20 January 2008
THE PROBLEM WITH DEEP ENTRYISM … IS THAT YOU ALWAYS GET FOUND OUT
I’m rather looking forward to tomorrow’s Channel Four Despatches programme on Ken Livingstone and (inter alia) his relationship with the Trots of Socialist Action. I had a couple of pints several months ago with one of the researchers on the programme and tried to make it clear that the London mayor’s relationship with the comrades was a bit one-way – he got a completely loyal mini-political-machine in return for a little bit of leftist posturing on his part – but it doesn’t seem that my analysis convinced her. All the pre-broadcast press (see Nick Cohen here and the Sunday Times here and here) suggests that the programme takes the line that Socialist Action is a dangerous shady conspiracy. Oh, well. What's more amazing is that it has taken so long for this to turn into a story. The Guardian had it (buried in paragraph 98) eight years ago, and even I mentioned it in passing nearly five years back.
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5 comments:
The Sunday Times article was a throwback to some of the red scare crap that one would read in the press in the eighties. It was laughable.
As you wrote, the so called Socialist Action revelations has been common knowledge on the left for years.
The fact that the revelations are spewed up now - after Livingstone has been elected twice as London mayor - says a lot about the slipshod nature of a lot of political journalism.
In the deepest inner recesses of my memory i am convinced i bumped into a very young ken in the closecompany of a group of people who were supporters of Solidarity (the old anarcho-syndaclist group, now, i think, dead)
But i may, aftre all these years, have been mistaken.
Solidarity could never be considered anarcho-syndicalist, and wasn't the whole point of Ken's rapid ascent in the London Labour Party was the fact that he joined Labour in '68, when everyone else of his generation was leaving it. (He said as much in his autobiography years ago.)
Or are you thinking of Ken Weller?
Livingstone told Tariq Ali in an interview in the early 1980s that he was close to Solid in the 60s, but Ken Weller told me he couldn't remember him. (I was in Solidarity myself for many years and would be now if we could revive it.) But Darren, you're right that the org was never anarcho-syndicalist. Gawd forbid.
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