The Fourth Protocol

As each successive constituency fell to the new Hard Left activist control, the position of the largely centrist MPs representing those constituencies became tougher and tougher. Still, they could not be easily ousted. For the true triumph of the Hard Left it was necessary to weaken, indeed emasculate, the independence of conscience of a member of Parliament; to transform him from the trustee of all his constituents’ interests into a mere legate of his general management committee.

This was brilliantly achieved by the Hard Left at Brighton in 1979 with the passage of the new rule requiring the annual reselection (or deselection) of MPs by their management committees. The rule caused a massive switch of power. A whole group of centrists quit to form the Social Democratic Party; others were deselected and left politics; some of the ablest centrists were harassed into resignation. Still, the Parliamentary Labour Party, though emasculated and humiliated, was left with one vital function: the MPs, and they alone, could elect the Labour Party leader. It was crucial, to complete the three-pronged capture, to take that power away from them. This was achieved, again at the urging of the Hard Left, in 1981 with the creation of the electoral college, in which thirty percent of the votes are held by the Parliamentary Party, thirty percent by the constituency parties, and forty percent by the trade unions. The college will elect each new leader as and when needed, and reconfirm him annually. This last function is crucial to the plans now afoot, and which I will explain.

The struggle for control that I have described brings the story to the general election of 1983. The takeover was almost complete, but our friends had made two errors, aberrations from the Leninist doctrine of caution and dissimulation. They had come out too openly, too visibly, to win those titanic struggles, and the premature call for a general election caught them on the hop. The Hard Left needed one extra year to consolidate, mollify, unify. They did not get it. The Party, saddled too early with the most extreme Hard Left manifesto in history, was in complete disarray.

Worse, the British public had seen the real face of the Hard Left.

As you will recall, the 1983 election was apparently a disaster for the by now Hard Left-dominated Labour Party. Yet I suggest the outcome was in fact a blessing in disguise. For it led to the gritty and self-denying realism to which our true friends in the Party have agreed to submit themselves over the past forty months.

Briefly, out of 650 constituencies in Britain in 1983, the Labour Party won only 209. But it was not quite so bad as it looked. For one thing, of those 209 sitting Labour MPs, 100 were now firmly of the Left, 40 of them of the Hard Left. It may be small, but today’s Parliamentary Labour Party is the farthest left that has ever sat in the House of Commons.

Second, the defeat at the polls gave a jolt to those fools who thought the struggle for total control was already over. They soon realized that after the bitter but necessary struggle by our friends to win control of the Party between 1979 and 1983, the time had come to reestablish unity and to repair the damaged power base in the country, with an eye to the next election. This program began under Hard Left orchestration at the October 1983 Party Conference, and has been unswerving ever since.

Third, they all saw the necessity to return to that clandestinity demanded by Lenin of true believers operating inside a bourgeois society. Thus the leitmotif of the whole span of the Hard Left’s conduct these past forty months has been a return to that clandestinity that worked so well through the early and mid-1970s. This has been coupled with a reversion to an apparent and surprising degree of moderation. It has taken a vast effort of self-discipline to achieve this, but again the comrades have not been found wanting in this regard.

Since October 1983, the Hard Left has effectively taken on the clothes of courtesy, tolerance, and moderation; stress is eternally laid upon the primordial importance of Party unity, and a number of hitherto impossible concessions have been made in Hard Left dogma to achieve this. Both the centrist wing, delighted and amicable, and the media appear to have been completely taken by the new, acceptable face of our Marxist-Leninist friends.

More covertly, the takeover of the Party has been finalized. All the lever committees are now either in the hands of the Hard Left or could be taken over during a single emergency meeting. But—and it is an important

“but”—they have usually been content to leave the chairmanship of these lever committees in the hands of a Soft Left person, and occasionally, when the voting supremacy is sufficiently overwhelming, even in the hands of a centrist.