LEON TROTSKY must be turning in his grave. Where all his followers’ efforts to make Trotskyism a mass movement failed, New Labour has succeeded.

Labour Party membership is nudging 600,000, as previously disillusioned members return to the fold and young activists who’ve never been in any political party sign up because of positive changes they see happening.

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t articulating a new politics. He’s saying now what he’s always said.

But the public mood has changed in response to people hearing a real alternative to the mind-numbing uniformity offered by major political parties, with voters forced to identify minor nuances to tell them apart.

Corbyn and the MPs backing him wholeheartedly have struck a chord with the disaffected and the re-energised.

They like what they see as a new approach — anti-war, anti-austerity, public ownership, investment for quality jobs, environmental protection, equality for all, trade union rights — and have joined Labour to get this agenda by voting for Corbyn.

But the likes of Angela Eagle and Tom Watson can’t accept this mass expression of democracy, seeing malign forces as having engineered their involvement.

Watson, who is happy to squander hundreds of thousands of pounds of party funds on a court case to prevent members voting in the leadership contest, sees “old hands twisting young arms” in the Labour Party.

“They are caucusing and factionalising and putting pressure where they can and that’s how Trotsky entryists operate,” he tells the ever-willing Guardian.

Some people might counter that this is how Lord Sainsbury’s Progress party-within-a-party operates.

Former leadership candidate Eagle — or at least “a friend” of hers — raises the Militant Tendency bogey, telling the Liverpool Echo that “some of the same destructive forces that caused misery in Liverpool and such harm to the Labour Party three decades ago are back.”

To prove how sinister these returned visitors from yesteryear are, many impersonate people in their twenties and thirties.

Eagle, Watson and their ilk must accept that time is passing, politics is changing and their attempts to use administrative measures to prevent Labour from reflecting new developments is just so 1980s.

Resurrecting old ghosts in order to exorcise them reflects political bankruptcy.

Southern dispute

SMALL wonder that rail union RMT feels the need to demonstrate outside the Department for Transport (DfT) offices today because government alone holds the key to resolving the Southern Railway industrial dispute.

Transport Department official Peter Wilkinson is effectively the Tory government’s ventriloquist manipulating Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR) negotiators.

GTR claims to be committed to a Martini approach to talks — “any time, any place, anywhere” — to end RMT members’ strike action.

But GTR chief executive Charles Horton has imposed strict parameters within which talks would be held — and these have already been rejected by the union.

He and his staff are not really interested in resolving this dispute for two reasons.

They know that the government is behind their obstructive position and they can rely on the capitalist media to abuse RMT, blaming the union for the chaos on the Southern network caused by incompetent private operators and the franchise system.

But RMT members have not voted so decisively for action to simply surrender in the face of a hostile media reaction.

The DfT cannot disguise indefinitely its hand stuck up the rear end of GVT managers who wave their arms and spout government-approved propaganda.

If strike action in a similar dispute in Scotland could be suspended on the basis of an offer worthy of discussion, nothing should prevent the same formula at Southern.