For Mark Serwotka, read Pete Winkelman

He led the Milton Keynes Stadium Consortium, a group supported by Asda and Ikea, which had the ambition of building a huge supermarket on a greenfield site near the town. However, there were planning restrictions. To get around these, any development had to include some tangible benefit to the local community, such as a brand new football stadium.

Winkelman’s problem was that there was no club in the town that could justify a new stadium, certainly not one with the 30,000 capacity required. So, he resolved to move one in. Luton Town, QPR and Crystal Palace were approached, before the chairman of Wimbledon FC, Charles Koppel, agreed to relocate the club to Milton Keynes in 2001. Despite opposition from fans and even the Football Association, the move was allowed to go ahead, and Wimbledon were uprooted some eighty miles away; the team renamed, the fans’ opinions ignored.

The majority of Wimbledon supporters felt, quite understandably, that their team had been stolen from them; relocated, renamed, and transformed into something completely different from the club they had supported for all these years. In response, they founded their own team, AFC Wimbledon, who have been climbing through the divisions ever since, and have happily made their way back to the Football League.

AFC Wimbledon are rightly regarded as a success story, an example of one community fighting back against what was widely seen amongst football supporters as a terrible injustice. For some reason, I was reminded of the Wimbledon story yesterday, when hearing Mark Serwotka’s latest comments.

Upon re-joining the Labour Party on Tuesday, Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, waited less than a week before issuing a call for boundary changes to be used as an opportunity to kick out “moderate” MPs.

A bit of history may be useful here.

Mark Serwotka was expelled by the Labour Party for joining Socialist Organiser, a grouping which later became the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. The AWL is an organisation proscribed by the Labour Party, and is “Trotskyist and Marxist”. That’s not hyperbole; that’s from their website. There is more detail on why the AWL is proscribed here.

More recently, Serwotka was involved in the creation of Respect; he gave a speech at their 2007 conference, provoking alarm even within the AWL. Since then, Serwotka voted for the Green Party in the 2010 elections, and claimed that New Labour was the worst government for public sector workers in history.

And now here we are. A man who for 25 years was deemed to not share the aims and values of the Labour Party is welcomed back. Just five days after having his ban overturned, he’s calling for MPs who are insufficiently loyal to the current leadership to face deselections. A man who has supported the Greens, Respect, and the AWL wants to get rid of Labour MPs who have fought for the party for many years, through thick and thin. And Serwotka is doing this in support of a leader who has rebelled against Labour hundreds of times, and who along with his chancellor talked of potentially bringing down a Miliband government. Loyalty is not Serwotka’s strong card here. The hypocrisy is astonishing.

And this is why I was reminded of AFC Wimbledon and Pete Winkelman. Winkelman couldn’t carry out his plans on his own; the capacity and the support for his ideas weren’t there. He needed an existing football club as a vehicle for his ambitions, and he didn’t care that he tore a community apart to get one.

Mark Serwotka is the same. There is no support for his brand of politics in the real world. His far-left ideas win no votes, no seats, no power. Like Winkelman, he has now found a way of furthering his ambitions; to take control of a party which does win significant support and twist it into something else; not by winning any arguments but by kicking out people who have loyally supported the party for years.

Serwotka’s disregard for Labour members (who mostly do not share his politics) and Labour voters matches Winkelman’s disregard for Wimbledon supporters. To these men, such people are irrelevant, as are the organisations they aim to infiltrate.

Wimbledon supporters felt that their club was stolen, relocated, renamed, turned into something different. Just as Pete Winkelman moved Wimbledon out to Buckinghamshire, so Mark Serwotka aims to take Labour far from home.

Winkelman and Serwotka could never have achieved their aims on their own, so they rely on a parasitic strategy. It’s too late for Wimbledon. But Mark Serwotka and his entryism must be fought back.