Jock Haston was one of Ted Grant’s supporters during the struggle to build a Trotskyist organisation in Britain during the 1940s. Exhausted, he dropped out of the movement around 1950, his shot-gun merger with the Healyites having backfired. Alan Woods touches on Haston’s desertion in his book about Ted Grant, but sanitises it – the two appear to have remained on good terms even after Haston’s renegacy. When I was in the sect we were never told just how far this break with Trotskyism went. I have since found out, chancing upon Haston’s resignation statement on the Internet. It’s wonderful how the bullshit with which we were brainwashed comes rapidly unstuck the moment you find critical information out there on the web. Here is Haston renouncing the idea of a Trotskyist vanguard conducting ‘entrism’ inside the mass parties:
‘So also have I revised my view that it is historically and practically necessary to form a tightly disciplined, secret organisation separate from the mass party of the working class as the only possible instrument of socialist emancipation. The perspective that it is necessary to work for a split which we have so unsuccessfully pursued for years. I now believe to be completely false. It seems today to be incomprehensible that I could have seriously visualised success on this basis, namely, that a mass revolutionary current could be developed on the basis of a tight, secret fraction. On the contrary, the very nature of the group necessarily did in the past and will in the future confine the Trotskyist movement to that of a sectarian clique. With this method we cannot approach the workers squarely and honestly with a rounded out case. Only the select few must be brought into the confidence when they are considered to be sufficiently well seasoned. This is not a moral question. It is a political question of the greatest importance.’
Who has been proven right in recent years? Haston, or Grant and the other Trotskyist cult leaders, who have continued with the same idiotic tactics decade after decade, but haven’t gotten anywhere?
Haston adds:
‘My break provided the opportunity of witnessing more clearly the degeneration of the British organisation, revealed in the reaction of the leadership. The membership were presented with an ultimatum to break not only political, but also personal relations with me on the pain of expulsion. It was further stated that Haston had to be driven out of the Labour movement and especially out of the National Council of Labour Colleges. Only the Stalinists, to my knowledge, have carried out this practise, one which was universally condemned by the Trotskyist movement. Unfortunately, this is a tendency which now characterises the movement and reflects its sectarianism. This campaign has, of course, a serious aspect, especially for the illegal organisation. For example, a few days after I left the organisation I was approached by a student of one of my NCLC classes, a Labour Party member, who asked me why I had been expelled from the Trotskyist organisation as a “renegade” and “enemy of the working class”. He could not understand this in the light of my lecture with which he was in complete accord. To expose the accusations, it was necessary to give my reasons for leaving the organisation. If a public discussion develops on this premise, the responsibility for the outcome must rest with the maligners.’
Trotskyism never changes. The same toxicity and cultism has characterised it from its origins to the present day. It should be swept into the dustbin of history.