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Article: A bewigged Trot straight outta Germiston; Ted Grant, originally Isaac Blank, was the driving force behind Britain's Militant Tendency, a thorn in the side of the Labour party.(Dispatches)
- Article from:
- The Sunday Independent (South Africa)
- Article date:
- July 30, 2006
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Ted Grant, who died on July 20 aged 93, was the founding father and undisputed eminence grise of the Militant Tendency, the revolutionary Trotskyist group that almost destroyed the Labour Party during the 1980s. Tireless, bizarrely wigged and conspiratorial, Grant was the driving force behind the movement from the mid-1950s. He led its efforts to infiltrate and subvert the Labour Party, a campaign that reached its high-water mark in 1983 after the group won effective control of Liverpool council and boasted three Labour MPs with Militant connections.
The same year, though, Grant and several others were expelled from the party, a development marking the beginning ...