an answer from Butchers came there none...
This is pretty shitty from you on a number of levels. First, the logical - to recognise the gaps, limitations, contradictions and plain wrongness of your position it doesn't require an alternative position to be put forward - unless you are arguing that your scenario is somehow inevitable reality. Second, you know very well what my answers are - the formation of community union type groups around locally identified w/c needs and solutions which necessarily bring them into direct challenge with labour rather than directing their energy and ideas into labour:
We could form 'community unions', possibly funded by trade unions but with organisational independence assured, unconnected to Labour that would work directly on helping to meet the needs of those politically abandoned working-class communities where conditions are deteriorating by the day. These would be based around the self-identified needs and plans of those communities - which can only pit them head-to-head against the BNP and the political mainstream.
The types of small victories that can be won on this terrain should be viewed not only as being worthwhile in themselves, but also as contributing to the re-emergence of community confidence in political self-assertion, the necessary first steps towards achieving further-reaching change. There are already existing groups engaged in this sort of practical activity, such as the London Coalition Against Poverty, Haringey Solidarity and the Oxford and Islington Working Class Associations.
The need for these to be open membership union-type organisations rather than party membership-type groups is a simple practical one. People will join unions at work as they recognise collective needs that exist over and above the heads of political disagreements, and the same is true of community needs. And once there is widespread identification (even passive) of the needs of an area/workplace with the existence of a union it becomes very hard to shift; that identification becomes a power in itself. Parties are too narrow to play this role under today's conditions - they exist on a different level - but there is no reason why they cannot play a role within these broader open groups.
But you don't like that sort of thing when it happens despite a purely rhetorical commitment to them - see the outraged response when even a challenge as wet as the greens came in Barking. Well remember the spluttering anger at daring to stand against labour.
Thirdly, you haven't actually suggested anything yourself (you've taken a number of contradictory positions but that's a different matter). All you have said is that unions should make labour nicer - on the basis that the unions are somehow to the left of the party leadership thereby ignoring their own role in producing modern day labour party neo-liberalism, and also ignoring the extensive list of blocks to this occurring that you trotted out earlier in relation to the LRC fantasy of taking over the labour party leadership.
