HOW THE MILITANTS ARE HIJACKING LABOUR AGAIN

WHEn the controversial firebrand Derek Hatton was expelled from the Labour Party almost 30 years ago, few thought that he would ever be allowed to return. The Armani-suited socialist was Deputy Leader of Liverpool City Council when it defied the Thatcher government’s demands for curbs on excessive town hall spending.

By refusing to set a legal budget in 1985, Hatton triggered the worst financial crisis in the city’s modern history. At the Labour Conference the same year, party leader neil Kinnock memorably denounced Hatton for wreaking ‘grotesque chaos’ on Liverpool.

His rebellion only ended when he was expelled from the party the following year for belonging to the Trotskyite organisation Militant Tendency, which had earlier been found to be in breach of the Labour Party’s constitution.

Militant had tried to gain key positions within the Labour Party so as to promote its own policies, including widespread nationalisation and a programme of public works.

Yet despite being a pariah in the Labour movement for decades, Hatton has quietly re-joined Labour as a member in the past few weeks — just in time to vote for hard-Left Jeremy Corbyn in the party’s leadership contest.

Deified by some on Merseyside, Hatton — an emblematic figure for the far Left — is proof that the Labour Party is being infiltrated by well-organised extremists who plan to vote for Corbyn, an unreconstructed Trotskyite. They are taking advantage of a disastrously misguided change in the rules by Ed Miliband, who introduced a ‘ onemember, one-vote’ system to elect any new Labour leader.

This followed widespread anger about the way Miliband himself was elected. When he became leader in 2010, the electoral college was divided into three categories: MPs, party members and trade unions.

Miliband came top in only the union section, and was never able to shake off the charge that he was a puppet of the unions. By creating a one-member, one-vote system and introducing an affiliate scheme enabling anyone to apply to join, he thought he was broadening the scope of the membership.

But his plan has spectacularly backfired, bringing back into the party some of the Left-wing militant zealots who did so much damage to Labour in the past.

Under the revised system, anyone who registers as an affiliated supporter and pays the £3 fee, has a vote in the Labour leadership ballot. Membership is refused if any applicant is found to be a member of a rival party or if they decline to sign up to Labour’s aims and values.

BUT, with no centralised membership list, the party is finding it almost impossible to properly monitor applicants. It is estimated that up to 140,000 people have already filled in an online application and paid their £3.

One former minister told me: ‘This is a concerted attempt by the unions and the far Left to influence the election. I’m not sure we have the resources to stop it. We have been overwhelmed.

‘We don’t have the staff or the resources to go through the political allegiances of every applicant. Half the Tory Party could have signed up for all we know.’ Labour MP John Mann has written to Harriet Harman, the party’s acting leader, calling for the election to be suspended because of alleged widespread ‘entryism’ in Labour’s ranks.

‘Entryism’ is defined as a political strategy in which an organisation encourages its own members or supporters to join another [usually larger group] to expand their influence.

Militant Tendency’s takeover of the Liverpool Labour Party in the Eighties was classic entryism. More recently, the Unite trade union flooded the local Labour Party in Falkirk in Scotland with supporters to try to influence the choice in favour of their hard-Left candidate to fight to become an MP for the constituency.

For her part, Ms Harman has insisted that the Labour machine is capable of weeding out any dodgy applications. The party has also brought in additional staff to ‘vet’ the applications but there are widespread concerns that they will fail

Harman says staff are working shifts six days a week sifting through applications and that she has even helped, too.

However, in an interview this week, Jeremy Corbyn conceded that entryism was occurring. He said: ‘The entryism I see is lots of young people who were hitherto not very excited about politics coming in saying, yeah, we can have a discussion, we can talk about our debts and our housing problems.’

As for Derek Hatton, after submitting his application for membership, he received a polite acknowledgement.

Today, the 67-year- old lives in a £200,000 rented penthouse flat in Liverpool, with panoramic views of