Union City Blue?

Every year, the sort of people who want it to be true come up with the story, which they always hope will run until the Labour Party Conference, but which tellingly never does, that Labour is planning to weaken or cut its links to the trade unions.

1980s throwbacks that they are, they expect people to have fits of the vapours at the mere mention of mass membership organisations of working, tax-paying British citizens, organisations articulating exactly the opinion of the mainstream middle of British society where the Coalition's Blair-without-Brown slashing and burning is concerned.

As members of the entirely separate Blair Party now led by David Cameron, with David Miliband as his Deputy for those nominally within the Labour Party, they are in any case the beneficiaries of entirely separate and undeclared, but manifestly lavish, funding not unrelated to their support for vast organised criminality from the City to several war zones.

Labour's is the only Leadership Election in Britain in which a third of the votes go to millions of ordinary working people rather than to full-time paid politicians (the MPs' section) or political hobbyists (the CLPs' section, and the whole of a Conservative or Lib Dem Leadership Election). No wonder that the Blairites in all parties have always wanted rid of it.