Militant by Michael Crick review – Britain’s successful leftwing sect

The press and the Labour’s right wing are often in a froth about the party being taken over by radical leftists. So is this addictive study of Militant a gift for Corbyn-bashers?

Panics about infiltrators are a Labour tradition. In a party made up of disparate elements from the start, in a country where the legitimacy of leftwing radicalism is rarely accepted by the media and wider establishment, it is hardly surprising that subversives, real and imagined, have regularly been spotted burrowing their way into Labour’s loose structures. During the 20s, the party struggled to purge itself of communists, whom Lenin instructed to support Labour “as a rope supports the hanged”. Nowadays, the party’s right wing and its many press allies are in an almost perpetual froth about Labour being “taken over” by left-wingers, whether they are activists of the large new pressure group Momentum or even Jeremy Corbyn himself.

The troublemaking political journalist Michael Crick first published Militant in 1984, when the still-infamous leftwing sect was approaching the peak of its notoriety. In 1986 he produced an updated version, with the reds-under-the-bed title The March of Militant. Thirty years on, he has updated it again, with a foreword and afterword that seek to connect the sometimes startling, often caricatured history of Militant to Corbyn, both back in the 80s and now.

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