This is one of the silliest things you've said yet. By this reasoning if someone was to argue on thread against measures that stop social mobility and was to argue on another for private schools it would be dishonest to point this out. Totally absurd. Political views don't exist in a vacuum (or at least they shouldn't), part of the point of debate is to tease out the contradictions and inconsistencies made.
Of course your view on the role of the LP in bringing about the changes you want is relevant to a discussion of how leadership of the LP should be defined. Of course your views on workers control of their community, and direct democracy are relevant to what the role of the leader of a political organisation. To argue otherwise if frankly pathetic.
Now if you views have changed since you made the posts I linked to fine, views do change but and if you are now saying that you don't hold those positions then ok but the idea that it is unreasonable to interpret your current claims in light of your past claims is garbage. The posts I linked to are hardly from the dawn of time, they were made within the last year and a bit, and are consistent with many other posts you've made.
Both you and Moose specifically drew a, partial, equivalence between the leader of the political party and a CEO. If that is not top down leadership I don't know what is.
I don't know why I'm humouring this but here we go.
The posts you've pulled from your files and linked to are, respectively, about (1) how I think, not enormously controversially, that the outcomes of parliamentary politics have the biggest impact on conditions in the contemporary UK, and (2) how it's too late in proceedings for anyone but states to mitigate the impact of global warming. For the maintenance of your records I continue to think both of these things are broadly true, at least until you can give me a rough date for the emergence of revolutionary socialism. Some of it should probably be qualified further but I only have finite time on this mortal coil. However, neither of them are directly relevant to "discussion of how leadership of the LP should be defined". For the same reason they're not even really relevant to who is actually in control, just how that control may be manifested - directly or by proxy.
As Moose later pointed out, parliamentary structure is inherently top down but beyond this I've not attempted to assert the necessity for top-down control within the Labour Party. Indeed I would argue the opposite. One of the major failings of Corbynism was that it claimed to be interested in grassroots community organising and listening to people, then in the course of four years did not do those things to any significant degree. It may have listened but it did not reflect as much in its action; it
was led from the top (not necessarily Corbyn) and this was a serious mistake. It used its people for heavily directed work, largely concerned with electoral campaigning. Only now are its members and satellites starting to show a renewed interest in something else.
This does not mean that a leader is redundant. I don't think the CEO term is very helpful in this discussion, probably a distraction, but I also don't think you understand what that is either; the spectrum of leadership possibilities. CEO is principally a position of responsibility, again an interface position where the blame or credit sits. It's not necessarily directive or prescriptive, though this may often be the case. A successful C-level leader could in the right circumstances do their job purely by enabling other people a long way beneath their hierarchical position; so it is with political leaders. Leadership isn't the same thing as ownership or control. I think amongst other things you're enormously overestimating what these people
do.
If the Labour Party were to manage to transform itself into something that best manifested itself through local activity, winning the battle outside of electoral politics, then it would very likely still need a leader - one to represent those efforts, both as a symbol to its own people and especially to those yet to be convinced. The latter is what the second part of the first linked post is about, change through leadership of ideas, although it's of secondary importance to any of this. In particular the
semblance of a traditional leadership role would be necessary in order to meet public electoral expectations; even though that may not be core to the bulk of what it
does, it would be core to getting elected.
But all of this is a waste of time if you insist on taking it to be endorsement of some top-down elite-led structure.
