If Militant had seized power…

The year is 1991. The socialist revolution in Britain has begun, led by the Militant Tendency. After months of protests against the hated poll tax, Ted Grant and his followers succeed in winning over the working-class to the idea of overthrowing the hated capitalist order once and for all. The police and armed forces sent to suppress the demonstrations defect in large numbers across the country, especially in London. A group of armed demonstrators storm key areas in the capital, including No. 10 Downing Street, the Ministry of Defence, Buckingham Palace, and countless others. The Royal Family flees to France. Prime Minister John Major flees the country by helicopter with his entire cabinet, and they end up in Washington D.C. Before leaving, he makes sure to take the nuclear codes with him, making it impossible for any new revolutionary administration to make use of Trident. Leading members of the armed forces either flee the country or go into exile. The civil service, horrified by events, goes on strike, and the country ceases to have any functional administration.

The stock market collapses by 98%, the pound enters into free-fall, production grinds to a halt, and there is capital flight on an astonishing scale, as the capitalist class seeks to save what it can of its assets and escape the oncoming debacle. Without any police force, petty crime explodes on a tremendous scale. There are murders and thefts in broad daylight. There are killings and gang fights that take place right before people’s eyes, and no one intervenes, such is the feeling of euphoria and liberation. Extrajudicial killings by bands of armed revolutionaries meet no resistance or condemnation. LGBT activists are subjected to harassment and intimidation by homophobic gangs of Militant thugs. Homosexuality is described as a symptom of bourgeois degeneracy and decadence, and strongly discouraged within the party ranks. Shopkeepers are dragged through the streets by angry customers and beaten with impunity, and their stores, the fruit of years of labour and family savings, are looted and burned to the ground. Some people take the opportunity to begin targeting immigrants, who are subjected to abuse and physical assault. Many begin leaving the country they called home, returning to the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean and their other countries of origin, or to other European nations. (One of them would undoubtedly be the author’s family.) Only those who felt most oppressed by the old order remain and welcome the overthrow of the establishment. Without law enforcement, no one is properly punished for crimes. People park their cars anywhere, as there are no traffic wardens – that hated occupation has ceased to exist. Traffic accidents multiply, and go unresolved because all the insurance companies are in the process of being nationalised, and the court system has ceased to function. Local councils no longer bother to meet – everyone is too busy getting drunk in celebration of the revolution, or has slunk into disillusionment and despair. Taxes and rate payments go unpaid, bins go uncollected and the dead go unburied.

A new revolutionary government is proclaimed which abolishes the monarchy and declares Britain a Socialist Republic. Ted Grant serves as President, Peter Taaffe as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Alan Woods as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Roger Silverman as Finance Commissar et al. An emergency session of a special revolutionary Parliament is called at which only Militant supporters are invited. Everyone gathered is a representative of one of the many Soviets that have cropped up across the country since the beginning of the year. An Enabling Act is passed that gives Parliament the right to nationalize the top 200 monopolies and place them under state control. It is unclear how this is to be done in practice, though, as all the state officials are refusing to cooperate and it will take time to create a planning administration that can oversee all these industries. In the meantime, the capitalists are sabotaging the economy, leaving nothing left for the new government to administer. Factories are being shut or blown up, people thrown out of work, tools destroyed and machinery and currency placed on ships or put onto planes, to be smuggled out of the country. No one can stop them as there is no more border force – they have all gone AWOL. The navy cannot intercept all these ships as it is in turmoil, with some ships declaring for the revolution and others remaining neutral. No unified command has yet been created to replace the old officers. The same is true for the air force. The workers launch a losing battle to save collapsing industries, taking over production and electing managers etc, but they cannot stop the rot. Workers take the opportunity to simply stop coming into work, or vote themselves massive pay-increases that further destabilise the economy and stoke inflation.

Britain is kicked out of the European Economic Community, further plunging it into economic crisis. Global sanctions are placed upon it, and it is forced to run a virtual siege economy. There is a run on the banks, as people queue in large numbers to withdraw as much money as possible and exchange it into dollars before the currency depreciates any further. In response to this, capital controls are introduced by the government, and it becomes increasingly difficult to get access to foreign currency unless you venture into the black market. Everyone else must use the official system that effectively rations dollars and yen, or must make do with increasingly worthless coins and notes. All imports stop, and soon it is back to the 1940s for the population. The government’s reserves are running dangerously low. They are the only thing preventing total collapse. They cannot be spent forever, and hyper-inflation is only a matter of time. Price controls are imposed. One by one, key goods disappear from the shelves and are sold illegally in dollar currency, in massive street bazaars that cannot be suppressed by the new revolutionary government, no matter how much they try. Despite a ban on exports (which few countries are willing to accept anyway due to sanctions), an illegal import-export trade develops. Most of it involves private individuals. Some revolutionary politicians who are trusted with access to foreign currency to import necessary goods are the biggest swindlers of them all, stealing the money and failing to import the goods asked for, or purchasing shoddy and cheaper alternatives, if not exporting them to other countries for more money. Since most countries have sanctioned socialist Britain, most imports are necessarily illegal under international law, and therefore, not subject to inter-state regulation, meaning that the quality of the goods in question cannot be guaranteed. Rotten fruit, among other atrocities, make their way onto the shelves of the state-run stores. Inevitably, a bureaucracy develops within months, which seeks to centralise the means of production, distribution and exchange in its hands. Effective control over production continues to elude the government and there is anarchy in the factories. The bureaucracy can only suppress the normal methods of distribution and exchange by driving them underground into the black market. Trotsky argued in The Revolution Betrayed that it was scarcity that produced bureaucracy, as a central power was needed to control the distribution of goods in limited quantities so as to prevent social anarchy. He should have realised that it was the other way round – bureaucratic control over the economy, in the name of building socialism, creates artificial scarcity which in turn justifies more bureaucracy to suppress the black market and monitor the population for engaging in perfectly innocent trading activities.

The Militant Tendency changes its name to the British Communist Party, and bans all rival parties, whose leaders are arrested and thrown in jail. Freedom of the press is abolished, and the bourgeois press nationalised and put in the hands of party cronies. State television proclaims the glories of the revolution. Endlessly it sings the praises of Ted Grant, the Dear Leader, and his followers, and recites triumph after triumph of the revolutionary forces. Tony Benn, once a staunch ally, speaks up against the repression. He, too, is arrested, together with the other useful idiots on left of the Labour Party who aided Militant in its rise to power. As the conscience of the left, he is too dangerous to be left unmolested.

The government’s industrial policy is all over the place. It is caught between centralisers who want more government control over the factories, and those who are advocates of workers’ control. The party’s official policy on industry is the ‘third/third/third’ approach borrowed from the Austro-Marxist Otto Bauer. In this, a planning board would be created on which a third of the seats would be reserved for trade unions, a third for the government and a third for consumers. This had been as part of a series of ‘transitional demands’. However, now that the workers have seized power, and given the crisis that has now ensued, the centralisers argue that these demands are no longer pertinent and that the workers’ state must seize complete control over industry, with the trade unions and the interests of consumers subordinated to it. After all, it is ‘their’ state – how can they have interests opposed to it? Another faction defends the autonomy of unions and the rights of consumers. In practice, the centralisers win out. It is clear that the only means by which the Trotskyist vision of socialism can be implemented is that which imposes tremendous sacrifices on the population, sacrifices which will not be accepted without force. Deliberate austerity in the form of rationing of goods and price, wage and capital controls, and unintended austerity caused by the collapse of the currency due to the revolutionary upheaval and the imposition of global sanctions cutting off all imports, militates against a more libertarian ideal of socialism. Barracks socialism it is. The revolution itself, with its socialist ideology of opposition to markets and push for centralised control over the economy, produced this crisis, and the crisis is used as further justification for centralisation, in a vicious circle. The subjective factor and the objective conditions combine to create a disaster scenario. The new revolutionary government begins dismantling workers’ control in the factories and suppressing the independent activity of the working-class. It turns out that the Marxist dream of a workers’ paradise is not possible at all, since the conditions that call forth a revolution are not the conditions that allow for the revolution to remain emancipatory for very long. Xenophobia replaces proletarian internationalism, for it is easier to rouse people with hateful slogans than the optimistic message of brotherhood of peoples. Coercion replaces the free association of producers. One might well ask, what good are lofty ideals if exceptional situations, like revolutionary war, make them unrealisable? That is to say, if real-world events complicate matters? What good is socialism? What good is theory?

A conspiracy of reactionary army officers soon develops. They meet in Kent, bastion of reaction, and discuss the fightback against the revolutionary forces. Across the country, soldiers and officers who are disgusted with events are meeting up and discussing what to do. They form reactionary armies to overthrow the revolution. In Northern Ireland, a provisional government seizes power led by Ian Paisley and the Orange Order, with the support of loyal British troops. Northern Ireland falls to a right-wing, Protestant fundamentalist dictatorship, which viciously suppresses the Catholics and proclaims that its goal is to overthrow the revolutionary regime and restore the old order. Irish Militant is suppressed, and Peter Hadden, its leader, is imprisoned and kept as a hostage, along with all other rival parties. The Irish Republic proclaims this an outrage, declares war, and invades Northern Ireland, exploiting the chaos to reconquer this errant province and bastion of British imperialism. It is supported with weaponry from the rest of Europe and the USSR. Genocidal violence ensues. The U.S., meanwhile, remains neutral in the conflict in Northern Ireland, but actively supports the forces of reaction within the rest of Britain with financing and military aid. The USSR, under Gorbachev, also remains neutral, not wanting to recognise a Trotskyist administration, and seeing it as a bad reflection on his own brand of reform Communism. It is also too preoccupied with domestic strife to throw its weight around on the world stage. No other Communist regime recognises the new project. Fidel Castro reportedly says to one of his aides, ‘These Trotskyist loons will ruin the country and be overthrown within six months.’ Cut off from its old, bourgeois allies in the First World on one side, and from its fellow communists in the rapidly diminishing Second World in the other, the Socialist Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is totally alone.

In Scotland, Scottish nationalists take advantage of the turmoil to proclaim Scotland independent, splitting from the rest of Great Britain. Many of the Scottish Militant members defect, and are joined by anti-Trotskyist forces within the banned Labour Party. A Socialist Republic of Scotland is proclaimed. The Trotskyist administration in London condemns the Scottish republicans as ‘petty-bourgeois nationalists stoking the flames of division and objectively working for the forces of foreign imperialist reaction’. It is to no avail, as the pro-government forces in Scotland are disarmed with ease. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, Derek Hatton and his supporters rule Liverpool as a virtual city-state, ignoring orders from the central government and subjecting the population to a reign of terror.

Soon, people are fleeing Britain and its ruthless Trotskyist regime. Thousands are throwing themselves into the English Channel and swimming across to France. A refugee crisis of astronomical proportions develops, as thousands of British citizens end up in exile on the shores of France. Farmers refuse to sell their produce at the prices demanded by the government, as it barely makes up for the rapidly escalating inflation, so the government sends task forces into the countryside to seize their goods, in a policy reminiscent of the War Communism of the Russian Communists. The farmers organise among themselves to fight back. The National Farmers’ Union resists incorporation into the government’s economic planning administration, and encourages its members to arm themselves in defence against the state’s anti-market policies. The farmers go on strike, refusing to grow the crops needed to feed the country and destroying as much of their surplus as they possibly can. At a time when imports are blocked and when there is a post-war tradition of agricultural self-sufficiency, this is a disaster for the country. Within six months, food stocks will run out and mass starvation blights Britain for the first time since the seventeenth century. Even party members are secretly relying on illegal imports from the black market in order to survive. But don’t worry about Ted Grant and his colleagues in the revolutionary government. Thanks to the generous rations given to ‘leading comrades’, they don’t have to worry about starvation. In order to avert catastrophe, consideration must be given to either relaxing market controls or allowing in humanitarian aid.

Unfortunately for the new Militant government, trade unions in Britain are far stronger than the ones in revolutionary Russia, which were pliable tools in the hands of the leading parties. It is much harder for Grant and his confederates to impose government policy on them. Across the country, the powerful trade union federations launch strike after strike with the aim of forcing concessions. Government troops sent to suppress the strikers end up defecting to their side. There are large, anti-government demonstrations and calls for the restoration of parliamentary democracy, the restoration of the market and an end to price and wage controls. Workers and farmers ask the government to allow them to negotiate directly with one another an acceptable price for their produce. There is chaos on the railways as the railwaymen go on strike repeatedly, and a three-day week is imposed for the first time since 1974 due to the lack of oil and gas imports from abroad. Hospitals can no longer get the equipment and the medicines the need from overseas, and there are reports of patients freezing to death or dying of pneumonia in hospital wards and old people’s homes. People become so cold that they burn the corpses of their dead relatives to stay alive. In the most horrific instances, people resort to cannibalism because they are starving.

Because the civil service are on strike, taxes cannot be collected, nor can decrees be printed in sufficient quantity, nor can the government conduct proper research on the likely outcome of any of its policies. There are not sufficient qualified administrators willing to help the new regime. They would rather see it fall. In order to entice them, the government proposes offering inflation-busting salaries, but this means a betrayal of Lenin’s proposals in State and Revolution regarding paying no state official more than the wage of an average worker. Oh well, objective conditions and all that. That said, it is funny how the very obstacles that the Russian Communists faced in their revolution are being faced in a completely different country, decades later, despite the assurances of the Trotskyists that the ‘advanced’ countries would face far fewer problems in building socialism. Perhaps every revolution is doomed to degenerate, regardless of the specific national situation. Attempts are made to coerce generals in the loyalist British Army to fight for the new revolutionary army by holding their families hostage, just as the Bolsheviks did, but this policy repulses public opinion and causes the new revolutionary government to become more hated. It does not make up for the dreadful state of the revolutionary armies, that cannot hold their own against the reactionary forces that are forming all over the country.

Before long, an American-led NATO fleet has surrounded the country, subjecting it to blockade. There is minimal resistance from the now ramshackle British Navy, some of whom defect to the NATO coalition. They bring over an invasion force which lands all along the British coast, and links up with the reactionary armies to restore the Major government. They begin marching on all the major cities, and the unprepared revolutionary armies can do very little to resist. In most cities, NATO forces are welcomed as liberators from misrule. Though they dare not make such threats publicly, word goes out that the American government, in agreement with the British government-in-exile, is prepared to use nuclear weapons if the revolutionaries do not surrender. In the nuclear age, any revolutionary regime that is not blessed with nuclear weapons, like the USSR, is arguably doomed to fall to the forces of counter-revolution, for what deterrent do they have to protect themselves from foreign aggression? The thought of the beautiful city of London being reduced to ashes and everyone of its inhabitants vaporised terrifies the leaders of the revolutionary government in London. Bankrupt, deeply unpopular and abandoned by most of their followers, the revolutionary cabinet holds an emergency meeting as American and British loyalist troops descend on the capital.

‘We’ve done our best,’ says Ted Grant. ‘We set up the very first British Socialist Republic. But, like the Paris Commune, our efforts were heroic but short-lived. We will live to fight another day. I say we get out of here and save ourselves for the future. The British working-class have proven useless. They are corrupted, bourgeoisified, no longer capable of revolutionary efforts. There will be another revolution, but first, we must save the cadres of this generation and educate the next. I say, the most senior of us should get out of the country.’

‘But where would we go?’ inquires a weary Peter Taaffe. By this point, he is nearly cracking from the strain of governing the country.

Alan Woods speaks up. ‘I say we make our way to Mexico, where Trotsky made his last stand. Failing that, let us go to the Soviet Union, where we have a chance of influencing events and preventing the bureaucracy from liquidating the gains of the revolution. People are hungry for Trotskyist ideas – for true socialism, not this reform nonsense.’

‘I say we stand and fight!’ says one commissar.

‘Now is not the time for petty-bourgeois romanticism!’ snaps Grant. ‘We must think of the future!’

People are unconvinced. Will Gorbachev be at all welcoming of these British Trotskyists? But Mexico is too close to the United States, and they are worried about CIA agents capturing them and sending them back to Britain for trial. By contrast, the USSR is at least a workers’ state, and what’s more, is opening up politically. No English-speaking country will accept these dangerous revolutionaries. The cabinet decides to make a run for it, abandoning the British proletariat that has failed them. That night, they issue a decree dissolving the republic and they make their way into a plane and desert the country. London falls to the counter-revolution. After almost a year, the British Socialist Republic has ended in counter-revolution and the crushing of the far-left for a generation. President George H.W. Bush arrives in the country to officially congratulate John Major on his restoration to power. Britain is restored to the European Economic Community. A program of painful fiscal austerity and high interest rates is put in place to fix the damage left behind by the previous government. Militant is banned and its leaders outlawed. There are mass arrests of those who were part of the revolutionary carnage, and they are put on trial in scenes which are televised across the country. They are then jailed, in many cases, for life. This traumatic period in British history strengthens the natural conservatism of the British people, who resolve never again to return to the dark path of socialist dictatorship. The Conservative Party wins in a landslide in 1992, wins again in 1997, and will not lose another election until 2010, when a young, up-and-coming politician named David Miliband, the son of the Marxist theoretician Ralph, becomes Labour leader and succeeds in presenting a slick, centrist image of the Labour Party that encourages people to turn to it after the financial disaster of 2008. Thus, British bourgeois democracy is given a new lease on life that will not be extinguished for some time.

Meanwhile, Grant and his followers make their way to the USSR, where they witness the collapse of the USSR just a couple of months after their own failed experiment with revolutionary socialism. They are detained by Soviet officials upon their arrival, who would like to do a deal with Britain for their extradition. Convinced that the new Yeltsin administration will hand them over to the restored British government for trial and imprisonment, they take advantage of the chaos caused by the Soviet collapse to escape to Cuba, one of the last workers’ states remaining, albeit very degenerated. Upon arrival on Cuban soil in the summer of 1992, they are detained again by Cuban officials as Trotskyist saboteurs and placed under house arrest. Ted Grant dies on the island in 2000. He could have lived at least six years longer, but was denied the adequate old age care he would have received in that hated bourgeois island of Britain. The rest remain under lock and key to this very day. They will never return to Britain to face justice for their crimes.