In the 1980s, Peter Taaffe, who has died aged 83, was famous in political circles, and Labour party grandees shivered at the sound of his name.
As leader since 1964 of the Militant tendency, which, unlike other Trotskyist groups, wanted to work within the Labour party, Taaffe had spent two decades shaping and implementing a policy of “entryism”, in which Militant members were to take over the party from the ground up.
In 1983 Militant gained control of Liverpool city council. The new intake of Labour MPs after the June 1983 general election included two Militants, Terry Fields, representing Liverpool Broadgreen, and Dave Nellist, for Coventry South East. A third, Pat Wall in Bradford, was elected in 1997.
Militant and the 1984-85 miners’ strike dominated the politics of the labour movement – the Labour party and the trade unions – for most of the 1980s. The journalist Michael Crick, who wrote two books about Militant, estimated in 1985 that it had about 7,000 members, 150 full-time workers, a turnover of around a million pounds a year and offices in most major cities. It was a party within a party.
Under the Labour leader Michael Foot, Taaffe and his four leading lieutenants were expelled in 1983, after three years of bitter debate in the party and in the courts. After Foot’s defeat to Margaret Thatcher in the 1983 general election, Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, began a purge in which dozens of Militant activists all over Britain were expelled.
Taaffe was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, the son of a sheet metal worker, and he and his five siblings grew up in poverty. He was a keen footballer and a lifelong Everton supporter. He was recruited to Militant in 1960 by Ted Grant, a veteran Trotskyist, who had been politically active since arriving in Britain from South Africa in 1934, and had worked with, and fallen out with, most of the major figures in British Trotskyism. They had learned sectarianism and doctrinal rigidity from the Communist party, which they loathed.
Taaffe became the general secretary of Militant in 1964 and launched the Militant newspaper. By the 80s he had made it easily the most significant Trotskyist group, and he remained general secretary of Militant and its successors until 2020. In the 90s, Militant was prominent in the movement to refuse to pay the poll tax, and in the demonstrations against it, which helped to undermine Thatcher.
He was a talented political organiser. His life was politics, and his commitment was total. At one point he was sleeping under the desk in the office, and he only took wages if enough money had been raised.
In 1966 he married Linda Driscoll. A primary school teacher and a leftwing activist in the National Union of Teachers (now the National Education Union), she shared his politics.
Some former associates say Taaffe was ruthless and intolerant of dissent; that those who crossed him found themselves frozen out. But they add that he taught them rigorous socialist study and a disciplined approach, and his successor, Hannah Sell, said: “He was not sectarian. We would discuss all issues and he would listen to everyone.”
These qualities enabled Taaffe to build Militant into a force that could seriously trouble Foot and Kinnock. By 1980, he was a serious player in Labour party politics, which gave him a platform he used skilfully. “The idea that just a few Marxists could just parachute into constituency Labour parties and take them over is absurd,” he wrote in the Guardian that year, just as he was making this absurdity happen.
In the 90s, Labour was moving not to the left, as Taaffe had hoped, but to the right, with the election of Tony Blair as leader in 1994. Taaffe decided the time had come to abandon entryism. Grant disagreed, and when Taaffe got his way at a special national conference in 1992, Grant left Militant (he claimed to have been expelled, which Taaffe denied) and started a new group called Socialist Appeal.
From 1997 to 2020 Taaffe was general secretary of Militant’s successor, the Socialist party, and he was to hit the headlines one more time. In 2016, Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, and some members of the Socialist party argued that this was the time for the left to make peace with the Labour party and to quietly influence its direction.
Taaffe rejected this softly softly approach, instead saying publicly that his old chum Corbyn (they had known each other in Islington before Corbyn was an MP) would lift the ban on Militant. This made it impossible for Corbyn to do any such thing, and Corbyn’s deputy Tom Watson moved swiftly to kill the idea. Taaffe called Watson “Stalinist” – and he knew no worse insult.
For many on the left, Taaffe is the bitter sectarian who helped ensure that the last half century has been dominated by Conservative governments. In the Socialist party, they believe he showed the way forward after the collapse of the Soviet Union, correctly predicting that it would lead in the short term to a move to the right. He inspired love and loyalty. Sell said: “He left us the Socialist party with 2,000 members and members on several trade union executives. That will enable us to advance socialism in the future.”
He is survived by Linda, their two daughters, Katie and Nancy, four grandchildren, and a great-grandson.
• Peter Taaffe, political activist, born 7 April 1942; died 23 April 2025
