Peter Taaffe (born April 1942) is a British Marxist (Trotskyist) political activist and journalist. He was the general secretary of the Socialist Party of England and Wales from its founding until 2020 and was a member of the International Executive Committee of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI).
Taaffe was the founding editor of the Trotskyist Militant newspaper in 1964, and became known as a leading member of the entryist Militant group. Taaffe was expelled from the Labour Party in 1983, along with four other members of Militant'''s editorial board
Taaffe was influential in the policy decisions of Liverpool City Council of 1983–1987, according to the council's deputy leader Derek Hatton, in the formation of the Militant tendency's policy regarding the Poll Tax in 1988–1991, and the Militant tendency's "open turn" from the Labour Party in the late 1980s, becoming general secretary of Militant's eventual successor, the Socialist Party in 1997. He retired as general secretary after the party's February 2020 congress but remains on the party's executive committee as political secretary.
Early life
Born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, one of six children of a sheet metal worker, Taaffe first joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, before joining the Labour Party where he was attracted to the radical element in the Liverpool Labour Party. In an interview for the BBC Radio 4 programme The Party's Over, Taaffe gave a few biographical details:
"I came into contact with Socialist Fight in 1960" writes Taaffe. Socialist Fight was the newspaper of a small group of mainly (but not entirely) industrial militants in Liverpool going by the name of the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), and led by Jimmy Deane and Ted Grant.
Taaffe "does not subscribe to the view that the struggles of small groupings are of no historical significance". This small group supported the ideas of Leon Trotsky, who proposed that genuine Marxism, followed by Lenin, had always argued that only the working class in the advanced capitalist countries could lead a revolution to establish socialism. These were the ideas to which Taaffe subscribed.
Taaffe argues that, "There is a long tradition going right back to the 1930s and Trotsky himself, of Trotskyist groups and organisations which endeavoured to find a base within the labour movement and working class."
Peter Taaffe and the Militant newspaper
In 1964, Taaffe writes that the "youth supporters of Militant" drew on their experiences gained during the 1960 Clydeside apprentices' strike in "seeking to organise and mobilise the Liverpool apprentices. Ted Mooney and I played leading roles, together with Harry Dowling and Dave Galashan, in organising an apprentices' strike in one factory, English Electric, on the East Lancashire Road." About 20,000 of the 70,000 engineering apprentices downed tools in total. By this time, the second issue of the Militant had come out.
Earlier in 1964, Ted Grant, Liverpudlians Jimmy Deane (who was National Secretary) and Keith Dickenson, Ellis Hillman, John Smith, and others on the executive of the RSL decided to launch the Militant newspaper "without complete unanimity" Taaffe writes.
Peter Taaffe, who lived in Liverpool at that time, was appointed editor. He recalled this time in the Radio 4 programme, The Party's Over:
In 1965, Taaffe was able to move to London. He became full-time national secretary as well as editor of Militant, despite a serious shortage of money: "I was compelled first of all to sleep on the floor of a supporter in Balham... once or twice spending sleepless nights in the entrances of subways". Eventually, the group became known by the name of the paper, and was either referred to as Militant or the Militant tendency.
Many of Peter Taaffe's major signed articles in Militant during the first few years were on international topics: the Congo, Dominica, Latin America, Vietnam, Rhodesia, and China. In Issue 16, in May 1966, perhaps to coincide with the international working class celebrations on May Day, Taaffe's article led the front page with the banner headline 'Internationalism the Only Road'.