smashed the pay freeze, and you also had a five-week strike of haulage workers, who were issuing dockets to allow the movement of essential services. Employers had to go to a strike committee and say, will you give us a docket, and make the case that
14:30 this is absolutely essential stuff. So it was very [high]. And also, just finally, in my view, what was achieved then in a number of factories, it wasn't just Cowley, I mean Ford's, [inaudible], a lot of plants had a very similar kind of strike record in that period: what was achieved then, I wouldn't argue it was workers' control, but there were big elements of workers' control. I mean, the shop stewards there, the shop stewards committee, 300 in
15:00 our factory, controlled just about everything. It controlled who did what job, how hard they worked, and it controlled all working conditions in the factory. Management had very little say in any of that. The only thing they had a say in, which we never challenged, was what they produced. They decided what they produced, and we decided the conditions under which it was produced. That was the way it was. And so I think these achievements were [important].
15:30 And also, OK, so I think all this is very important to try to preserve, all this, for when we assess the situation, a dire situation we're [in now]. Because one of the reasons why it's so difficult to get struggle off the ground now is because that level of struggle is low. It's not any longer underpinned by that.
16:00 Actually, if you look at the Bennite movement that emerged in the early eighties, the driving force of the Benn movement was the struggle in the factories. I mean, one thing that Benn [did], there's no doubt about it, he supported struggle, and the reason Benn moved to the left in that period was under the impact of the struggle in the factories. So I think this is all a [really] important thing to bear in mind. But I could just come back
16:30 finally to a point [Ian] made about factions. I don't think it's a matter of whether factions are a good thing or not. Nobody would regard factions as a good thing; it's very nice if you don't have factions. The problem is that the absence of factions equates to an absence of democracy, and that's the problem. The right of
17:00 a faction, the right to a tendency, facilitates democracy, and means that you don't have to split over everything, but there can be an ongoing discussion. And also you said, well, maybe the thing we shouldn't be doing at the present time is looking towards fusions and regroupment, rather than working together. Well, I think we do have to start working
17:30 together. We do have to start looking to a different kind of far-left organisation than we've had in the past. It has to be much, much more heterogeneous. It has to be much more tolerant of discussions, much more open to discussions. It has to have a kind of democratic centralism that doesn't stop people speaking in public and so on, where people can express their views and everything else. And we do need a different kind of far left. But I do
18:00 think at some stage that is going to mean organisational coming together. Because at the moment the problem with the divisions we've got amongst the far left is not just that it means the far left is disorganised; it means that the wider struggle is disorganised, because many of the divisions in the far left replicate themselves in the major campaigns that are carried out in a wider way. So you've got different
18:30 organisations having their own anti-cuts campaigns and so on. So I actually think that the question of unity, particularly in Britain, it's an issue everywhere, but I do think the issue of unity in Britain is of particular importance. And not just because we ought to be in the same room rather than a dozen different rooms, but because it's in the interests of the working class, in the interests of the struggle, for the far left to be united,
19:00 in order to unite the movement as a whole.