Terminal

John McDonnell is my friend on Facebook, he has turned out to have been much less pro-IRA than successive Tory and Labour Governments, he has only ever been Labour Left rather than the sort of sectarian Leftist things that eventually became New Labour, and he was kept off the ballot for Labour Leader because of a "Loony Left" proposal to tax the highest incomes at fifty pence in the pound (whatever happened to that barking mad idea?).

But even some of us who are open to persuasion about Heathrow naturally side with unions rather than with luvvies, although we don't like super-unions, in the way that we don't like big business, or central government's trampling on local government.

The small, classically Hard Left remnant, which will include some new or restored faces, will be one of the three parties on the Labour benches in the next Parliament. So will the larger, and rather more replenished, Blairite remnant. But the party of the big unions will predominate. On something like Heathrow, it might even be right. But it won't always be. Yet there will be nothing strong enough to take it on.

The formal dissolution of the Labour Party, like that of the Conservative Party for different but similar reasons, is no more than a Parliament away. However, while there is First Past The Post, then there will still be the Lib Dems, though not for one moment longer. But even that might not be reason enough to get rid of it.