How sobering, then, to realise that 27 years on, any one of those eight people, if they so wished, could now re-apply successfully for membership of the Labour Party.  In fact, come one, come all! Basically anyone can join the Labour Party these days. Campaigned against us for the last couple of decades? No problem, comrade! Stood as a candidate against us at the last election? Welcome aboard! Called for people to support an opposing candidate? Don’t worry about it – have a job in the leader’s office, why don’t you?  It’s now even been confirmed that a reality-challenged individual by the name of Gerry Downing, a member of an extremist bunch of Trots and assorted misfits called “Socialist Fight”, has been accepted as a member. This is a man who thinks that the 9/11 attacks against America were justified and whose party believes Isil should be supported in its struggle against American imperialism.  No doubt he’s keeping an optimistic eye on any vacancies that might arise in the near future in John McDonnel’s office.  Just as worrying is the arrival (back) in the party of the civil service’s favourite toytown revolutionary, Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). Having been absent from Labour’s membership rolls for 25 years (and gosh, how we missed him!), Serwotka spent the first ten minutes of his membership telling a newspaper that Labour members should get rid of their Blairite MPs and replace them with proper Labour Party representatives. By this I guess he means representatives like him, with a track record of losing elections and strikes and who only joined the party in the wake of Comrade Corbyn’s great leap forward.  Serwotka, let us not forget, through his support for the likes of Respect and Socialist Alliance, has spent the last two decades actively campaigning against the party which, he has only recently decided, he supports (for now, anyway).  “If you call on people to join the party and then say to them that you can never change who represents you, what is the point in joining?” Serwotka bleated to the Guardian. Dare I suggest new members join because they want to campaign for a Labour government? But there’s me being all Blairite and opportunistic again.  It’s time for a reality check on what the various brands of Trotskyite lunacy actually stand for. Whether it’s the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which set up and still runs Corbyn’s favourite anti-west pressure group, Stop The War, or the Socialist Party (the successor to Militant) or Socialist Fight or Socialist Action or Socialist Annoyed About Some Things – these people are not democrats. They genuinely (and unbelievably) still think that revolution, not democracy, is the only way to bring about the radical change that they, and few others, want.  When John McDonnell said, “If you use the law against us we will have no other option but to resist by civil disobedience,” it was the Trots and anarchists who nodded sagely, because they were on his wavelength.  When McDonnell accurately acknowledged that his various pronouncements might be interpreted as inciting riots, and added: “Well maybe that’s what we’re doing today,” he would have been applauded by the paper sellers kicked out of the Labour Party years earlier.  Ed Woollard throws a fire extinguisher from the roof of Millbank into the crowd of police officers below, main photo, and inset, at court, charged with violent disorder. Mr Woollard was praised by John McDonnell. Photo: SKY & Eddie Mulholland/The Telegraph  The man Jeremy Corbyn actually believes is fit to be this nation’s Chancellor of the Exchequer called for “insurrection” “to bring down the government” on three separate occasions between 2010 and 2012. And the two men seem to agree that the courts were just beastly to a student who almost killed a police officer by throwing a fire extinguisher off of a tall building during the student riots of 2010.  That the Labour Party has now become a safe haven for every demented Trot and anarchist in the country says all you need to know about its fitness to govern under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.  Welcome to the Labour Party, comrades – you’re welcome to it.
Militant Lefties are coming back to Labour after Neil Kinnock kicked them out,   and they'll fit right in with the Labour leader and his ilk