Labour Co-ordinating Committee

The Labour Co-ordinating Committee (LCC) was a factional body inside the British Labour Party established in 1978 and wound-up in 1995. In that period it moved (along with many of its members) from a group established to challenge to leadership of the party from the left to the vanguard of Tony Blair's drive to modernise the party's organisation and policies.

The LCC was established in 1978 to co-ordinate the efforts of the Labour left. As such it was extremely broad including, for instance, members of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Labour Briefing and the fiercely anti-Trotskyist National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS).

In 1981 the LCC supported the campaign of Tony Benn against Denis Healey for the deputy leadership of the party, but many were deeply unhappy with Benn's campaign and approach and the LCC began to evolve into a body aiming to rescue the party from the mess it found itself in as the SDP split and Benn's campaign imprinted an image of extremism in the minds of the voters.

The anti-Trotskyism of NOLS was central to this period - as they were able to successfully outmanouvre the far-left groups, having developed the skills in the bitter struggle of the Clause Four Group with the Militant tendency inside the student movement.

In 1983 the LCC organised a major conference 'After the landslide' to examine the lessons from the party's catastrophic defeat of that year: the tone the conference set - that organisational and political modernisation and change were essential was to become the dominant theme in the party's internal life in the following decade. Robin Cook became the LCC's principal voice in parliament and Peter Hain was a prominent voice outside Westminster. At this time Cherie Booth was also an active member, serving on the LCC executive.

Under Neil Kinnock's leadership the LCC became fully engaged in the struggle against Militant and the LCC was broadly supportive of the leadership, though it backed John Prescott's unsuccessful 1988 challenge to deputy leader Roy Hattersley.

However, the defeat of the Militant left the group without a real cause and membership began to decline, though the group also sponsored the launch of a new discussion journal Renewal in 1993 and firmly repositioned itself as a group of modernisers rather than on the soft left.

In 1998 with New Labour now in power, the LCC voted to wind itself up.

External links

• The full text of Tony Blair's letter to Michael Foot written in July 1982