There are many, many things about the Spartacist League that one could object to, but surely trying to support people in Brick Lane against fascist attacks isn't amongst them?

One of the things you could complain about, however, was the sheer tedium of their newspaper, Workers Hammer, which they didn't bother trying to translate from the American. Its only apparent function was to make you realize how blessed Britain was when it came to articulate Trots - they looked positively epigrammatic compared to their American counter(s)parts. In his book, Denver Walker correctly identifies one aspect of this that was always annoying:

I've often seen people perplexed by slogans like 'Unions, minorities must oppose' such-and-such. This actually means 'Unions and racial minorities'; the omissions are quite acceptable in US-English; the Sparts don't seem to realize that the wording can create a problem for those of us who speak the home-grown variety. (p.79)

He also has fun taking the piss out of their slogans, such as 'the ill-rhyming and ill-scanning couple of iambic tetrameters: Defence of Cuba/USSR - Begins in Central America'.

In fact, Walker's principal interest often seems to be taking the piss. As a writer on the New Worker (which I think was the one set up by the splitters who left the Communist Party in protest at the adoption of Eurocommunist theory in the late-1970s), he's essentially a Stalinist and regards all Trots as juvenile, ego-driven grandstanders. He thinks much the same of Trotsky himself, as it happens.

Despite the good-humoured banter, however, there's something a bit more serious going on as well. Underlying it all is a deep fury that anyone calling themselves a Marxist could dare to criticise - let alone oppose - the workers' paradise that is (or rather, was) the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. For Walker such talk is effectively treason. And nothing arouses his wrath so much as any left group venturing its support for a figure like, say, the trade unionist Lech Walesa, or the writer Solzhenitsyn - 'That's no dissident, that's a whinger,' he spits in ill-mannered spite. As he points out repeatedly, such support places Trots shoulder-to-shoulder with Thatcher and Reagan. (Having a go at China is perfectly alright, of course.)

Unfortunately he then simultaneously reveals his ignorance and undermines his own position by denouncing the work of Martin Barker (of the SWP). Now, Barker wrote a fantastic and highly recommended book in the early-1980s entitled A Haunt of Fears, which examined the horror comics of the 1950s and the campaign to stamp them out. Apart from providing a serious analysis of a neglected art-form, the book also exposed the role of the Communist Party in the suppression of free speech - this in response to the Kremlin line of defending native nationalist traditions: Morris dancing and sea shanties were ideologically sound, whilst rock & roll and Hollywood were capitalist exploitation. In this context, the comics were apparently to be regarded as Yankee imperialism and an attack on British culture, rather than as the subversive and sideways attacks on bourgois complacency that Barker identifies.

Moving on from that work, Barker turned his attention to the then-current campaign against video nasties, which was following much the same trajectory as the earlier witch-hunt. In particular, he produced a superb analysis of I Spit On Your Grave, which - despite the dodgy title - is a fine, and exceptionally harrowing, movie. (At least that's how I remember it from the eraly-1980s - it's back out now, and maybe in retrospect it's not lasted too well, I don't know.)

But for Denver Walker, such talk is deeply offensive. 'I haven't seen the video,' he says in the time-honoured tradition of pompous piety and blinkered bigotry, before complaining that Martin Barker is 'silly' and a supporter of 'sadistic American filth' (so much worse than other sadistic filth, apparently). In other words, Walker places himself shoulder-to-shoulder with, er, Margaret Thatcher and Mary Whitehouse.

The truth is, of course, that trying to smear someone by pointing at their alleged bed-fellows is a poor substitute for argument. There's not a single idea in the history of humanity that hasn't at some time been espoused by a scoundrel. Walker's dislike of Trots, for example, doesn't exactly distance him from the Daily Mail.

Despite these caveats, it's mostly an entertaining book. It reminds you, for example, of the Revolutionary Workers Party, the group that every other Trotskyist ridicules. Tiring, perhaps, of industrial disputes that were pre-destined to betrayal by right-wing union bureaucrats, the RWP (or Posadists, as we knew them, after their founder Juan Posadas) turned their attention to UFOs and possible Chariots of the Gods-type visitors to Earth. They theorised that:

(1) only an advanced civilization could master inter-planetary travel;
(2) an advanced civilization is, by definition, a socialist civilization;
(3) ergo, we should embrace any visiting extra-terrestrials as the saviours of the working class.

As far as is known, this theory was original and did not originate as a flight of whimsy on the part of Douglas Adams. Trotsky rejected the notion of 'socialism in one country'; Posadas rejected 'socialism on one planet'. Genius. The Posadists also argued for a first nuclear strike by the Soviet Union on America.

The difference between these books can perhaps best be demonstrated by their depictions of the tortuous lineage of British Trotskyism. Tomlinson adopts a logical approach, thus: