Labour Party

"Even in these hard times, is it too much to expect an opposition to oppose now and again?" (Sunday Herald, 16 June).

For historians of the British Labour Party, June 2013 is likely to be remembered as a key milestone in Party's political and ideological evolution.

On 22 June, unless you have a very good excuse, you must be at the People's Assembly in London. Practically every trade union leader is scheduled to be in one room alongside hundreds of rank and file activists as well as people who have led campaigns against the bedroom tax, fought to defend the NHS and headed up the revolt by disabled people.

The next general election is still two years away, but the battle lines are already being drawn. In a series of carefully planned announcements, the mainstream parties have all made it crystal clear that immigration will be at the top of the political agenda. The 2015 election looks set to herald the most racist campaign in a long time.

The demise of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and of the political tradition that it seeks to embody have been widely proclaimed on the British left in recent weeks. Thus the columnist Owen Jones has announced that "the era of the SWP and its kind is over." Is he right?

The Labour List website ran a headline in early October declaring, "There's a class war being waged in Britain - but not by Labour."

This was meant to be a compliment, not a criticism, of Ed Miliband's attack on the Tories as the real enemies of "One Nation" Britain. Yet, of course, it's an observation that is close to the mark.

Unite has been derided in the right wing press as a union pushing a backward looking confrontational agenda apparently belonging to a bygone age. Len McCluskey, Unite's general secretary, was condemned before the Olympics when he declared that "the unions, and the general community, have got every right to be out protesting.

A few days after the Bradford West by-election, a shellshocked Labour activist described his experience of the campaign: "From around 15 March till the 22.... it seemed we were going to win - we had our headquarters set up in each ward and our campaign was leaps ahead in backing, money and numbers....[then] during this last week I'd check the #bradfordwest hash tag, and for every pro-Labour tweet there were easily ten pro-Galloway ones, seemingly from young Asian Bradford constituents...We'd pass kids in the street who would shout 'Galloway' at us all the time.

What was it that first motivated you to write Chavs?

Above all it was to put class on the agenda. I wanted to challenge this idea that we're all middle class now and that all that remains of the working class is a feckless rump. The point is that if you don't have class, then you don't have class politics and if you don't have class politics, then you don't have a left.

Cries of shame greeted Labour leader Ed Miliband as he spoke at the TUC conference in September. Despite his declaration of pride in the relationship between the trade unions and the Labour Party, he went out of his way to denounce the strike planned for 30 November when millions of workers will take on the Tories.

The Labour Party has a problem. It has a new leader who, like his predecessors, sees Labour as an electoral machine whose sole purpose is to put the party back into power. To do that, of course, requires presenting an alternative - a different programme or vision or set of policies - which can distinguish them from the government in power. Let's get out of the way immediately the fact that the party leaders are almost indistinguishable, cloned products of the new managerialism.