Johnson's self-delusion

He has a particular problem with Len McCluskey, but his generalised image of trade unionism as "fat, white, finger-jabbing blokes on rostrums shouting and screaming" indicates that the Unite general secretary is simply first among equals in his league table of hostility.

His effort to evoke the Monty Python "What did the Romans ever do for us?" sketch by listing individual rights enacted by Labour in office tells only part of the story.

Labour's 13 years in office left Tory anti-union legislation largely intact, making it difficult for workers to take legal industrial action, especially the solidarity action used widely when Johnson was active at local level.

What kind of Labour Party member could gloat about the virtual halving of union membership from a high of around 13 million?

This is not because of trade union officials' inability to "connect to a whole swathe of the workforce that thinks they died out with the ark," as Johnson sneers.

It has more to do with the deindustrialisation process that has hit highly unionised areas such as coalmines, docks, steel, print and motor manufacturing, together with systematic government attacks on unions.

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Johnson accuses McCluskey of regarding electoral victory as a "bourgeois concept."

This is part of new Labour's rewriting of history that poses Tony Blair as an electoral magician who won because he wore the Tories' political clothes in contrast to traditional Labour politicians - not just the left - who were incapable of victory because they were doctrinaire and old-fashioned.

This ignores the reality that, had traditional right-of-centre Labour man John Smith lived, he would in all probability have won the 1997 election.

This because the Tories were viewed correctly as corrupt, sleazy and bankrupt of ideas, abandoned by many of their usual media backers.

It suited both the Tory media and new Labour mythmakers to portray Blair as a new phenomenon, a winner because he scorned the ideas and practices of the party to which he was nominally committed.

Johnson's victory-at-all costs diatribe skirts around the fact that new Labour's subservience to Washington and City bankers caused Labour's vote and membership to drop at every general election after 1997, paving the way to defeat in 2010.

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McCluskey's crime, in Johnson's view, is to insist that Labour has nothing to gain by revisiting the pro-profits obsession that alienated the party's working-class electoral base.

As much as he is flabbergasted by the suggestion that Labour has been "taken over by some right-wing clique," the penetration of the party by big business money is well documented.

Progress, the body that interviewed Johnson, operates as a well-heeled party within a party, bankrolled by Lord Sainsbury with help from Pfizer, Network Rail and lobbyists Sovereign Strategy.

As Aslef national organiser Simon Weller has pointed out, an association of Labour members taking corporate donations without party oversight "is a scandal waiting to happen."

Trade unions are still more in touch with the disenfranchised working class than politicians in the Westminster bubble, many of whom owe their seats to patronage and sharp practice.

Labour will be stronger for a closer relationship with the unions and for policies that favour working people over City of London parasites.