AN UNRECONSTRUCTED Trotskyite revolutionary of the old school, Ted Grant was a founder and the leading force in the political group Militant Tendency, which was active within the Labour Party from the mid-1950s onwards, and caused the party leadership such serious concern in the 1970s and 1980s.

Harold Wilson, by then a former Labour Prime Minister, might dismiss its members as the Labour Party’s “coomers in”. But by the mid-1980s the party was in serious disarray after crushing electoral defeats by a right-wing Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher. In these circumstances Militant reflected a significant body of opinion within a party suffering from a degree of disillusionment and loss of identity, as its leadership tried to disencumber itself of what was thought by some to be vote-losing left-wing baggage, and regarded by others as immutable socialist principle.

These confusions were reflected by 1985 in Militant’s effective control of Liverpool council and by the election of three MPs with Militant affiliations, in spite of its leaders by then having been expelled from the Labour Party. The Labour leadership under Michael Foot nevertheless balked at taking on Militant’s influence at local party level, believing that for the sake of unity the expulsion of its leaders was indication enough of intent.

It was for a fresh Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, to “take on” Militant fully at grassroots level, and, through his forceful eloquence and undeniably working-class credentials, eliminate it as an influence in the party, in the process making Labour (almost) electable. In doing so he gave fresh impetus to new energies in the party, which led to the gradual sidelining of a commitment to socialism and the creation of today’s capitalism-friendly new Labour.

Grant, taking his lead from Trotsky’s advice of half a century before, had always believed that Militant should work within the Labour Party. In this he was to find himself increasingly at loggerheads with colleagues who believed that the movement should sail under its own revolutionary banner, opposing itself to Labour at the polls. By 1992, with Militant no longer a force in the Labour Party, Grant was expelled from the movement over which he had wielded such influence for so long.

Ted Grant was born Isaac Blank in 1913, in Germiston, just outside Johannesburg. Although he was to spend most of his life outside his native country he never completely lost a South African accent.

His father, Max Blank, had emigrated from Russia in the previous century, and Isaac grew up with a fascination for that country, which, by the time he was old enough to be cognisant of such things, had endured revolution and the adoption of the Soviet system.

But it was accident rather than ideology acquired through reading of such things that led him towards 100 per cent revolutionary socialism. His parents divorced when he was still quite young. He lived with his mother, a Parisian, who, to supplement the family income, took in lodgers.

One of these, a South African Communist Party member, Ralph Lee, who had been expelled at the behest of one of Stalin’s directives, introduced Isaac to the writings of H. G Wells, Jack London, Bernard Shaw and Gorky. From there it was a short step, as the boy’s mind developed an appetite for dialectic, to Marx, Engels and Lenin.

In 1934 he helped Lee, who was in touch with the international Trotskyist movement, to found a South African Trotskyist group. But he soon came to the conclusion that South Africa was not likely to be fertile ground for significant developments and decided to go to London. En route he stopped off in Paris, where he met Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov.

He also changed his name to Edward (always to be known as Ted) Grant — a nom de guerre apparently “borrowed” from one of the crew of the ship he sailed in, and adopted to protect his parents in South Africa, should he get into trouble with the authorities in his country of adoption.

Once in London, Grant immediately joined a Marxist group and immersed himself in the ferment of revolutionary politics that had been heightened by the seizure of power by Hitler in Germany. He took part as a demonstrator in the 1936 “Battle of Cable Street”, in which the Jewish inhabitants of Stepney, joined by many left-wing sympathisers of all hues, opposed the march of Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts through that part of the East End of London.

In 1934 Trotsky had suggested that the Marxist group would be more effective if it worked within the Labour Party. Its leaders could find no common cause on the idea, but in the clearer air of the postwar period it was to be one of the tenets of Grant’s beliefs that the most effective vehicle for the propagation of revolutionary socialism was Britain’s socialist party itself.

In 1937 Grant became a leading light in the Workers’ International League (WIL), which was subsequently to combine with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), founded during the war. He was influential in the vociferous support that WIL/RCP gave to the Soviet Union, once it had become an ally of Britain in the fight against Nazi Germany.

The period after the war was a confusing one for Trotskyists, but after several false starts, in the 1950s Grant founded the Revolutionary Socialist League. This grew slowly at first, but it was recognised as the official British section at the Trotskyist Fourth International congress of 1957, and in 1964 acquired greater definition with the foundation of its newspaper Militant. This gave the movement the name by which it was next to be heard — Militant Tendency.

This was to gain a sense of purpose in the years of disillusionment for the Labour Party that followed the electoral victory of Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1979. Militant was easy enough to stigmatise as a sinister organisation — “Reds”, not only “under the bed, but in the bed”, were the stuff of headlines. Nothing the movement did could be proved to be undemocratic (though its coercive dialectical style at meetings did tend to cow opposition). But its commitment to bedrock revolutionary socialism alarmed a Labour leadership, which could see that the party’s failure to secure the loyalty of groups of workers during the “winter of discontent”, which had left the dead unburied and the streets littered with refuse, had been the cause of its 1979 defeat, and would continue to lose it elections.

Grant and his “unconquerable working class” on the march was an unpalatable prospect for a party wanting to end its years in the wilderness.

Eventually, in February 1983 Grant and four other key members of Militant were expelled formally from the Labour Party. But that appeared to be the end of it as far as the leadership was concerned. This reluctance of the essentially decent party leader Michael Foot, himself a South Wales industrial valleys MP, to carry the war to a group claiming such working-class loyalty was understandable. But it was not enough to assure the public that the party had its house in order. It was for a new, much younger leader, Kinnock, also a valleys MP, to take the fight to Militant after succeeding Foot in 1983.

At the 1985 party conference he confronted the Militant Tendency in words of memorable condemnation, accusing it of being responsible in Liverpool for “the grotesque chaos of a Labour council hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers”. The purity of Militant’s motives was indelibly impugned, and from then on its influence palpably declined. Many more leaders of this “party within a party” were now expelled from the Labour Party, and this led other Militant leaders to question the rationale of Grant’s insistence that “entryism” — infilitrating the party — was a viable modus operandi.

Finally, Peter Taaffe and other Militants, alongside whom Grant had stood shoulder to shoulder for so long, insisted that the principle should be dropped. When Grant, and another like- minded spirit, Alan Woods, refused to concede the point, both men were expelled from Militant in 1992.

They formed another group, Socialist Appeal, but although Grant continued to travel, to deliver speeches and to write, the day of his influence was past. Latterly he had lived in a residential home in Romford, where, amid his books, he continued to be visited by old comrades from the Trotskyist front line.

Ted Grant, revolutionary politician, was born on July 9, 1913. He died on July 20, 2006, aged 93.