Update: Militant councillor Derek Hatton is suspended from the Labour Party

It’s been a week of bad news for the Labour Party, after eight of its MPs announced they were leaving to form their own splinter group. But if the party was hoping to show that it wasn’t dominated by far-left ideologues, news tonight suggests the party is heading down an altogether different path.

Derek Hatton, the former deputy leader of Liverpool council has been readmitted to the Labour party, after being banned for 34 years. Hatton was a key member of the hard-left Militant faction which dominated Labour politics in Liverpool during the 1980s, and was behind the council’s disastrous decision to set an illegal budget in 1985. As a result, the council went bankrupt and Hatton and his colleagues were forced to send redundancy notices in taxis to council workers.