Opting In

A move from opting out of the political levy to opting into it would require primary legislation, which David Cameron would never let Ed Miliband have, which a Labour Government would hardly be likely to enact in 2015, and which the Conservatives have never attempted to introduce between 1951 and 1964, between 1970 and 1974, between 1979 and 1997, or since 2010.

Instead, all levy-payers and members of other affiliated organisations should be declared members of their Constituency Labour Parties automatically unless they were members of any other party apart from the Co-operative Party.

Progress (which is doing sterling work against tax evasion and in favour of keeping the East Coast Main Line in public ownership, thereby earning itself that ultimate accolade, the scorn of Dan Hodges) ought to become an affiliated organisation. As should Movement for Change. There might then be a case for the abolition of individual membership altogether.

There has been no shortage of entryism and selection-rigging, all right. Most Labour MPs abstained rather than oppose the retroactive legalisation of workfare.

Almost all did so rather than oppose the cancellation of a day's parliamentary business in order to give Margaret Thatcher the funeral of a Third World dictator, on which there was only a vote at all because a non-Labour MP had forced one.

To call such people the successors of the One Nation Tories or the SDP would be to insult the memories even of the One Nation Tories and the SDP.