On 22/23 July, over 30 comrades from Britain, Australia, Ireland and Sweden, who had been expelled by the League for the Fifth International (LFI) three weeks earlier, met to set up a new international organisation.

And there was even an unmistakeable omen for those present at the founding conference:

Our discussions went on despite interruptions caused by the decaying infrastructure of British capitalism. A widespread power cut meant that the building where the conference was held had to be evacuated for most of the second day. We carried on our discussions in the open air, so that our firststeps to setting up our new tendency were made in the full heat of the hottest British summer in living memory.

I know several people who will have been at the meeting, and can vouch for the fact that they are intelligent and dedicated revolutionary socialists. But sorry, a new 'international organisation' with just 30 members? What really is the point? Surely it would have made more sense to affiliate to one of the (all too many) existing Trot groupings, as a distinct tendency if necessary?

Meanwhile, the International Bolshevik Tendency does the workers' movement a service in exposing the scandalous Northite revisionism on the China question. According to the International Committee of the Fourth International, China has been a deformed bourgeois state since 1949. But the Northites have only just noticed.

It all makes you want to pull your hair out, doesn't it? Despite being described elsewhere as 'the grand old man of semi-Trot types', in fact I remain as committed to the basic ideas of revolutionary socialism as I was when I first became involved with the far left.

But I will only be able to take groups like these seriously when they start taking themselves seriously, and there is no sign of that happening any time soon.

I like to think I am an expert on the geneology of obscure Trotskyist splinter groups. But I have recently come across the website of the International Trotskyist Labor Tendency, and I have to admit that this time, I am utterly, utterly stumped.

The slogan of this outfit is 'For world revolution and a 5th International!' Yeah, yeah. Ain't we all? Not exactly a unique selling point.

And I just love the way they include a link with the teasy-weasy title 'who are we?' Trouble is, you click on it and nothing happens.

The ITLT even claim to have a group in Britain, the Workers Front Organisation. But googling them draws a complete blank. Anybody know of any members? Do they have a publication?

If the WFO exists, it may even be working inside the Labour Party, if this extract from the ITLT's theoretical work is anything to go by:

'Many times our theory of Academicianism has become confused with the Ultra-left Anti-Proletarian theory we denounce this claim. What our theory is in truth is an observation of reality ...

'The long-standing history of labor and progressive ideas in Britain by far outweighs that of the U.S. In Britain initially we would apply Academicianism but the period would be brief and at some point we would begin "Light Enterism" into the Labour Party. We note that a new challenge exists with organizing inside of said party. This being the existence of Inter-Sectarianism.'

This perspectives document raises many important questions. Not least, have Workers Power and Southpaw Punch denounced them as reformists yet?

Comrades! Reveal yourselves to the DP audience! Either that, or I'll have to dob you in to Luke Akehurst. He really, really doesn't like Trots, you know.

Another Trot blog has seen the light of day this week. International Trotskyism is brought to you by Gerry Downing, described in the current Weekly Worker as 'a comrade from the
Workers Revolutionary Party tradition who is currently unattached'.

After the WRP split into nine factions - count 'em, nine - in the mid-eighties, Gerry was originally part of the Workers International League.

Initially forthright defenders of the Healy legacy, the WIL subsequently evolved in an alarmingly sensible direction and became the small Labour Party entrist group it is today.

WIL publishes Workers Action. Perhaps its most illustrious former member is Livingstone staffer Bob Pitt, one of the brains behind Islamophobia Watch.

Lucikily, Gerry spotted the scratch that was in danger of becoming gangrene early on, leading a split which was comprised entirely of himself and two mates. The three of them formed a breakaway organisation, whose name I now forget. If you've got the details, please let me know in the comments box.

This particular revolutionary vanguard published one or two issues of a journal, and one of the members managed to get his girlfriend to join, swelling the ranks of the group to four. I suspect that was about as good as it got for them. I have heard nothing since.

Gerry's first blog post is minimal, so it remains unclear what we can expect. But my guess is that International Trotskyism will be super hardcore, the Trotskyist equivalent of the stuff they keep under the counter in porn shops to please favoured customers.

I confidently predict that the blog will show up both Southpaw Punch and Ian Donovan for the vacillating centrist wusses that both of them clearly are by comparison. Even Workers Power will find it difficult to denounce as reformist.

A sample of Gerry's writing style and political outlook can be found here. I wish him every success with his new website.

I still believe in socialism from below. I still believe that Marxism is the only coherent anti-capitalism. I still believe that the global working class alone possesses that unique combination of interest, capacity and social weight that provides the foundation for rational, humanist and radical democratic politics.

Post-proletarian politics is politics without a viable social agency. The working class will lead future socialist revolutions, of that I am sure. The impact of neoliberalism throughout the world makes a backlash inevitable

It's just that I no longer think that the Trotskyist movement has the capacity to lead the process. The simple fact that it has undergone multiple fissiparous splits since 1953 underlines that it is really not serious about the task of building unified Marxist parties with political roots in the working class. It is incapable of getting its act together. As John Reid might put it, it is not ‘fit for purpose‘.

If that wasn't bad enough, the 'pimp my politics' tendency has long been in the ascendent, ever since Healy put the Workers Revolutionary Party in hock to Gaddafi. Some of the 'leaders' of Trotskyism in the UK now essentially envisage its future as the junior partner in an anti-imperialist bloc with political Islam.

Include me out. The irony is, if the universal caliphate ever does come into being, the revolutionary left will be among the first to face the sharia tribunals.

For the last few years - roughly since the Socialist Workers Party unilaterally decided to dump the Socialist Alliance and launch Respect - I haven't seen any point in using the adjective ‘Trotskyist’ as a point of political reference.

OK, I've got form. Serious form. And as a libertarian Marxist, I'm not ashamed of my political past. Leon Trotsky spent his life fighting exploitation, oppression, poverty, hunger, racism and injustice. He stood for peace, democracy, internationalism and socialism.

But the trouble with Trotskyists is that 99% of them give the rest of us a bad name. The movement has degenerated into a self-perpetuating dysfunctional subculture, in which ‘building the party’ replaces any notion of an emancipatory project.

Probably the term itself has become meaningless. Most people - not just most workers, most people - haven't got a scoobie what the word even means. For most of those that do, it is synonymous with 'ultraleftist nut job'.

Given that the point of politics is to persuade people of the rightness of your point of view, why erect a barrier to that before you even start arguing with them?

On the other hand, a significant minority of labour movement activists know exactly what the term means. The politically literate public expect Trotskyists to broadly support the ideas of Trotsky. Not unreasonable, really.

That means adhering to the conjunctural analyses the Old Man developed in the twenties and thirties. It means arguing that Russia was a degenerate workers' state, that permanent revolution is the only means of advance in the developing world, that transforming working class consciousness is a simple matter of advancing the correct transitional demands.

The first two of these ideas were - at the time they were first put forward - brilliant contributions to Marxist theory. But unnoticed by most of the Trotskyist left, the world has seen massive changes over the last two decades.

South Korea, Taiwan and Singpore show that the third world bourgeois can indeed offer both economic development and political democracy. Other countries will be joining that so far select club in fairly short order.

The USSR is no more.And perceptive as the degenerate workers' state theory was when Trotsky advanced it in the 1930s, the way it was extended by the Trotskyist left to cover the post-war overturns of capitalism really underlines its flaws.

China proves that it is possible for such countries to restore capitalism without social revolution. Can the Beijing bureaucracy - with its unique brand of ‘market-Leninism’ - really be described as an 'inconvenient hireling' that in the final analysis defends planned property relationships?

I once belonged to an organisation that honestly considered Pol Pot's Kampuchea some form of workers' state. I am glad to say I never personally swallowed such obvious nonsense myself. But if I had been pushed on the matter in public, democratic centralism would have compelled me to make the case I carefully rote-learned anyway.

And why should the international labour movement defend 'post-capitalist' North Korea? This miserable and glum repressive dictatorship offers the working class neither a superior standard of living nor minimal democratic rights. The sooner Pyongyang crumbles into the hands of Seoul, the better. That way, at least North Korean workers might get something to eat.

In addition, humanity is facing qualitatively new challenges, not least at the environmental level. Trotsky once remarked: 'If you conceive that some cosmic catastrophe is going to destroy our planet in the fairly near future, then you must, of course, reject the communist perspective along with much else.'

We are not far away from tipping point on that one. Any brand of twenty-first century progressive politics that does not place the highest priority on environmental issues is going nowhere fast. Feminism, anarchism and even radical liberalism - with its stress on political democracy - should also all inform the progressive future.

Where does all this leave the Marxist left? Pretty much in a situation envisaged earlier by Georg Lukacs:

'Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx's individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious 'orthodox' Marxist would still be able to accept all such findings without reservations and hence dismiss all of Marx's theses in toto - without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment.

'Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred' book.On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method.'

In other words, socialist politics continues to be built on historical materialism. And first we have to interpret the world, precisely because the point is to change it.

(10) You mean you share my critique of Mandel's interpretation of Kondratiev's long wave theory? Wow, we have so much in common!
(9) Let’s get out of here. I know a much cozier little Marxist bookstore downtown.
(8) I bet I can guess your party cadre name.
(7) Sorry, but I just wanted to tell you how stunning you look in that secondhand donkey jacket while carrying a bundle of Socialist Workers under your arm ...
(6) I used to read Trotsky ... but then I drifted.
(5) Is that the Transitional Programme in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?
(4) That secondhand donkey jacket of yours would look great on my bedroom floor.
(3) What's a nice girl like you doing in a lousy union fraction like this?
(2) Do you sell papers here often?
(1) So, babe ... just how degenerate would your ideal workers' state be?

Coming soon: top ten New Labour chat-up lines ...

UPDATE: Just saw a version of this one from Drink Soaked Trots ... 'Don't suppose there's any chance of seizing control of your means of production, love?' Classic.

[Snogging Millies pic: hat tip III]

After the huge success of Saturday's post on Trot chat-up lines - inspired in large measure by a drinking session with the Stroppies, it should be said - it turns out that earlier this year the libertarian communists over at libcom.org.uk were thinking along similar lines.

Here's some of the best cheesy gags that contemporary representatives of that noble political tradition could come up with:

(6) Hey sweet thang, wanna dictate my proletariat?
(5) Is your father a commissar of production and distribution? Because he surely expropriated some bourgeois diamonds for your eyes ...
(4) Hey baby, if I said you had a peasantry capable of being led by a tiny working class would you hold it against me?
(3) Wanna see my bra? It's a size (provisional) CC.
(2) Trotsky was all for women's lib, you know ... have you heard of Nadezhda Krupskaya?
(1) Are you a girl? Please will you talk to me. I promise not to mention Trotsky.

Extra-special bonus Posadist pick-up line: Did it hurt? When you fell from your sexy spaceship come to liberate the proletariat?

Compiled with the help of the posters on Urban75.com and first partly published in Freedom newspaper, or so I'm told.

The US government has insisted for decades that disclosure would constitute a threat to national security and could prompt ‘diplomatic, economic and military retaliation against the United States’.

Let’s just say that nothing in the material leads me to believe that Blair is about to declare war on the USA. All we get is the shock horror news that the former Beatle was heavily but unsuccessfully courted by the International Marxist Group:

In February 1971 John LENNON, who was already well known as a musician, gave an interview to Tariq ALI and Robin BLACKBURN who were members of the International Marxist Group paper "Red Mole". In this he implied he was sympathetic to IMG which is a small Trotskyist group which owes allegiance to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. LENNON emphasised his proletarian background and his sympathy with the oppressed and underprivileged people of Britain and the world.

It is believed that LENNON promised to advance sums of money to IMG in order to finance the establishment of a left wing bookshop and reading room in London. Despite a long courtship by BLACKBURN and ALI, as far as we know, no sum has been paid by LENNON for this purpose to them.

Coming in 2036: MI5 documents reveal Girls Aloud’s clandestine backing for the International Bolshevik Tendency.

Probably of most interest to the wider left will be the sections on SWP and satellite group orientation towards the so-called ‘parties of recomposition’ in western Europe and elsewhere, and to the established social democratic parties, including the Labour Party in Britain. Supporters of the Committee for a Workers' International will also notice a couple of digs:

5. A range of new formations of the radical left have emerged in the past few years to take up the challenge of providing political expression to resistance to neo-liberalism. Some – Respect in England and Wales, the WASG-Linkspartei in Germany, the Left Bloc in Portugal – have in the past year continued to make real advances, as has the Party of Socialism and Liberty (P-SOL) in Brazil. But there are contrasting cases that are much more negative. The Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) – widely held up as a model for the radical left – is in the process of committing suicide. In Italy the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (PRC) has moved decisively to the right. And in France the LCR is throwing away a major opportunity to widen and strengthen the radical left.

Central Committee 1 November 2006

Read it all here.

[Hat tip: Coatesey]

(1) The Trotskyist didn't cross the road. Those are Stalinists you see on the other side of the road, and centrists gathering at the curb and thinking about crossing. No genuine Trotskyist would ever attempt to cross the yellow class line in the middle of the road.

(2) To divert some of the advanced elements of the oncoming traffic in a leftward direction.

(3) Because the masses of pedestrians have illusions in road-crossing as a means to get to the other side. We must make this journey with them, but without ever abandoning our perspective that road-crossing is just another reformist illusion.

Only a genuine Trotskyist, armed with a petrol station map and an accurate programme, who must be in place during the road-crossing, can then lead the advanced elements of now-disillusioned road-crossing pedestrians in a successful struggle against oncoming traffic.

Only a genuine Trotskyist pedestrian will be truly able to expose crossing guards and traffic cops as the lackeys of the capitalist, racist traffic department, and lead the pedestrians forward to a pedestrian dictatorship, which will build a carless, trafficless intersection

"Why shouldn't I?" he asked.

"Well, there's so much to live for!"

"I'm just so depressed, I've been a communist all my life and the revolution seems as far away as ever"

"You're a communist?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"I am as well!! Did you originally join the Communist Party USA?"

"Yeah."

"Me too! Did you join the pro-Trotsky Communist League of America in 1928, which later merged with the American Workers Party to form the Workers Party of America in 1934?"

"Yeah."

"Spooky, Me too! After the WPA was expelled from the Socialist Party of America in 1936 did you then go on to join the Socialist Workers Party USA and the Fourth International?"

"I did actually…"

"Me too! In the 1940 dispute did you side with Cannon or Shachtman?"

"Cannon."

"Me too! In 1962 did you join Robertson's opposition caucus, the Revolutionary Tendency?"

"Yep."

" Holy shit! And of course like me you were expelled and went on to join the International Communist League (Spartacist)."

"Well ... that goes without saying!"

"In 1985 did you join the International Bolshevik Tendency who claimed that the Sparts have degenerated into an 'obedience cult'?"

"No way!"

"Nah, me neither. In 1998 did you join the Internationalist Group after the Permanent Revolution Faction were expelled from the ICL?"

"Yeah! I can't believe this! Maybe I won't ..."

"Die, counterrevolutionary scum!". And he pushes him off the edge.

[Stolen from Red Left Review]

The US Central Intelligence Agency will shortly declassify hundreds of documents detailing illegal activities from the 1950s to 1970s. OK, that makes the revelations anything from three to five decades after the events. But even disclosures on this delayed time scale may prove rather more frank than anything we would conceivably be allowed to know in Britain:

The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments …

* the confinement of a Soviet defector in the mid-1960s
* assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro
* wiretapping and surveillance of journalists
* behaviour modification experiments on "unwitting" US citizens
* surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971
* opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union; from 1969 to 1972 of mail to and from China

Personally I will be more interested in seeing the FBI open up about its COINTELPRO operation against the American left, most notably the Communist Party of the USA and the then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party.

One writer on this topic notes:

In 1973, the SWP and its youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance, filed a lawsuit against the federal government (Socialist Workers Party v Attorney General) demanding compensation for years of disruption, harassment, and surveillance of the organization.

From 1961-1976, fifty-five informants held offices or committee positions and fifty-one served on executive committees of the party.

There is plenty of evidence that as late as the 1980s, the British state took a similar interest in the CPGB, the far left, and even campaigns such as CND.

The Tory right-aligned Economic League and the US embassy also maintained more than a watching brief, and quietly intervened in a number of trade unions.

I did extensive research on all this more than a decade ago, which was published at the time in Lobster magazine, although the material is not online. I really must get round to getting it scanned and making it freely accessible.

But the official line is that, these days, the focus of UK efforts to counter domestic subversion has switched to radical Islamism. I don’t doubt that is the case.

I presume there will still be a handful of strategically-placed operatives in the main left groups. But in all honesty, very little the left does these days seems particularly worth keeping an eye on.

Mirror political editor Kevin Maguire – a man to watch under the Brown prime ministership, I’m told – cites this extract from an SWP internal document in his New Statesman diary column this week:

Trot tantrums in the SWP's weekly party notes under the intriguing head "Revolutionaries and Big Brother". Walthamstow comrade Carole Vincent seemingly misunderstood the concept of entryism, following the miaowing Respect MP George Galloway by entering the dysfunctional Channel 4 home. "At no point did Carole consult the SWP leadership about joining the programme," declares the commissar, "and it is not part of our strategy to enter BB in order to manipulate the media."

What? How dare she? Before you know it, SWPers will be deciding on their holiday destinations without asking the central committee first. And then where will ‘the party’ be?

[Hat tip: email informant]

Here’s an intriguing tale from the Moscow Times website. It seems that the webmaster of the residual Russian CP is guilty of ideological deviationism, 1930s style:

Anatoly Baranov, editor of the party's web site, has been plotting to subvert party policy to reflect "the interests of pro-Western forces," the party's Central Audit Committee said a statement posted on the party's web site over the weekend.

Baranov immediately denied the charges and dismissed them as a pro-Kremlin plot to discredit the Communists.

Fascist wrecker! Anybody got the background details on this one?

Meanwhile, it looks like the Automobile Association-Saga merger – it’s the lead story in Financial Times today - equals ker-chiiing! time for one British former comrade:

AA chief executive Tim Parker, a former Trotskyite and Labour member who now advises the Tory party, was reported to be in line to collect £80million, although the firm said later it would be "nearer £40million".

Me, I never begrudge old lefties a decent pay-day. Parker is an ex-WRPer, I’m told. Any readers remember him from his paper-selling years?

The Ligue communiste révolutionnaire is going ahead with plans to launch a new and broader far left party in France.

Local assemblies will be convened before the end of 2008 to discuss the question and organise the founding conference, according to a story in Le Monde republished here [in French].

Incidentally, the French Trots – who had 2,900 members in January – claim substantial growth, with 1,200 new members since the recent presidential elections, in which LCR candidate Olivier Besancenot polled just over 4%.

Reportedly, the planned new formation is to be ‘anti-capitalist’ rather than revolutionary, and distinguished from the rest of the anti-neoliberal left both by greater independence from the Parti Socialiste and a refusal to participate in running institutions.

I’d need to know more about it before passing a definitive judgement, and will try to talk to some of the comrades when I spend a few days in Paris next month. I’m presuming that the LCR will reserve its right to constitute an organised revolutionary tendency within whatever emerges.

But I don't think the idea is necessarily tactically wrong or unprincipled. However, my guess would be that certain regular readers would beg to differ.

At last! It's the final crisis of capitalism! That's according to the publishers of Revolte Jeune - Toute la Verite, a badly-produced French Trot journal I picked up from a seller outside a metro station on Saturday.

It seems that the subprime crisis is about to usher in a period of military dictatorship and fascism, culminating in a third world war fought with nuclear weapons, which will destroy humanity.

Fortunately, the world has one last chance. The new generation has seen through the lies of the leaders of the mainstream left, the false Trotskyism of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, Lutte Ouvrière and the Parti des Travailleurs, and the idle chat of the anarchists, and is rallying to the action programme of the Comite des Jeunes de Banlieue et de Paris. Thank fuck for that.

Yep, this is vintage foaming at the mouth stuff, at a level of sophistication beneath even the most crazed ultraleftist element in this blog's comment box. But sadly - unlike Ian Donovan's legendary Revolution and Truth - it is not a one-person effort.

According to the studenty-looking vendeuse, the CJBP has about 15 members, gathered around a bloke who was expelled from the Lambertistes in the 1980s. That's 15 activists, most of them presumably young, who could be doing something a damn sight more politically constructive with their energies.

But French Trotskyism does have it's more serious side. Later on Saturday I visited the LCR bookshop and picked up some fine reading material, including Serge Cosseron's Dictionnaire de l’Extrême Gauche, Christophe Bourseiller's Histoire Générale de l’Ultra-gauche and Histoire de l'Extrême Gauche Trotskiste, de 1929 à Nos Jours by Frédéric Charpier.

I've started the last-named volume, and it makes for depressing reading. Even before Trotsky commenced his exile in France in 1933, his French followers were polarised between two competing cliques divided more by personality than politics. Is there something in the movement's political DNA that renders it uniquely vulnerable to this kind of thing, to a degree perhaps matched only by a certain strand of religious sect? Surely there must be some materialist explanation?

Hardly likely. But that’s what happened in the case of Lionel Jospin (pictured left) in France, the socialist who headed that country’s government from 1997 until 2002. His longstanding links to the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste current around Pierre Lambert did not become public knowledge until 2001.

Only then was Jospin forced to admit that he had been a secret member of the OCI until one year before he became minister of education in 1988. Lambert maintains that Jospin was still a member right up until that point.

Intriguingly, as a new biography from Yves Bertrand, former head of the French intelligence service Renseignements Généraux confirms, the spooks were well aware of all this right from the start.

Bertrand started his career with the funny people in 1973, and was assigned to a unit charged with surveillance of the far left. Jospin’s past form was no secret to him.

‘There was with him [Jospin] a coldness, a capacity for calculation and even duplicity, that I have rarely seen,’ Bertrand tells Le Journal du Dimanche [in French, here.] ‘He hated me because I knew he was [an ex-Trot].’

Nevertheless, Bertrand insists he was not the source of the eventual media revelations. ‘But I would be lying to you if I said that I dissuaded the journalists who were inquiring into the subject from doing their work by explaining to them, for example, that there was nothing to find.’

That’s an interesting choice of words.

If advance write-ups in the Sunday Times and Observer yesterday are anything to go by, C4’s Dispatches strand will tonight ‘exclusively reveal’ what anybody in the least interested in such things has known full well since 2000; many of London mayor Ken Livingstone’s six-figure salary bag carriers are or were members of a small far left grouplet known as Socialist Action. What’s more, the programme will say that like it’s a bad thing, at a time when a mayoral election is due in a matter of months.

Apparently, there will be specific allegations of wrongdoing. If there is a prima facie case - and the London Evening Standard’s Andrew Gilligan insists there is - then of course such accusations absolutely must be investigated, and charges pressed if appropriate.

Corruption cannot be tolerated at any level of Labour politics. I mean, thank goodness Tony Blair and Lord Levy were ultimately exonerated by the cash for honours probe. We’d all hate to think that Britain is governed on the same basis as the Premier League transfer market, wouldn’t we?

But what, in principle, is wrong with a leftwing mayor surrounding himself with leftwing political advisors? Of course I’m pissed off that Livingstone didn’t pick me; I could do with a £121,000 wedge myself. If you are reading this, Ken, I’d happily work for two-thirds of the money. Go on - twist my arm - half, even. But what can be remotely objectionable about a senior politician picking staffers on his own political wavelength?

First, full disclosure. As I said, I am no longer a Trotskyist. But unlike Alan Milburn, Lionel Jospin and Alistair Darling, I am not in the least ashamed that once I was. As a student Labour activist, I joined the Socialist League - the supposedly ‘secret’ entrist organisation that then published the newspaper Socialist Action - in 1983.

This is the grouping that was known in the sixties and seventies as the International Marxist Group. It wasn’t quite the same formation that now trades as Socialist Action; but it is certainly the political tendency from which the current avatar derives.

If memory serves, it had about 600 members in this period. Yes, they included John Ross, Redmond O’Neill and Jude Woodward, all reportedly spotlighted in tonight’s documentary. Atma Singh, the Socialist Action defector who features as a key witness for the prosecution, claims to have been around at this time. If that was the case, he wasn’t prominent.

Incidentally, I was recently told that the political comedian Mark Thomas - then a student - was sufficiently sympathetic to sell the paper, although he couldn't be arsed to stump up membership dues or anything. Sensible bloke.

A few points here. Ross is a highly experienced Oxford trained economist. Plenty of Oxford trained economists end up in well-paid positions; Ross's pay packet is not exceptional for a top local government bureaucrat. The Marxist morality of being on that sort of dosh is a separate question, but I somehow doubt that's the angle Dispatches is going to take.

Nick Cohen’s Observer column yesterday picks Ross up for some spectacularly duff predictions. And? Again, many Oxford trained economists in highly-paid positions make spectacularly duff predictions. I’m sure Blair will soon find that out for himself in his new $5m a year gig at J P Morgan.

Similarly, unless it can somehow be proven that O’Neill and Woodward are somehow not up to their jobs, then why shouldn’t they be working for the Greater London Authority? Remember, too, that Livingstone was elected as an independent. Labour Party members potentially faced expulsion for taking the Red Ken shilling, so his choice of appointees was limited from the start.

And what if Socialist Action continues to have private meetings in a room above a pub in Islington? Lots of people have private meetings. As a punter, I cannot just barge in on get togethers of the Jockey Club; although I am member of the Labour Party, I have no right to sit in on sessions of the cabinet. Having meetings is what political groups of all stripes do, and cannot be adduced as evidence of undesirable clandestinity.

Cohen - sometimes given to sending me the odd abusive personal email for no reason in particular - asks how the media would react if a Tory mayor of London appointed British National Party supporters to his cabinet.

This point is as offensive as it is plain damn stupid. Whatever one thinks of Trotskyist political prescriptions, revolutionary socialists are politically motivated an entirely noble desire to see an end to exploitation, oppression, poverty, violence, hunger, racism and injustice across the planet.

Look, my present political relationship with the Socialist Action clique - ‘the Rossites’, as we called them back in the Socialist League - is as poor as only political relationships between former comrades can possibly be. But there is no valid comparison between their ideals and the ideals of fascists.

Cohen’s attack is worthy of a certain 1950s senator from Wisconsin. Are they now or have they ever been? Yes, they have. But in a democratic society, adherence to far left beliefs should be no bar to public office. We thankfully never got round to implementing a Berufsverbot in Britain, Nick.

There’s no way on earth that a leftie would ever be appointed as head of the National Lottery in this country. But in what could be good news for one of the local sections of one of the Fourth Internationals, Sri Lanka has just given the equivalent job to comrade A.P.A. de Vass Gunawardena, described by one leading national paper as 'an avowed Trotskyite'. Sounds like a winning ticket to me.

Nevertheless, I have already argued on this blog that the far left should mount a challenge in next week’s Haltemprice and Howden by-election, rather than letting pro-death penalty Conservative David Davis get away with presenting himself as a principled civil libertarian.

I think highly of both Tony Benn and Bob Marshall-Andrews, who will be campaigning for DD. But it is tactically disastrous for the Labour left to lend moral support to the Tory right, in any and all circumstances.

Meanwhile, the obvious inability of either Respect or the Socialist Workers’ Party/Left List to intervene rather underlines the pretentiousness of their claims to be serious political actors.

Well, the list of contenders has just been published; after considering the claims of the 26 hopefuls, this blog formally endorses the Socialist Equality Party, British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Who? Well, for the non-initiated, SEP are one of the splinters of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, possibly the biggest Trot group in Britain until it expelled its leader Gerry Healy in 1985 and split into at least nine fragments. Ask them their policy on any question, however complex, and it always reduces itself to ‘build the revolutionary party’.

Candidate Chris Talbot – pictured - is fresh from heading the list that triumphantly finished 18th out of the 18 parties that stood in the Welsh Assembly contest last year, securing 292 votes across the principality on a platform that even the most ultraleftist of my comments box regulars would surely find strong stuff.

It’s not a programme likely go down well with the good gentlemen farmers of the target constituency, who are not known for receptivity to the message of revolutionary Marxism. If the world revolution ever does kick off, I’d hazard a guess that it won’t be in Haltemprice and Howden.

Talbot will be extremely lucky if the number of voters willing to put a cross by his name in the seat reaches three figures. SEP will lose its deposit and finish behind the fascists, of course; but then hey, so did Labour in Henley.

In leftist theory, Talbot is engaged in is what is referred to as a ‘propaganda candidacy’; the idea is not to win, but to take advantage of the publicity opportunities offered by the heightened political interest around the by-election to raise the profile of the revolutionary party, and even to win members.

Very rarely, it even works. Geekier sections of the far left still get excited at the mere mention of the Neath by-election of 1945, where Jock Haston came third with 1,781 votes and gave the Revolutionary Communist Party an enduring foothold in South Wales.

Aficionados prefer to forget such cock-ups as Birmingham Stetchford in 1977, notable in Trot history for seeing Brian Heron of the International Marxist Group beat Paul Foot of the Socialist Workers’ Party by 494 votes to 377.

Nevertheless, some of the other runners make SEP look almost sensible. Lord Biro, who is standing in the Church of the Militant Elvis Party interest, does issue a formally correct call for the overthrow of the capitalist state, although sadly I suspect he is actually a reformist on other questions.

Mad Cow-Girl rules herself out of consideration by clearly being on the right of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Easy on the eye though Gemma Garrett of the Miss Great Britain Party indubitably is – she’s certainly got a popular front, know what I mean, fellas? – she does not strike one as the kind of gal who would be up for extended discussion of the class nature of the degenerate/deformed workers’ states.

It is to SEP’s credit that they are prepared to put in the work needed to argue for socialism – albeit of the fruitloop brand – in unpromising territory, in a by-election where the array of joke candidates underlines the devaluation of parliamentary democracy in recent decades.

They may be seriously mad, but at least they are serious, and they are clearly opposed to 42-day detention from the left. If I were on the electoral register in Haltemprice, they would get my vote.