Labour Party

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.

The big losers in the elections were the Liberal Democrats. Their base in big city councils built up over the last two decades by posing to the left of Labour, were sharply eroded as Labour revived.

After the huge TUC-organised anti-cuts demonstration at the end of March, one thing should be clear: the contours of British society remain profoundly shaped by class.

It wasn't just that the 26 March protest was huge, though it was. With at least 500,000 demonstrating - perhaps even as many as 750,000 - it was the second biggest demonstration in British history, after the February 2003 anti-war march.

Such tensions centre on how the Labour Party should deal with the budget deficit and respond to the Con-Dem cuts.

Ed Miliband has sought to balance different pressures. Despite trade union support enabling him to clinch victory over his brother, and his apparent distancing of himself from New Labour when he described himself as part of a "new generation" of leaders, he quickly shunned the label of "Red Ed".