Labour Party Young Socialists
| Labour Party Young Socialists | |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1960 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
| Ideology |
Democratic socialism Social democracy |
| Mother party | Labour Party |
| International affiliation | International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) |
| European affiliation | Young European Socialists (ECOSY) |
The Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) was the youth section of the Labour Party in Britain from 1965 until 1993. In the 1980s, it had around 600 branches, 2,000 delegates at its national conferences and published a monthly newspaper, Socialist Youth. From the early 1970s, it was led by members of Militant.
The Labour Party has had several youth sections. In the 1930s, the Labour League of Youth had 30,000 members. The League took a highly critical stance towards the leadership of the Party and was closed down in 1954.
Youth sections continued in some constituencies, however, for instance in Liverpool Walton where there was longstanding entryism from supporters of Ted Grant's Trotskyist faction, which later became the Revolutionary Socialist League. The Walton youth section published Rally, said to stand for "Read All About the Labour League of Youth".
In 1960, a new Labour youth organisation was set up, called the Young Socialists. In 1965, this was renamed the Labour Party Young Socialists.
From the outset, the Young Socialists organisation saw conflict between Trotskyist entryist groups that published the paper Young Guard and a group that published a rival paper, Keep Left, which formed the leadership. Both groups came from the Trotskyist tradition, but their methods and ideas differed considerably.
Keep Left was published by the Socialist Labour League, a Trotskyist group - later notorious for its internal culture of violence and sexual abuse - led by Gerry Healy, until the League took its supporters out of the Labour Party in 1964-65. The Socialist Labour League became the Workers Revolutionary Party, which maintained its own Young Socialists section until 1985. It was after the departure of the Keep Left group that the Young Socialists organisation was renamed LPYS.
The publication Young Guard was a collaboration between the International Socialists (IS) and the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), known from 1964 as the Militant group. The RSL, which had produced Rally in Walton, also published Socialist Fight, while before Young Guard the IS had supported a smaller publication, Rebel. By 1963, however, the faltering collaboration had ended, and the Militant was set up in 1964. The Young Guard was continued for a time by the IS alone, but it was discontinued by 1966, and the IS left the Labour Party and LPYS in 1967-68.
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