"One of the party's most influential figures," the Daily Telegraph calls Alan Johnson. How quaint.
Next week, either the publicly funded or the publicly owned television network, I forget which and I do not care to remember, intends to run some hatchet job or other on Momentum.
Next week, either the publicly funded or the publicly owned television network, I forget which and I do not care to remember, intends to run some hatchet job or other on Momentum.
No one is going to watch it, of course. Or, at any rate, no one who might conceivably have voted for Jeremy Corbyn for Leader of the Labour Party.
But hey ho, the central thesis is apparently to be that "Trotskyists are setting the agenda".
Yet the BBC and Channel 4 lived for eight recent years in a gigantic city of which that was literally the case.
Ken Livingstone won the 2000 London Mayoral Election against the full might of Tony Blair's pre-Iraq machine, and against an official Labour candidate who was a former Cabinet Minister.
Who did the donkey work for that? Who do you think? And they were rewarded.
As late as 2007, three years after Livingstone had graciously permitted the Labour Party to readmit him rather be humiliated by him for a second time, the Evening Standard's list of the 25 most influential people in London contained no fewer than four members of Socialist Action.
With the man who had appointed them to their various positions, those members of that tiny Trotskyist organisation comprised one fifth of the total list.
Now, say what you like about Livingstone's London, but it was hardly Trotsky's Kronstadt.
Livingstone's London was the most power that Trots have ever had, running one of the major cities of the world for eight years, with a population larger than many countries and an economy far larger than most countries. Judge them by that, not by no more than three and a half thousand (Anarchist, heavily armed) deaths at Kronstadt, which was very small beer compared to the deaths caused by Ken's enemies.
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