Jimmy Deane (31 January 1921 – 21 August 2002) was a BritishTrotskyist who played a significant role in building theRevolutionary Socialist League. Along withJock Haston andTed Grant, he played a role during the Second World War in theRevolutionary Communist Party, the British section of theFourth International.
Jimmy Deane was born inLiverpool to a blacksmith, Gus Deane, and his wife, Gertie, a trained nurse.[1] Deane came from a long line of trade unionists in the Labour movement in Merseyside – Deane's maternal grandfather Charles Carrick was elected president of the Liverpool Trades Council in 1905, served for fourteen years as one of Labour's first councillors, and was an organiser for the MarxistSocial Democratic Federation.[2] Carrick, like many trade unionists at that time, remained active within theLabour Party when the Social Democratic Federation left. Deane's mother and brothers were all in the Trotskyist movement[3] and were members of theWalton Constituency Labour Party in the 1950s and 1960s. The origins of Trotskyism to which the Deanes were attracted can be traced to Albert Houghton, a founding member of the Communist Party in Merseyside who had drawn Trotskyist conclusions and fought the Stalinists in Merseyside who later became leading Labour figures.[4]
Joining the Labour Party in 1937, he was later that year won over to Trotskyism and joined theMilitant Group.[1] Through him his mother Gertie was recruited, and then his brothers Arthur and Brian, who also played an important role in the Trotskyist movement.
In 1939, with growing fragmentation within the Militant Group,Gerry Healy a member of an earlier breakaway from that group, theWorkers International League (WIL) formed in 1937, was able to recruit the Deanes, along with Eric Brewer, Tommy Birchall and Harry Matthews to the new group.[1]
Due to serving an apprenticeship at theCammell Laird shipyard as an electrical engineer, he was not called up during theSecond World War, and became a shop steward.[1][5] In January 1944 he was trained as a miner, due to wartime legislation, and worked at Nook Pit,Tyldesley before he was invalided out of work at the end of the year.[1]
For most of 1945, Jimmy Deane became a full-time worker for the newly formedRevolutionary Communist Party as its London Industrial Organiser and joined the party's central committee and editorial board of theSocialist Appeal, the party's journal.[1]
In 1946 Deane was the British delegate to the International Conference of theFourth International alongsideJock Haston.[6] He stayed in Paris for a further 18 months as the British representative on the International Executive Committee.[1]
Deane was one of the founders of theRevolutionary Socialist League in 1956 and was appointed as its first General Secretary.[1]
Deane was to go on several international missions of behalf of the International during this period including going to Morocco to help the AlgerianFLN break through the electrified Algerian/Moroccan border as well as attempting to unite Indian Trotskyists in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras into a single all-India organisation.[1][7]
After attempting to bring about an unsuccessful fusion between the RSL and theInternational Group as well as joint work with theInternational Socialists in the magazineYoung Guard, Jimmy Deane suggestedPeter Taaffe as his successor as General Secretary and editor of the soon to be launchedMilitant newspaper.[7] He left Britain for India in 1965 and subsequently spent a few years inFiji.[1]
Although he returned to Britain he did not resume his active role in the Trotskyist movement: he remained loyal to his political beliefs, speaking at a meeting in Wigan against the witch-hunt ofMilitant in the Labour Party.[7] At the end of his life he declared his support for theSocialist Appeal tendency,[8] and emphasised that "A Marxist tendency must combat any traces ofultra-leftism that arise out of impatience". Jimmy Deane died ofpneumonia alone on 21 August 2002 at the Rosebank Nursing Home inLiverpool.[1]