This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Garageland66 (talk | contribs) at 15:22, 9 September 2015 (This was written in 1997. It refers to the HISTORY of the British left and the Labour left in the 1980s. Not the present day.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 15:22, 9 September 2015 by Garageland66 (talk | contribs) (This was written in 1997. It refers to the HISTORY of the British left and the Labour left in the 1980s. Not the present day.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) For the usual meaning of hard left, see far-left politics.Template:Globalize/UK The 'hard left' was a pejorative used by elements in the media to describe sections of the British left, both inside and outside the Labour Party. In the 1980s in the United Kingdom, the term hard left referred to the Socialist Campaign Group and Labour Briefing, as well as Trotskyist groups such as Militant tendency, the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Organiser. The hard left was more strongly influenced by Marxism, while the soft left had a more gradualist approach to building socialism.
In 1997 Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann wrote:
Labour was ... in the depths of the fratricidal blood-letting that had engulfed it after the defeat of Jim Callaghan's government. The activist left in the constituency parties and the trade unions, with support from some left MPs, most notably Tony Benn, was in revolt against what it saw as the failure of the 1974–9 government to put Labour's principles into practice. On policy, it was insistent that Labour adopt unambiguously radical positions, particularly withdrawal from the European Economic Community and unilateral nuclear disarmament ... But the activists' biggest priority was to make the Parliamentary Labour Party accountable to the party as a whole ... The left coalition was a bizarre mix of radical democrats, Leninists old and new, traditional Labour leftists, feminists, libertarians and decentralists. It was notoriously unstable, not least because it could not agree on the detail of its proposed reforms to the party constitution, and was already beginning to divide into a hard left that wanted to push the revolt to its limit and a soft left that was prepared to compromise.
The pejorative was used during Gordon Brown's leadership for some Labour MPs in contrast to the soft left.
See also
- Far left
- Loony left
- The longest suicide note in history
- Municipal socialism
- Social Democratic Party
- Ultra-leftism
Footnotes
- https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Safety_First.html?id=qVKNAAAAMAAJ&hl=en
- Anderson and Mann, Safety First: The Making of New Labour, Granta, 1997, ISBN 1-86207-070-9 chapter 31. FAULTY LINK. http://www.granta.com/books/chapters/31
Further reading
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