Lefties often resort to historical analogies to explain current events. The Jacobins looked to the Romans as examples, leading Trotsky to comment “Their Roman speeches were a heroic way of expressing a prosaic content.” The Bolsheviks looked back to the French revolution and today we do not lack for 1917 reenactment societies. In my more irritable moments, the example of Felix Dzershinzky often comes to mind.

However, only one group sees Liverpool in the mid-1980s as the defining event in world history to which everything must be linked. It is true that Militant’s struggle against Thatcherism has lessons which are still relevant, but the fact is that it was a defeat forty years ago. For most young activists born in the two intervening generations it probably does not mean that much.

Militant renamed itself the Socialist Party ages ago and had a split with that section of the membership which was committed to staying in the Labour Party and then decided that the British revolution is imminent. We can reasonably describe much of their output as stolid, though other adjectives have been used.

The Socialist Party have decided once again to stand a mayoral candidate in Tower Hamlets. They maintain the polite fiction that the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition is a wholly independent formation of which they are but one element.

They have solid mathematical reasons for standing. In 2018 they got 728 votes (0.94%) and in 2022 this solid foundation delivered 1462 votes (1.74%). By my reckoning they are on course to win by the late 2050s if they keep doubling their vote.

Their maths might be impeccable, but the politics are more dubious. They are understandably miffed that the bureaucrats who euthanised Your Party announced without consulting any of the outfit’s local members that Corbyn was endorsing Aspire.  They also make criticisms of Aspire which are perfectly reasonable. It is not a party in any meaningful sense, just a bunch of councillors who owe their position to their relationship with the mayor.

Missing from the explanation is anything about what is happening to the British party system. You are told about the Poplar councillors of the 1920s and Liverpool in the 1980s, but there is nothing about the collapse of Labour locally or nationally and where their voters are going. The battle to be vote is solely between Aspire which controls the council and TUSC, which if its luck keeps up, might get 3.5% of the vote, though I doubt it.

It is obvious to anyone who hasn’t been living on top of a mountain for the last six months where the left vote in the May elections is going to go. As that noted philosopher Stringer Bell, so memorably played by Idris Elba, observed “Look, the thing about the old days — they the old days.” The world has moved on since Liverpool in the 1980s and the demand for Scouse nostalgia is fully met by the Beatles and not by Derek Hatton.