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It feels like the 1950s in the Labour Party. A week that began with important victories for Jeremy Corbyn in the High Court and National Executive Committee elections has ended with a witch-hunt of sorts. First in a Guardian interview party deputy leader Tom Watson alleged that “Trots have come back to the party,” continuing that “some old hands [are] twisting young arms in this process.” He followed this up with by sending a dossier to the press, which claimed to reveal the extent of the “infiltration.” The campaign is not surprising. Like many of the attacks waged on Corbyn by the Labour right this line has been deployed before, more effectively, by the Tories. What gives Watson’s allegations greater weight, however, is not their substance but their implications. In conjuring a Trotskyist conspiracy behind the Corbyn movement, his aim is broader than misrepresenting the politics of hundreds of thousands of Labour supporters. If left unchallenged, Watson’s McCarthyism will pave the way for attacks on party democracy and far greater policing of political opinion.

Deception First, the substance. Let’s begin by stating the obvious: there have long been Trotskyists in the Labour Party and outside Trotskyist organizations have always made pronouncements about internal Labour matters. It seems obvious that some have joined the party since Jeremy Corbyn was elected. As the dominant party of the working-class in Britain, there are plenty of reasons for the far left to relate to Labour. But how significant is this? To get a sense, consider the numbers involved. Reliable estimates would put the total active membership of the two largest Trotskyist parties in Britain — the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party — at a little over three thousand combined. Smaller organizations count their members in the hundreds, or dozens. In total, Trotskyist organizations in Britain have somewhere between five and ten thousand members. By contrast, under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party has increased its rolls from two hundred thousand at the end of Ed Miliband’s term to something approaching six hundred thousand today. If we were to accept that one thousand Trotskyists had escaped the clutches of the compliance unit and joined — they haven’t, this guess is far too high — that would mean 0.25 percent of the new members were entryists. Some infiltration. And what about Watson’s other allegation, the “arm-twisting” by “old hands” that is leading impressionable young members astray? In his dossier, Watson provides no evidence whatsoever of Trotskyists in positions of influence in the Labour Party. Instead, he focuses on people attending local meetings, phonebanking, and organizing in affiliated trade unions. These kinds of grassroots activities simply do not come close to meriting the pied piper status he implies. He goes on to mention Momentum specifically. So who might the “old hand” be leading that campaign? Its chair, Jon Lansman, is certainly an experienced organizer. But Lansman is not a Trotskyist or an entryist — he led Tony Benn’s campaign for deputy leader back in 1981, a decade before Tom Watson became active in the party. Momentum’s second most influential figure, national organizer James Schneider, hardly fits the bill either. Far from a Trotskyist, he is recovering from a lambasting in the press for previously having supported more right-wing political parties. These are far from the only inaccuracies in Watson’s claims. For instance, one of the five points in the dossier refers to an alleged Socialist Workers Party “training course to infiltrate Labour.” But when you examine the document, it makes clear that this is not what the SWP advocates at all. “We are not members of the Labour Party,” it says, “as we believe an independent revolutionary socialist organisation.” It goes on to suggest work “alongside” Labour members. A glance at party materials reveals that its leadership considers membership in the Labour Party incompatible with membership in the Socialist Workers’ Party. This kind of error is unsurprising when one considers that the Labour right have described Corbyn as both an anarcho-syndicalist and a Marxist-Leninist in recent weeks. The Tories probably have a better grasp of left-wing politics. But when you dig a little deeper into Watson’s sources, it becomes clear why he gets so much wrong. At the end of his dossier he claims to quote from a book by Michael Crick about a manual from the Militant Tendency. Except he doesn’t — the quote he uses, word for word, comes from a review of that book by the Blairite pressure group Progress. An interesting source to use when complaining about parties within a party. Indeed, at the same time as this controversy erupted, leading Progress supporter John McTernan was using his column in the Daily Telegraph to call for the Tory government to crush the rail unions. This same party member has previously called for the National Health Service to be privatized, Iraq to be reinvaded, and public libraries to be closed. Despite this, he is an almost-daily presence on television defending the Labour right. No questions have been raised about his Labour membership. Clearly, right-wing opinions are not treated with the same suspicion.