This week BOB cludes his series democracy, tracing the formation League in Bevanism in the late fifties and early sixties.
revival of the left inside the Labour Party.
party.
The PLP rejected this out special conference the ILP hand and voted by 241 votes to 142 to disaffiliate. This made sure that lost influence on the majority who stayed inside the LP.
Furthermore it sent it into a total of 16,773 members 1932 it was reduced by 1935 to 4,392.
The mantle of the new left inside the Labour ParLeague which held its in- fell the Socialist augural meeting on the eve of the 1932 Labour Party conference. executive consisted of all shades of left opinion from those hardly left of centre, right across people sympathetic to the Communist Party.
Its members included people like Stafford Cripps, who in typical British social democratic manner was able to comone cere with left reformism and belief in a constitutional monarchy.
Others on the executive included Nye Bevan, Clement Attlee, Ellen Wilkinson, and distinguished academics like Harold Laski and G.D.H. Cole. It was the influence and prodding the Socialist League that Socialism and Peace, third programme and most radical. bring it more under the control of the whole stamped on by the Labour executive who in disaffiliated the League and two months later declared membership of the League 'to be incompatible with membership When the Socialist League dissolved itself these threats from the right, Cripps and Strauss Tribune as the new voice of the left. Despite its odd salvoes from the side lines Tribune did not organise against Attlee's steady drift to the right. In fact it called for a new Lib-Lab DACL policy which played right into the hands War In September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. 1940 Labour entered into Churcoaleon povert. ment and Attlee was made deputy premier and the Labour Party shut up shop having concluded an electoral alliance the Tories.
Bevan the old left the enders policies coalition The others, without prosecuted the patriotic' war measures abroad.
But war years began SUI deep measures which were vital for any serious capitalist government in tending to change society, were abolished under the pressure of big business Neither did the left inside the Labour fight for a more radical programme Attlee acknowledges Labour's landslide victory in 1945 posed charges on the NHS, Nye Bevan, Harold Wilson and others took up an attack on the leadership.
had been democratic programme the parties and sai Do Ten kin and Labour skell, Jenkins and Tony Crossland in alliance with the right-wing union bureaucrats closed ranks against the Bevanites late fifties the Bevanites had got a new influx support. The Campaign Nuclear experiencing massive growth and Bevanites like Michael Foot were prominent in its activities The left inside the LP got fillip and Wilson and Bevan after resigning from Cabinet over health charges