Towards the end of the Second World War the coalition government in Britain was pushing through the Town and Country Planning Bill in such a way that it guaranteed the property rights of the big landowners. In this article (July 1944) Ted Grant called on Labour to break the coalition and nationalise the land without compensation to the big landowners!

At the 1944 conference of the ILP there were clear indications that a steady move to the right on the part of the leadership was taking place. This posed the question of what the left wing of the party should do. Here Ted Grant raises the need for the left to sharpen up its ideas and take a firm stand.

Contrary to the official mythology about Churchill, by 1944 he was already losing support among the people of Britain. This article by Ted Grant, written at the time and based on local election results, shows that the workers were becoming radicalised. This was to be confirmed in a dramatic way just after the war when Labour won a landslide victory.

The Labour leaders were in the wartime coalition, but not as “equal partners”. What the bosses wanted came first and the Labour leaders bowed down to this pressure. But pressure was also building up from below to meet the needs of the workers. Ted Grant looked at how all this was reflected in the Labour Party conference.

More than halfway into the Second World War the mood among the British workers was changing. The bourgeois could feel the changing mood and attempted to manoeuvre by making false promises. All this was putting pressure on the Labour Party, where the contradiction between the leaders in the coalition government and the workers in general was becoming ever more evident.

In 1942 the British Stalinists launched a vicious campaign of slander and lies against Trotskyism. Ted Grant, in the best traditions of Marxism, used the weapon of truth to reply to the Stalinists, whose methods were without honour, truth and conscience.

In the middle of the war the ILP was floundering. Not having a fully worked out Marxist programme, it combined opportunism and sectarianism at the same time. They could not understand the method as outlined by Ted Grant at the time, which was not to issue mere denunciations of the Labour Party leaders. It could “only be done by demonstrating to the masses, by their own experience, that their leaders are incapable of representing their interests.”

In 1942 a slanderous campaign against the Socialist Appeal waged by the Communist Party leaders was backed up by the Sunday Dispatch, infamous for its early enthusiastic support of Hitler, Mosley and the Blackshirts. They shamelessly joined forces to accuse the Trotskyists of being Hitler's agents! Here is Ted Grant's reply to these slanders.

In 1942, Mr. Hall, President of the Yorkshire Miners' Association viciously attacked the Socialist Appeal. In his attack, Mr. Hall claimed that "subversive influences outside the miners' association" were responsible for the unrest in the mines, and that these forces were "pro-Nazi". Ted Grant responded to these slanders point by point, explaining the real reasons for unrest on the coalfields.

In 1942 the Socialist Appeal, organ of the Workers' International League, came under a sever attack launched by the mouthpiece of the coal-owners, The Daily Telegraph, and echoed by the entire national and provincial press, the Tories, the Communist Party, the Liberals and the Yorkshire miners’ TU leaders. The aim was to get the Socialist Appeal suppressed. Why? Because the SA was giving a voice to the anger of the Yorkshire miners as they came into conflict with both the bosses and their own strike-breaking trade union leaders.

In 1942, a censure motion by the extreme right wing of the Tory Party was proposed in order to replace Churchill with a military general. The ruling class was playing with the idea of using the Royal Family as a cover for introducing some form of Bonapartist rule.

The text of the thesis adopted at the National Pre-Conference of Workers' International League, August 22 and 23, 1942. Edited for publication in The Unbroken Thread, full version available on the Ted Grant archive.

While every effort was being made by the Labour (and Communist) leaders to uphold the national government, the mood among the masses was changing. A series of local elections in May 1942 revealed that radical left mood was developing of opposition to the government and where left candidates stood they got good results.

After Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, the Stalinist CPGB leaders followed the U-turn decided in Moscow and became the most loyal supporters of Her Majesty’s war effort. In order to cover their left side, they launched a vicious attack on the Socialist Appeal and the ILP. We publish here the Workers’ International League’s reply where Ted Grant challenges the Stalinists to a public debate, and an exchange of letters with ILP leader Fenner Brockway.

As part of a general attempt to slander revolutionary ideas as pro-Nazi, the Labour Party's newspaper, Daily Herald, ‘accidentally' included the report on the trial of the Minneapolis General Drivers' Union, also leaders of the Socialist Workers' Party (Fourth International), into a report of the trial of 33 German spies. Here is the vibrant protest of the Workers' International League, by Ted Grant.