The news of the death of Phil Lloyd was a terrible shock to
all of us who knew him. Although we knew he had been fighting leukaemia for the
last few years the end took us by surprise. He was so resilient and optimistic
that it was hard to appreciate the seriousness of his condition. But that was
his nature. He was always cheerful and positive about things. When faced with
problems he would take it philosophically and with good humour. He never
dramatised or exaggerated. His wife Kay says he thought he would live forever.
Perhaps we did too.
Phil Lloyd was a great friend, comrade and life-long fighter
for the cause of the working class in Britain and internationally. He was
the best sort of proletarian militant. All his life he was active in the Labour
Movement, where he consistently fought for socialist policies, both in the
Labour Party and in the Post Office Engineering Workers’ Union (POEU), now part
of the CWU. For many years he was secretary of the union in Swansea and had an unassailable position and
a great authority among his fellow workers. Even in the last years, when he was
battling against leukaemia, he remained active in the union, as part of its
pensioners’ section.
| Phil Lloyd with Alan Woods and Ted Grant |
Always a hardworking and conscientious trade unionist, he
had a tremendous personal authority with his members. But he was no narrow
trade unionist. He was first and foremost a Marxist working in the union field.
When he was the secretary of the Swansea POEU branch he proposed the setting up
of a library for union members, an idea that was accepted by the branch, which
voted to put aside a certain amount of money every month to buy books.
Naturally, Phil ensured that the library contained plenty of Marxist literature
as well as working class classics like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
He was always anxious to get workers reading.
My memories of Phil
Phil Lloyd was the first contact I ever had with the
political tendency founded by Ted Grant, which is now known as the
International Marxist Tendency. I had applied to join the Young Socialists (YS)
early in 1960 and received a letter signed by Phil, who was then the secretary
of the Swansea YS – one of the very few branches which at that time were
controlled by the Tendency. It was the beginning of a friendship and political
collaboration that lasted for 47 years and came to a tragic end this week.
I remember the first meeting I attended on a miserable,
rainy, cold and windswept night in Townhill Community Centre. We were a tiny
band – not more than half a dozen, but we would discuss the ideas of Marxism
endlessly and with tremendous enthusiasm. Dave Matthews was the life and soul
of the group, but Phil played a vital role. He recruited most of his family:
his brothers Alan, Bob and Dave were all active in the Movement at that time.
Alan Lloyd recently told me how Phil, who was two years his
elder, became involved in politics in the 1950s. He and Alan were working as
cable-jointers with the Post Office telephone engineers. Like most other
workers, Phil first became active in his trade union, which was then known as
the POEU. But he soon realised that not everyone in the union was fighting for
the class. He told his brother he thought the local union secretary was a
"bosses’ man". Thus began a long and hard battle against the right-wing
bureaucracy of the union, which Phil was determined to transform into an
instrument fit to defend the interests of the workers.
In the course of this struggle, Phil began to realise the
limitations of trade union work. He saw that the day-to-day struggle for
advancement under capitalism, important as it was, was insufficient. He saw the
need for a change in society and joined the Labour Party to achieve this end.
He became a member of Labour’s youth organization, and there he met the
comrades of the Marxist tendency led by Ted Grant. This changed his whole
outlook and shaped the rest of his life.
Phil soon realised the limitations of reformism and
parliamentarism, but he did not come to Marxism immediately. Alan recalls long
and intense discussions with Dave Mathews and Will Smith in Cascarini’s café
opposite Swansea
railway station. But Phil was soon convinced of the correctness of Marxism and
never wavered in his conviction. He became a supporter of the newspaper Socialist
Fight edited by Ted Grant in London.
"We used to sell the Fight around the pubs on a Saturday night," Alan
recalls, adding humorously, "a bit like the Salvation Army."
When Phil joined the Tendency in the dark days of the 1950s,
he was part of a very small group with no more than a few dozen members in the
whole country. But he and the other comrades in South
Wales never despaired. They were supremely confident of the power
of Marxist ideas. They discussed in detail works like Capital, Anti-Dühring,
State and Revolution and Trotsky’s books, The History of the Russian
Revolution, The Revolution Betrayed and In Defence of Marxism. Phil
was a voracious reader all his life. I remember he was particularly keen on
Cannon’s little book Socialism on Trial, which he strongly recommended
me to read.
An important part of the weekly activities in Swansea was attending the
classes of the NCLC (National Council of Labour Colleges). Few people today
even remember the name of this workers’ education organization, which helped to
train generations of worker activists in basic economics, history of the Labour
Movement and so on. They even held classes on things like how to chair a
meeting and how to speak in public. It was a valuable institution that was
later taken over by the TUC and dissolved.
The Swansea NCLC held meetings every Saturday night upstairs
in The Old Red Cow, chaired by Albert Jones. He had a hard time
steering a
course between the Stalinists and Trotskyists, who regularly used these
meetings to engage in ferocious polemics about the Russian Revolution
and the Soviet Union. No matter what the subject was supposed to
be, the discussion always came back to this. Along with Dave Matthews
and Colin
Tindley (who had an extraordinary gift for needling the Stalinists –
and nearly
everybody else), Phil was one of the most regular attenders.
But the main work centred on the Labour Party and above all
the youth organization. The bureaucracy had closed down the Labour League of
Youth in the 1950s to prevent it falling into the hands of the left wing. But
the defeat in the 1959 general election convinced them that they needed a youth
organization and so they re-launched it under the name of the Young Socialists
in 1960. The Marxist Socialist Fight tendency was very weak at that
time, but thanks to the tireless work of the comrades in Swansea,
it had a strong position in Wales.
By patient and hard work the comrades got contacts in other
areas: Llanelli, Neath, Resolven and Newport.
They systematically went to every weekend school and conference, selling the
paper, moving resolutions and getting new contacts. They made an important
breakthrough in Llanelli, where they won over a young female worker called
Muriel Browning. She later became a shop steward in the Llanelli British
Leyland car factory. She died tragically young of cancer in the 1980s – a big
loss to the Movement.
| Phil Lloyd with Alan Woods and Rob Sewell |
It was a constant battle. The right wingers in the Swansea
Labour Association were led by Peggy England-Jones, a redoubtable lady with
blue rinse hair and a mind worthy of Machiavelli. They were naturally hostile
to the Young Socialists, who were always moving left-wing resolutions in the
Association meetings that were held every fortnight in the old Elysium
buildings. The YS was a thorn in their side, and they did everything possible
to get rid of Dave Matthews and Phil Lloyd, who they rightly suspected of being
the ringleaders.
They regarded them as responsible for "leading the young
people astray", although we did not mind being "led astray" in the direction of
Marxism in the slightest. They wanted the YS to hold dances and ping-pong
tournaments and to do the donkey work at election time, to do as they were told
and to stay out of politics at all times. In other words, they wanted the
impossible.
Transport House (as we used to call the Labour Party
bureaucracy) had passed a rule that put the upper age limit for YS membership
at 25. That was intended to get rid of troublesome elements and leave only
green kids who, they thought, could be easily led. Phil was already slightly
over age when I joined, and Dave was older still. The right wing therefore took
the trouble to obtain copies of their birth certificates, which they exultantly
waved around one Thursday evening in the midst of an astonished Labour
Association.
Marxists and the Labour Movement
Needless to say, all these antics of the right wing did not
succeed in their objective. Phil Lloyd and the others remained in the Labour
Movement, continuing to educate the youth in Marxism, fight for socialist
policies and deny the right wing the pleasure of a quiet life that they so
earnestly desired. Phil had read Lenin thoroughly and had absorbed the elementary
lessons of Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder:
"There can be no doubt that the Gomperses, the Hendersons,
the Jonhaux and the Legiens are very grateful to those ‘Left’ revolutionaries
who, like the German opposition "on principle" (heaven preserve us
from such ‘principles’!), or like some of the revolutionaries in the American
Industrial Workers of the World advocate quitting the reactionary trade unions
and refusing to work in them. These men, the ‘leaders’ of opportunism, will no
doubt resort to every device of bourgeois diplomacy and to the aid of bourgeois
governments, the clergy, the police and the courts, to keep Communists out of
the trade unions, oust them by every means, make their work in the trade unions
as unpleasant as possible, and insult, bait and persecute them. We must be able
to stand up to all this, agree to make any sacrifice, and even – if need be –
to resort to various stratagems, artifices and illegal methods, to evasions and
subterfuges, as long as we get into the trade unions, remain in them, and carry
on communist work within them at all costs."
Phil understood very well the teachings of Lenin, which were
the firm foundations upon which Ted Grant built what later became known as the
Militant Tendency. Ted taught us that it is not enough to have a theoretical
grasp of Marxism (although he always laid stress on the importance of theory).
It was necessary to carry these ideas into the workers’ movement and not to
separate oneself from the mass organizations of the proletariat: in Britain, that
means the trade unions and the Labour Party.
From small beginnings in the 1960s, the Tendency grew into a
formidable force. Phil was active in the launching of the Militant in
1964 and
was a firm supporter until the split in 1991-2. He collaborated with
Rob
Sewell, the Militant full timer, in building a solid Marxist
organization in South Wales. He was elected onto the National Executive
Committee of the POEU.
The split in Militant was a very difficult time for him, as
for many other comrades. But Phil reacted in his characteristic way. He did not
immediately take sides but carefully read every line of the documents of both
the Minority led by Ted Grant and the Taaffite Majority. He refused to be
railroaded and quietly made up his own mind on the strength of the arguments
alone.
It did not take much to convince Phil that the arguments of
Ted and the Minority were correct. All his life Phil had fought for these
ideas, and experience showed him that they were the right ones. He understood that
the ideas of Marxism are impotent abstractions if they are not firmly linked to
work in the existing mass organizations of the working class. In Britain that
means, essentially, the trade unions and the Labour Party. As Ted said:
"Outside the Labour Movement there is nothing."
Passion for theory
Phil became a supporter of Socialist Appeal and a
member of the International Marxist Tendency. He regularly followed our
website, marxist.com and frequently expressed his great admiration for it. He
told me of his boundless enthusiasm for the advances of the tendency on a world
scale, particularly in Cuba
(he was always interested in the Cuban Revolution) and Venezuela.
His lifelong passion for theory meant that he was extremely
enthusiastic about the Trotsky Project that we launched a few years ago with
the backing of Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov. Phil was actively involved
with the Project and proofread our edition of My Life. He always bought
every new title from our bookshop and was really inspired not long ago by 1937:
Stalin’s Year of Terror by Vadim Rogovin.
He was always asking when Rogovin’s other volumes would be published in
English.
The last time we met, only a few months ago, he came to stay
at our house as he was attending a conference of the union. As always he was
cheerful and optimistic about life and politics. And as usual he was eager to
discuss politics in Britain
and internationally, Marxist theory and how it applied to things like the
Venezuelan Revolution.
Phil was always an avid reader. He had studied all the
Marxist classics and had a deep knowledge of Marxist theory. This was for him
an anchor and a compass that enabled him to keep his bearings through all the
inevitable vicissitudes of life and the ups and downs of the Movement.
Others became tired and disillusioned and dropped out of
activity. Phil Lloyd never did. He remained a loyal stalwart to the end. More
than that: he retained right to the end that irrepressible enthusiasm he had
always had since I first knew him as a young man. He did not appear to age. He
never complained of his illness. That is why his sudden departure was so
unexpected and so cruel.
For the IMT, coming so soon after the deaths of Ted Grant
and Phil Mitchinson, this is a very hard blow. We mourn for Phil, but we
believe that the best way to honour his memory is to continue the fight for
socialism to which he dedicated his life. I know he would not have it any other
way.
Somebody once asked me: "What is life without a great Enterprise?" Phil Lloyd
dedicated all his life to the greatest Enterprise
of all – the fight for the emancipation of the working class in Britain and on
a world scale. He will live on in the memory of his friends and comrades.
Our heartfelt condolences go to Kay and all the family and
friends of this marvellous man.
Alan Woods, London,
October 18, 2007
