I’ve been looking through Tony Benn’s Diary for the first months of the 1964 Labour Government when he was Postmaster General. Already we find the conflict between permanent officials and the political direction Benn wanted things to go in.
One interesting entry on 16th November is a reminder that efforts to purge the left in the Labour Party are far from being new, institutional, or, if you like, baked into to its structure.
Benn records
I went to the Youth Sub-Committee of the Executive which was entirely taken up with a discussion as to what we should do with the Trotskyites. All but two members of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists have been expelled and Ian Mikardo made the point that we should not take drastic action. If local Labour Parties have exercised disciplinary powers of their own and if there are now appeals against expulsion from the people concerned (which there have not been) its better for us to keep out of it.
Benn had not yet begun his long march to the left, while Mikardo was a figure of the left. Neither of course were Trotskyists- the groups in question were primarily the forerunners of what became the Militant and the SWP. However its reminder that unlike 60 years on Harold Wilson’s 1964 Labour Government had an element (no more I’d argue) of the Broad Church about it and a concern to stick to Party rules
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