Trotting On

Yes, I piggyback by turning up to Momentum's events and so forth. But what is now happening is why I, and many others including key figures around Jeremy Corbyn, have never joined it.

We fully support its central aim of making Jeremy the Prime Minister in 2020. But we knew what else would happen in the organisation, and we are being proved right.

There have always been extremely few Trotskyists in Britain. But this is possibly the only country where a moderately well-informed member of the voting public would know the word "Trotskyist".

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.

It was, however, the biggest powerbase that Trotskyists have ever had, anywhere in the world. Eight years running London in the early twenty-first century. 

But then, three of them had sat overtly as Members of Parliament in the 1980s and early 1990s, although there were more of them than that on the Green Benches at the time.

A sitting MP until her retirement in 1997 was married to Trotsky's bodyguard, who as her husband presumably held a parliamentary pass.

The All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, which made no bones about being the Militant Tendency, brought down Margaret Thatcher.

Don't take either my word or Militant's for that. Read the extremely bitter account of it in her own autobiography.

All other attempts at explanation are fig leaves that she herself refused to wear.

To her, as to Militant, she was removed in order to abolish "the Community Charge", and that abolition was the biggest concession that the British State ever made to the Far Left.

After all, that abolition did happen as soon as she had been deposed. On Europe, while the rhetoric changed a bit, the policy did not change one jot.

And now, Momentum has more members that UKIP, including far more Members of Parliament. Few of the former, and probably none of the latter these days, are Trotskyists.

But you, dear reader, know the word, don't you?

Only in Britain, kids. Only in Britain.