In 1934, while living in exile in Barbizon, a small village near Fontainebleau in France, Leon Trotsky pioneered the political strategy that is now vexing Zack Polanski. It was here that he started encouraging his supporters to deploy a new method to shift the political debate: entryism. Concerned that the Communist League – a French Trotskyist group founded four years previously – did not have the size or influence to act alone, Trotsky encouraged its members to dissolve the group and join the larger French Socialist Party. Ever since then, the term entryism has been used to describe any incident of a smaller group joining a larger organisation in order to advance their own agenda. Discussion of this tactic has appeared once again after Green Party members passed the controversial “Zionism is racism” motion at their party conference on 4 October. Grandees, such as the party’s former leader Caroline Lucas, have expressed concern that in failing to adapt the Greens’ ultra-democratic systems for a new era of mass membership, the party has left itself open to this tactic. Writing for the New Statesman last week, Lucas said: “Entryism has been a problem for many parties, but with our commitment to direct democracy and our cumbersome internal accountability mechanisms, the Greens are woefully exposed.” newstatesman.com/politics/gr…