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Obituaries: TED GRANT
Independent, The (London), Aug 9, 2006 by Andy McSmith
If consistency is a politician's greatest virtue, then the veteran Trotskyite Ted Grant was one of the most virtuous figures of the 20th century. His convictions did not alter from when he was converted to revolutionary Marxism as a boy of 14 to when he died at the age of 93.
None of Grant's predictions of the imminent collapse of capitalism came true, and in his old age he was thrown out of the organisation he founded, the group known as Militant Tendency, to die as he had mostly lived, in near total political isolation. It took an obdurate kind of bravery to hold on for so long to a belief system that so many others had abandoned. He had an impressive number of ex-followers who were inspired by him when they were young, some of whom are prominent in public life, like the highly colourful Scottish socialist Tommy Sheridan. Grant could also claim to be one of the last living links with Leon Trotsky. Though he never met Trotsky in person, he knew his son, Leon Sedov, who was murdered by Stalin's agents in the late 1930s.
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He made a brief appearance on the national stage at Labour's annual conference in Brighton in September 1983, as Michael Foot pushed ahead with a decision to decapitate the so-called Militant Tendency, a Trotskyite organisation suspected of organising a party within the Labour Party. Five members of the editorial board of the newspaper Militant, including Grant, were allowed to appeal to the conference against a decision taken by the National Executive to expel them. As the vote went heavily against the five, Grant made his departure saying: "We'll be back." Like so many Ted Grant predictions, it was wrong.
He was born in Germiston, near Johannesburg, where his father emigrated to escape the anti- Jewish pogroms in Russia. It has been reported that his original name was Isaac Blank, but "Blank" may have been an invention. He concealed his identity to protect his relatives in South Africa, and perhaps out of an innate secretiveness.
His father abandoned the family home when Isaac was young, and his French mother took in lodgers, one of whom was Ralph Lee, who introduced the young boy to the works of Trotsky, who had just lost the power struggle in the Soviet Communist Party. In the early 1930s, Lee was expelled from the Communist Party and founded a tiny Trotskyite group, who decided that Europe was a more promising field of activity. The story goes that "Isaac Blank" and another young Jew made the long voyage on a German passenger ship, and to avoid the attention of Nazi sympathisers on board, borrowed the names of English crew members. One became Sid Frost, the other Edward Grant.
On arrival in Britain, the young Ted Grant followed instructions that came from Trotsky himself to join the Independent Labour Party and try to take it over from within. So began the tactic of "entryism" which Grant pursued for most of his life. However, the tiny band of entryists were soon embroiled in one of the rancorous, incomprehensible feuds in which Trotskyite groups have always specialised.
On the one side were a group of Bloomsbury intellectuals whose main asset was that Trotsky knew who they were' on the other, unknown young men and women mostly from working-class backgrounds, led by a Scottish seaman named Jock Haston. The South Africans all joined Haston's breakaway Workers International League (WIL). There followed a breach of a more personal kind, when Haston began an affair with Ralph Lee's wife, Millie, and Lee moved back to South Africa. He was expendable, but Millie Lee was not, because according to an informant planted in the WIL by Special Branch, her family was the little organisation's only source of funds.
From this unpromising start, the WIL suddenly achieved national notoriety after the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, when the Communist Party of Great Britain called for an end to all industrial action. When Tyneside shipyard apprentices struck, the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, was sufficiently alarmed by reports of Trotskyite infiltration to have Haston and three others charged with sedition.
WIL influence on Tyneside was a fact, because one of their undercover members was the full-time regional or-ganiser of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), T. Dan Smith, later famous as the corrupt boss of Newcastle City Council. Smith's cover was blown when Ted Grant turned up in Newcastle in 1943 to announce breathlessly that Britain was in a "pre-revolutionary situation", drawing attention to himself and other Trotskyites, who were expeled from the ILP.
This was a period of high hopes for the young Grant. He really believed that when the war was over, capitalism and Stalinism would both collapse in a new wave of revolutionary upheaval. Disillusionment followed when, instead of taking to the barricades, the workers put their trust in the Labour government, and the Trotskyites reverted to the old habits of entryism and internal feuding. Grant became locked in a ferocious feud with an Irishman named Gerry Healy, which lasted four decades. Healy lost because his followers revolted against his practice of continuing the indoctrination of young female revolutionaries beyond working hours. It was revealed that 76 young women had been introduced to what Brian Behan described as "the erect forces of Healyite Labour".
