Lies of the Labour leadership contest 7: There is mass Trotskyist arm twisting

Lie 7:

Trotsky entryists (sic) are twisting young arms in the Corbynite cause.

Bollocks because:

Look, I'll level with you. I'm happy to describe myself as a Trotskyist. For me this has more to do with the necessarily international nature of socialism and the centrality of working class agency to political change than, say, selling papers in a room above a pub. There is, you see, a bit of ambiguity as to what the word "Trotskyist" means. For a certain kind of Labour right-winger, schooled in the ways of NOLS, it means simply "someone a bit more left-wing than me". On this perspective, Trotskyism is more a matter of opposing academies than storming the Winter Palace.

But, on any reasonable understanding of the word, there are not many Trotskyists in Britain. We're talking the low thousands at most. The idea that they are in a position to enter the Labour Party and swing the result of a leadership election is either scaremongering or utopianism, depending on your view on these matters. On a bad day the combined ranks of British revolutionaries-from-below are not in a position to twist a lemon, let alone the arms of hundreds of thousands of impressionable youngsters. This, as I see it, is actually a problem. But Tom Watson really doesn't need to worry.

The idea that Trotskyists are not interested in winning elections is, by the way, absurd. And it is certainly the case that the mass of Corbyn supporters want Labour to win the next General Election, however unlikely the more clear sighted of us might acknowledge that to be. For many of these the aim of such a victory would be the rolling out of policies not out of place in the mouths of Roy Hattersley or John Smith. The Corbyn surge is a product not so much of popular conversion to the doctrine of Combined and Uneven Development as of the relentless rightward shift in Labour Policy since the mid-90s. Others amongst the surgers are products of a younger, more environmentally conscious, libertarian egalitarianism. Again, they have not reached this position as a result of reading The Revolution Betrayed.

Tom Watson is right about one thing. Arms are being twisted in this leadership election. To see this in action, however, you need to look not to dingy meetings on the state capitalism hypothesis but to the columns of the Guardian and the actions of PLP members. Corbyn is not the beneficiary.