Well then our recollections on this differ. I must be getting old.
LT:
Their presence in and ultimate
> departure from the Labour fold, voluntary or otherwise, however meant
> little
> in the end for the electoral success (or not) of Labour.
LT: This is quite obviously because, as I stated, the Labour Party was and is a mass party with hundreds of thousands of members, a huge paid staff of professionals, church supporters, small business supporters, union memberships, mass funding, a tradition going back for over a century now. Now, these aren't insignificant differences, and your refusal to register them suggests that the analogy isn't offered in good faith.
What's 'good faith' got to do with it? Fact is Labour was essentially the party of the trade union bureaucracy before morphing into the Americanised animal it is today in which signed-up members have even less influence than in the old days (when they had less and less anyway as time went on if you read Ralph Miliband). You seem to have an excessively romantic idea of what Labour was and has become. A largely working class Labour *vote* certainly never made it the 'mass party' of your illusions - at least not in most people's living memory.
LT:
The similarity lies in an opportunistic orientation towards labourism in
> both cases in the vain expectation of rapid growth.
LT: There is no orientation toward labourism. Respect was and is an open coalition between revolutionaries and reformists, formed for the purpose of challenging New Labour's hegemony on the left vote, and providing an alternative based on radical policies. To which end, Respect has so far had some considerable success despite.
Well what do you call Galloway's politics? They're surely a residue of old left labourism? Actually from what I've heard, Respect was about an orientation (via Galloway) to something even less radical in the form of predominantly conservative ethnically-based local constituency politics.