The "Trotskyite" thing

[Cain]

I've noticed a recent fetish of our Tory overlords: everyone who disagrees with them is a Trotskyite.

For instance:

Parents protesting at a primary school turning into a charter school?  Michael Gove, education secretary, called them Trotskyites.

When people realized part of our government workfare scheme meant making people work at certain major corporations, full time, but get no pay at all aside from their welfare benefits (in other words, providing free labour to said corporations through state-backed coercion), and they protested, causing said corporations to back out over the scheme, David Cameron referred to critics of the scheme as Trotskyites.

And now, according to the Mayor of London, the former administration was full of Trotskyites and "newt fanciers".  Relationship of newts to the revolutionary politics of Leon Trotsky currently unknown, but investigations are continuing.

No doubt when the government is forced to back down over its insane plans to privatise the police, that too will be the fault of villainous, moustache-twirling elitist Trotskyites, lurking in the shadows.

There's something quite disturbing in the way the government refers to all critics of its policies as Trotskyites or SWP members (same thing).  The SWP is a fringe group in party politics in the UK - it does provide a broad organizational capacity to certain leftist movements, especially anti-war and anti-fascist groups, and to a degree the organisations protesting budget cuts, but by and large, they are a group on the edges of political life. 

In a sense it is quite amusing for them, that according to the government they are so powerful and influential, and yet at the same time such a minor group that they should not be listened to.  But the automatic assumption that people who protest the Tory agenda are people with fringe political beliefs and therefore should be ignored is a very worrying one.  The equation fringe political beliefs = barmy people =
ignore them has some clearly disturbing undertones.

As an aside, I'm not sure when Trotskyites became the major villain of the Tories.  I have not been paying attention to the opinion pieces of...well, anyone for the last few years, on account of them being stupid, so while I do read the Telegraph, I've obviously been sheltered from an ongoing campaign of mostly imaginary red-baiting.

[Prince Glittersnatch III]

Why do they specifically name Trotskyites instead of just Commies in general?

[Cain]

A good question.  It is a curiously specific focus...much as if Stephen Harper were denoucing his enemies as Maoists.

I suspect it is because much of the Tory Party are still stuck in the 1980s, and thus denouncing their enemies as the "loony left".  There was an element of that, back in the day, with Militant infiltration of the Labour Party and other issues, miners strikes and so on, and of course the Tories ran with it as much as possible, to paint everyone to the left of Maggie Thatcher as being some lunatic subversive revolutionary environmentalist feminist newt-lover.

[BabylonHoruv]

The Troskyites were a common boogeyman for Soviet Russia as well.  I don't think there's any connection, but it is amusing.

[Cain]

Given the Soviet inclinations of the neoliberal right (I mean, seriously, they act like caricatures of capitalist Bolsheviks) it would make sense.

Oh, Chris Grayling claimed his email had been hacked by the SWP as well.  Given that the SWP had a massive internal debate about even having a Twitter feed recently, I find this somewhat hard to credit.

[Scribbly]

My instinct is that 'Commie' or 'Communist' sounds too uncomfortably American (our stand up comedians have been ripping on american politicians for the whole Socialist = Commie/Communist thing for a while) and crazy on behalf of the person spouting it. Trotskyist has the same connotation but also sounds more educated somehow. The middle classes love hearing where things are from, too. Knowing their ham is from Wiltshire and their political opponents are Trotskyites not just Communists appeals to a certain mindset.

On the other hand I've been sick as a dog for days and I'm only just starting to feel human now so I might be babbling incoherently. Moreso than normal, even.

[Telarus]

So it's there to a) influence the Narrative, and b) trigger the prediction-dopamine related "AHA! I knew it!" reaction, which further embeds that node as a carrier further spreading this Meme (& as carriers may already know each other irl, spreads the memetic wave as an advance front into the general population).


I'm sure the repetition comes from a "short half-life", in that there is so much other competition in the Narrative from other "threats" that falling out of the Narrative would leave it circulating only among the already deeply infected.

[Cain]

I dunno DS, makes as much sense as almost every other theory I've seen so far.

Telarus, good points about the nature of such propaganda, though of course, in theory at least, any buzzword would potentially do.

I think it's a case of since our government is acting like parody Stalinists, all opposition looks like imaginary Trotskyites (I have been informed, incidentally, the correct term is Trotskyist).