SOCIALIST Party members made a mass application to rejoin the Labour Party yesterday, saying they aimed to “pacify the Blairites.”

Seventy-five activists who had been expelled from Labour for association with the Militant tendency said they wanted to become involved in Labour again to stop “further compromise and retreats.”

The group includes former Liverpool Labour bigwig Tony Mulhearn, former Labour MP Dave Nellist and Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe.

Mr Taaffe said: “We want to play our part in the struggle to transform Labour and urge the national executive committee to aid this process by admitting us, and others who have been similarly expelled or excluded, into membership, and also by deciding favourably on requests for affiliation from any socialist organisation that so applies.”

But a Labour spokeswoman said the members would be “ineligible” for membership as party rules kept out members of organisations with their “own programme, principles and policy, or distinctive and separate propaganda.”

The Socialist Party has recently argued that the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc), the organisation through which it stands candidates, should “make no further preparations for contesting the May 2017 [local] elections.”

Some suggested the timing of the announcement was a bid to raise attention of the party’s Socialism 2016 festival this weekend.

One shadow cabinet member on the left of Labour told the Star: “It’s a publicity stunt. It adds nothing at all to the serious job of a mass Labour Party rooted in working-class communities.”

But a Socialist Party source hit back: “That’s not the case. We’ve raised these issues within Tusc within the last month or so and this is an annual event. The timing is just a coincidence.”