I'm sorry, I thought it was somehow important.
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.
Here are the facts: at its peak in 1950, the Labour Party had a million members. Today, at its nadir, it has roughly 200,000 members. That is still a massive membership. Together with the other massive advantages I mentioned, it tells you why the Labour Party could survive the expulsion of minnow sects. Respect has about 1% of the members that the Labour Party has, no union affiliation, poor funding, a small professional staff etc. A split from such a small base cannot be the basis for future success. It was tough enough in BG&B with everyone on board, general good-will toward us and a very poor and dim-witted local MP. Galloway defeating Fitzpatrick is unthinkable.
> 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.
You're not paying attention: Respect is an open alliance between reformists and revolutionaries. It was *never* about 'ethnically-based local constituency politics', much less 'conservative' politics. It is the attempt to take a turn in that direction that produced this bitter argument and effective split.