Let's stop bickering about 'politics' and do it properly

Westminster shadow boxing is totally irrelevant, as Tony Benn said over 10 years ago, when he decided not to stand again in order to engage in "real politics."

The only effective opposition to the government's policies is by extra-parliamentary struggle - demos, strikes, organised civil disobedience on such a scale as to make the country ungovernable.

Rather than repeat previously unsuccessful attempts to create B versions of the Labour Party, it would be better to urge the unions to reclaim Labour by the following measures:

1) Using their weight to restore the pre-Blair constitution, making conference and an executive answerable to it the sole deciders of policy, instead of an unelected "national policy forum."

2) Making the parliamentary Labour Party part of the party, subject to party decisions, instead of maintaining the upper-class fiction that an MP is an individual "member of the club" answerable only to his own conscience.

3) Urging local branches and trade councils to be more active in their constituency parties to deselect the Blairite fifth column so that their real status as "independent" quasi-Tories is quite clear.

This would not only make Labour more electable but free Ed Miliband from being virtually a prisoner of the gang.

Such a democratic Labour Party, aware and responsive to its roots, would also be able to return to the party's original constitution, with several socialist parties alongside the unions and co-ops within it.

These affiliated parties could then concentrate of their real work of popular education - raising the class and social consciousness of all "workers by hand and brain" instead of wasting their time on electoral fantasies.

Jimmy Jancovich

Paris, France