Petty point scoring on the poll tax

As a former member of the Militant Tendency, brought up on a diet of myths, dogmas and lectures labelling other left groups as being sects on the fringes of the labour movement, this extremely negative attitude and other rather odd ways of looking at the world should rightly be condemned and learnt from.

However that organisation's tactics and approach, which were sometimes wooden, were unfairly treated in the article.

Militant, through its leadership of the All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, did not oppose the policy of non-implementation, nor oppose taking the campaign into the unions and the Labour Party. Militant supported the non-implementation policy at union conferences and branches and the few councils where it was taken up as a real campaigning option (Lambeth, etc,). In the Labour Party numerous Militant comrades were elected as local councillors on an explicit anti-poll tax ticket and a well established tactic to bring in anti-Poll Tax activists into the Labour Party (not solely the LPYS either) was greeted with a series of expulsions of well known Militant supporters. I personally can remember spending countless hours in ward, GC, EC and Campaign Group meetings and recruiting people to the Party (in retrospect maybe it could be argued too much work was put into this sphere of activity).

The truth of how the campaign developed was that non-implementation was defeated. It would have been far preferable for the organised labour movement to have beaten the tax. However, following the defeat of the miners, printers and the lurch to the right in the Labour Party, this did not happen. What defeated the poll tax was non-payment. We have to look soberly at reality and see things as they are, not as we would have liked them to be, nor how the textbook says it should have gone.

Also blaming Militant and the 'naming names' fiasco (admitted now as a mistake) for the lack of political action by young people over the last decade, the rise of single-issue campaigning and lack of labour movement action is a bit rich. Likewise the insinuation of culpability for Labour's 1992 election defeat is barely worth commenting on.

There is a lot you can lay at the door of the Militant/CWI stable. However, nonsense like this is more likely to be viewed as at best unbalanced, at worst petty point scoring misinformation. It will do little to guide those who have questioned its politics and sectarianism towards a more genuine revolutionary socialism.