Remember me
Liverpool, 1981. A political virgin from a Labour-voting family of dockworkers finds that his home port is suddenly on the wrong side of the country and work has dried up. At a march for jobs he is befriended by an older man in a donkey jacket. On their next meeting, donkey jacket hands him a book first published in 1925, slim and pamphlet-like, with the enigmatic title “Where is Britain Going?”. Its author is Leon Trotsky, a long dead revolutionary whose name elicits a flicker of recognition. Relevant passages are helpfully highlighted. Next week, it was the History of the Russian Revolution, then, by way of Lenin’s State and Revolution, some of the major works on entryism. Such was the inaugural reading list for recruits to the Revolutionary Socialist League, or Militant Tendency. Those who joined up to Britain’s most notorious Trotskyist organisation tell us this is roughly how recruitment went – with a strong emphasis on required reading.
The Tendency saw itself as the vanguard party of the proletariat in Britain and, from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Eighties, operated clandestinely within the British Labour party. Its aim, in Trotskyist terms, was to overthrow Labour’s daisy-chain weak liberal leadership and then begin the British revolution. They failed catastrophically under the internal pressure of splits and combined external pressure from that most ludicrous troika: Neil Kinnock, Michael Crick (who pursued the group with his typical journalistic venom) and Mrs Thatcher.
And yet British Trotskyism still has its echoes if you listen for them. There were tales of mass entryism during the Labour leadership of the conflict-averse democratic-socialist Jeremy Corbyn. Then, this year, Trotskyists operating under the banner of the Socialist Workers Party briefly emerged to win a victory in Liverpool at the “Your Party” inaugural conference, forcing the old collective leadership model of Militant onto Corbyn’s new vehicle. The British popular press – studiously ignorant of the history of its own country never mind anybody else’s – spent years incorrectly describing Corbyn and his entourage as “Trots” when they led Labour. Now the same hacks are chortling at the final act of Corbyn’s career, in which he has actually come into contact with a motivated group of Trotskyists, who have utterly humiliated him.
Meanwhile, in the pages of the Mail on Sunday, former Trotskyist Peter Hitchens goes on insisting, in his lonely and eccentric but always compelling way, that we already saw the triumph of an essentially Trotskyist project in 1997 when “the Blair revolution left all the buildings standing, all the outward forms in place, but ripped the spirit out of the country”. Other former Trotskyists have converted to the libertarian right: see the strange fate of the cadres of Frank Furedi’s Revolutionary Communist Party. Some have newspaper columns or influential blogs. At least one sits in the House of Lords, put there by Boris Johnson.
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From this grab-bag of disciples, it is easy to see Trotskyism and Trotsky as eccentric, alien influences. The man himself certainly never fitted neatly into British intellectual life. This dead Russian was a politician and then a soldier; he was the cold-blooded killer of the Kronstadt sailors and the Poles who fought his Red Army; before and after all that, he was a writer. (Robert Service, his conservative biographer, has said that he was the most talented politician-writer of the 20th century, barring perhaps only Winston Churchill.) But Trotsky’s engagement with Britain was always more direct and theoretical than that would suggest. And it is through his writing that Trotsky has gone on influencing and encouraging the British left since he first turned his full attention to these islands with the publication of “Where is Britain Going?” a century ago.
In all his works Trotsky showed a recurring interest in the British. This is the place where the working class were first made and where Marx and Engels studied them. It is the crucible of great literature and Trotsky, the best-read revolutionary in history, had a fluent recall of Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen. It is the country of Colonel Rainsborough and the petitioners of the New Model Army. In the bad old days of the Tsar, Trotsky had lived in London, the world capital of exiled revolutionaries. In 1902, he first met his hero Vladimir Ulyanov, pen-name Lenin, at the office of the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra in Clerkenwell.
But it was more than remembered affection which constantly drew Trotsky’s attention back to Britain. Marx had written that the social revolution of Europe would begin with the French, advance with the Germans and finish with the English (the Russians didn’t get a look in). Trotsky had spent years eagerly waiting for the German Revolution. In 1918 he was chief Russian negotiator in the peace of Brest-Litovsk, via which Germany enforced a Tamburlaine-like subjugation of the new communist state, shattering its western frontiers and restoring the independence of Poland, Ukraine and Finland. The West feigned outrage at German predation (all the while planning to use it as a pretext for something equally humiliating at Versailles). But to Trotsky it all made sense – and in the long run didn’t matter. Soon the German proletariat would rise in revolution and both peoples would be united in socialist brotherhood.
The German Revolution never came; it died with Rosa Luxemburg. By 1925 Trotsky was losing hope. The Reds around Europe were being suppressed by gangs of mad homespun paramilitaries fresh from the trenches. Instead of leading the world revolution, after Lenin’s death the USSR had coagulated into a provincial bureaucracy centred around the figure of Joseph Stalin. This was a time of danger for Trotsky. Though he was still riding high as a revolutionary hero and senior government figure, the Stalinists began to move against him and the other radicals who would become known as the Left Opposition. The state ideology had become “socialism in one country”, entailing a communist state with essentially bourgeois characteristics in its foreign policy – defend borders, make beneficial alliances, acquire territorial gains and achieve self-sufficiency.
Trotsky still dreamt of world revolution and thought the Soviet Union was doomed to isolation and decline without it. In his 1936 work The Revolution Betrayed, written from the exile Stalin forced him into, he predicted the collapse of the USSR in both fact and feature with startling accuracy 50 years before it happened. As the state and economy stagnated, he said, the desperate Soviet bureaucracy would seek solace in capitalism in an attempt to save their own skin. (Which of course is exactly what did happen and now we have an old KGB bureaucrat in the Kremlin presiding over the post-Soviet oligarchy.) For the same reasons, Trotsky managed to foresee the Nazi-Soviet pact three years before it “shocked the world”. No wonder his Marxist biographer Isaac Deutscher called him “the prophet”.
It was in this middle of this period of alienation that Trotsky turned again to Britain, where there seemed to be an opportunity. The great mass of the British Empire was already falling into the sea by 1925 and Trotsky predicted its ruin, Britain’s “increasing capitulation to America”, and a concomitant crisis with potentially revolutionary outcomes. It was an acute diagnosis for Britain’s 20th century path, though the workers’ revolution never came and seems further away now than it did when he wrote. But with his merciless critique of the class basis of the Labour party, Trotsky started an argument that is still raging 100 years later. In blunt terms, he pointed out that Britain has a supposedly working-class party that is run by middle class liberals, the central problem of Labourism that is unresolved to this day. Today, with resentful voters splitting off to the Greens on the left and Reform on the right, this original contradiction remains Labour’s core fracture.
“Where is Britain Going?” is firstly a standard guide to revolutionary theory, and these sections are as dead as the doctrines they describe. (Put it like this: the more headway the Trotskyists make in Corbyn’s Your Party, the more irrelevant it seems.) But the book still sings for its brilliantly vicious attacks on a still very present institution: the leadership of the Labour party and its intellectual, political and social circles. In Trotsky’s time, this involved taking aim at the co-founders of the Party and of this magazine, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Taken together, he wrote, “they came to consummate the uncompleted work of total enslavement of the working class to bourgeois society”. It’s a slur against Labour that the left has never tired of – not least because several of Labour’s leading figures insist on reviving the positioning Trotsky first railed against.
The Britain Trotsky was writing about was bitter and declining. Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives were presiding over a widespread disaffection with the broken promises of the post-war Lloyd George coalition, and militancy was growing around the Labour movement (the General Strike was a year away). The Labour party had been in power once, for nine months in 1924, in a handholding confidence and supply arrangement with Asquith’s Liberals, but their administration was widely regarded as a salutary disappointment. In a symbol of things to come, the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, insisted on wearing court dress to meet the King, keen to uphold an impression of Establishment continuity. MacDonald desired social harmony, exalted notions of Christian socialism, taught pragmatism, and welcomed pacifists.
For Trotsky all this was a foul cocktail which gave the Tories a free run and did nothing in the country but elicit coos of pitiful sympathy from the comfortably off. Writing of the Labour leader’s “complete mental bankruptcy” he said “the social solidarity which MacDonald preaches is the solidarity of the exploited with the exploiters, in other words, the maintenance of exploitation”. MacDonald’s brain he described as “the ideological shop of an old furniture-dealer, where the stifling scent of naphthalene does not interfere with the successful work of the moths”. He thought the Labour leadership’s project was doomed because the Conservatives would “do all that lay in their power” – in concert with the Lords, the judiciary, the army and the bureaucracy – to stop a future Labour government from achieving anything socialistic, and the leaders of the party would be too weak and obsessed with demonstrating Establishment respectability to fight back.
The fact that, by 1931, MacDonald had not just ceded power to a Tory restoration but had actually placed himself at the head of it as a coalition prime minister would not have surprised a Trotsky in this temper. No one in the shadow cabinet was spared: “one may with as much reason expect revolutionary energy from MacDonald, [J.R.] Clynes, and [Philip] Snowden, as one may expect a sweet scent from a rotten beetroot”. George Lansbury and his fellow left pacifists were hypocrites, “mentally enslave[d]” by the bourgeoisie (because they swore off force without opposing the force used to prop up the imperial government abroad). The Fabians were “the most reactionary group of people in Great Britain”. Snowden, later Chancellor, was a soft Tory in a red rosette who was “not fit for anything” while his wife Mrs Snowden was a “conservative old lady” who believed the royal family were “the most industrious class in society”.
Trotsky would live to regret this invective when, in 1929, exiled by Stalin, he sought refuge in Britain shortly after the election of a second Labour government. He sent personal telegrams to Snowden and Lansbury regarding his visa request and was politely told that nothing could be done. But is it so surprising that Trotsky’s venom flecked Labour so much more than the Tories? Like many left revolutionaries he possessed at least a grudging respect for the ruthless political efficiency of grey, calculating men like Baldwin, and the fact that they were rather better at “class war” than the trembling ranks of the Parliamentary Labour Party. “The Conservatives are made of stronger stuff than the flamboyant socialists,” he wrote. It’s the same admission that the intelligent left would make of Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s: that she was the most successful class warrior of the period, only on the other side.
MacDonald is a villain of the Labour movement: a turncoat and a compromiser. And Patrick Maguire – a historian of Labour and one of the Westminster lobby’s most scholarly correspondents – wrote in the Times with great predictive force back in December 2022 that Keir Starmer could go the same way. This would not take the form of a 1931-style betrayal. Instead, Starmer would be resented and then forgotten because his government would be “overcome by crisis” and prove unable to respond to the pressures from its own voters and movement, instead prioritising the financial markets and Establishment credibility.
It was the same unfolding that Trotsky predicted, from a revolutionary rather than a journalistic standpoint, when he wrote in “Where is Britain Going?” that a future MacDonald government would “swing from side to side, irritating one, not satisfying the other, provoking the bourgeoisie by its dilatoriness, intensifying the impatience of the workers”. This is almost word for word, minus the Marxist jargon, the critique the current Labour government hears from its own movement and backbenches.
Under MacDonald, Trotsky wrote, “there would be no point in raising the very question of the realisability of socialism by parliamentary means, for the Budget of the City has nothing in common with the Budget of socialism”. Remember Andy Burnham’s comments to this magazine about the Labour government being “in hock to the bond markets”? This is not to dub Burnham a crypto-Trotskyist, but simply to observe that the same disappointment and despair on Labour’s left flank endures 100 years later.
Trotsky’s prediction was that the weakness of MacDonaldism in government would please no one, shatter the left, and revive the Conservatives, with a revitalised right-wing at their helm. “Along this road the MacDonald government will sooner or later in accordance with the interrelationships of power in Parliament have to yield their places either to a Conservative government, with fascist and not compromising tendencies, or to a revolutionary government.” A Labour MP recently told me that, on current trends, he thinks Britain is set to get both at the same time by the end of this decade: a government of the revolutionary right under Nigel Farage.
The solution the Parliamentary Labour Party have landed upon is the leadership contest widely expected in the New Year, and through that contest a change of direction on Europe and the economy. But Trotsky had firm words for any potential leader of the Labour party, a historical argument as much as a political one. The reason for all their troubles, he wrote, was that they had nothing to do with labour, with the working class. He traced the party’s origins back through the old Liberal party – which used to own the working class vote on a short lease – back to the Independent faction of the New Model Army during the Civil War period. He said that all three great of leaders of these movements – Cromwell, Gladstone and MacDonald – were essentially paternalists.
It is worth quoting Trotsky in full on this point: “On the foundation of the Independents was built up British Liberalism, the chief mission of which was to educate, in other words to bring the working masses into subjection to bourgeois society. Within certain limits and down to a certain period Liberalism fulfilled this mission, but in the final resort it was as little able to remould the working class as was Puritanism. To replace the Liberals came the Labour party, with the same traditions – Puritan and Liberal.” This is a structural bind. By historical accident a form of puritanical liberalism had become the party ideology of the industrial working class, an ideology with which they had almost nothing in common. As Trotsky put it, “the leaders of the Labour Party lead it with closed eyes, without perspectives, without an understanding of social realities”.
As the summation of Labour’s problem, Trotsky quotes MacDonald’s dictum that “Socialism forms the religion of service to the people.” This instrumental, representative view of “socialism” enraged Trotsky.“In those words,” he thundered, “is immediately betrayed the benevolent bourgeois, the left Liberal, who ‘serves’ the people, coming to them from one side, or more truly from above. Such an approach has its roots entirely in the dim past, when the radical intelligentsia went to live in the working class districts of London in order to carry on cultural and educational work.” On 5 July 2024 Keir Starmer stood outside 10 Downing Street and said that he would form a “government of service”. Was the reference even conscious? It was far more indicative of Starmer’s ideological heritage than any talk of an “island of strangers”.
If the Labour party were ever to thrive, Trotsky concluded, it “must finally liquidate the Puritan-Liberal tradition”. I’m not sure that imperative can be easily discerned from anything said about politics in recent years by Maurice Glasman, the founder of the Blue Labour group, or even Nigel Farage, as well as socialist critics of Labourism who are now breaking off into parties of the left. The polls now tell us that, despite Labour winning across class lines at the general election, the average working-class voter intends to support Reform, while Labour does best with thewell-off.
“The workers voted for Liberals, but remained workers in the mass, and the Liberals had always to be on the alert. The very displacing of the Liberal Party by a Labour Party was the result of the pressure of the proletarian masses,” Trotsky concluded. In 2025, the Labour party’s crisis of political direction stems from a fear that the plates are shifting, “the pressure of the proletarian masses” is building and comfortable assumptions about politics are disintegrating.
The Blue Labour tendency is one response to this, plain-speaking about its intention to wrest back the support of one idealised version of the British working class. The Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is its current champion in the Cabinet. Or look at the regional populism of Andy Burnham, who hopes to build a national political movement out of the North-Midlands identity that has sustained Labour in its heartlands even as older class distinctions have withered away. In London there is Sadiq Khan, whose ability to unite the massive ethnic diversity of the working class in a 21st-century megacity is proportionate to the fury he generates on the political right.
There are alternative visions at play. Yet the Labour party doesn’t have this conversation in terms of class, instead talking of “hardworking families” and “working people”, “voter coalitions” and “hero voters”. After all the trials of Militant and other left-wing challenges – along with a general allergy to notions of political theory – you will not hear Labour politicians speak the name of Leon Trotsky, whose image is abominated in the party like that of Emmanuel Goldstein. And yet all are asking the question he posed 100 years ago: where is Britain going next?
[Further reading: Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid politics]
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