Trotsky
Sir: John Grigg's observation that anybody `who calls himself a Trotskyist . . is deliberately giving his allegiance to a tyrant' (8 January) is a timely reminder that Trotsky the exile and martyr was also Trotsky the mass murderer of Kronstadt and the architect of the militarisation of labour.
The illusion still persists among the young and romantic that if somebody is brutally murdered while fighting for a political cause, the victim and his cause must therefore be right. Mussolini was also murdered by Stalin's henchmen, and in an equally gruesome manner. Is fascism therefore a just cause? Students and other young people, who often embrace the fashionable neo-Bolshevism for the highest of motives, would do well to ponder this.
Casting the Trotskyists into the limbo outside the Labour Party, however, will not make them disappear from the earth, or answer their often pertinent criticisms of the party. Is it not time for mainstream Labour supporters to engage in debate with critics on all sides, in or out of the party? Those who engage in political action in a democracy have a responsibility to defend their theory and practice in argument, and never more so than when they are in power, but this is precisely what Labour refuses to do.
As I imply above, the attacks are not all from one quarter. On the right, a growing number of economists blame our present difficulties on the Keynesian theories which have guided the postwar policies of both major parties. These ideas have undoubtedly made more of an impact on the Labour Party than they have on the Tories. (In the current controversy within the Labour Party over government expenditure cuts, it is not the doctrine, but the correct application, which is in dispute.) And yet to my knowledge, no prominent Labour intellectual, not even the redoubtable Mr Crosland, has taken up the gages thrown down by Messrs Friedman, Hayek et al. Can it be that with all this battering from right and left, Labour's spokesmen are now punch-drunk, and therefore bereft of all reason? A heavy-handed auto-da-fe against left-wing dissidents—and here I disagree with John Grigg—would only confirm the general impression of intellectual bankruptcy, A democratic political party, like the society of which it forms a part, is at its most efficient when everybody
can discuss anything in an atmosphere untainted by fear of reprisal from any direction.
R. A. Baker 22 Victoria Avenue, Princes Avenue, Hull
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