John McDonnell sees the same process at work. Here’s a section from his blog last Sunday 3 August: “This morning the media is again full of plotters engaged in the planning of coups and counter coups, conspirators, infighting and character assassination. It's just another day in the life of New Labour.

“The Blairite New Labour spin machine has gone into overdrive in promoting David Miliband throughout their usual media outlets. Yesterday it was embarrassing to read exactly the same eulogies to Miliband from the likes of the Guardian's Polly Toynbee that she had written initially for Tony Blair and only 12 months ago for Gordon Brown. Now in the Sunday papers we have Blair's own revenge attack on Brown published.” ( www.johnmcdonnell.org.uk )

Blair has allowed a memo in which he described Brown as ‘lamentable’ and ‘vacuous’ to escape into the wild. Blair no doubt blames Brown for his downfall. For him this is payback time. In doing further damage, he shows the loyalty he has always given to the Labour Party – none whatsoever.

Labour supporters are naturally disgusted by all this. They are in despair as to what it means for Labour at the polls. All the Labour leadership candidates (people who are very happy to knife one another as long as they are an unattributed source, but swear eternal loyalty to Gordon Brown if they venture out of the shadows) are briefing, spinning and damaging the government’s standing even further. Any impartial observer will see that New Labour is a nest of vipers. Why vote for them?

Philip Stephens adds in the FT (29.07.08) “Somewhere along the way I must have missed something. I had always thought that governing parties wanted mostly to stay in power. Not so, it seems, in Britain. The consuming topic of conversation in Gordon Brown’s Labour party is how best to lose the next general election.”

Given that most MPs’ main concern is holding onto their seats and careers, and in some cases genuine concern for their electors, why are so many behaving like this? Don’t they see the damage it’s doing?

They are behaving like this because it’s the New Labour way of doing politics. For ten years Tony Blair held sway by maintaining a lie machine at Number Ten that ran unattributable briefings against his colleagues. Gordon Brown, for instance was described as ‘psychologically flawed.’ Everyone knows this rumour came from the PM’s office. Perhaps Brown is psychologically flawed, but is this the best way to build a winning team? Blair didn’t want a winning team and a successful mass party. He wanted to surround himself with talentless nonentities loyal to ‘the project’, yes-men and women who lacked any critical faculty.

The press laps this stuff up. Unattributable gossip and innuendo debase even the shallow pseudo-democratic political process in this country. That’s why Tony Blair was so good at it. The media can run a story up based on absolutely nothing but a few winks and nods. This is journalism on the cheap!

There is another basis for the PM’s power over the PLP. It is the payroll vote. ‘Make him a PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary). That’ll shut him up.’ Then there’s the thuggishness of the Whips. We all know the stories about Whips ringing up backbench MPs at 2 o’clock in the morning and demanding they nominate Brown for leader so there would be no contest. ‘Otherwise you’re finished in the Labour Party’. And we all know the stories are true.

On top of that the machine now controls the selection of the candidates. Anyone of independent spirit is ruthlessly weeded out. As a result the Parliamentary Party is stuffed with timorous careerists. People incapable of running a whelk stall are supposedly running the country.

This is why not enough backbenchers were prepared to nominate John McDonnell to force a leadership contest last year. Now the same people are grizzling because Gordon Brown hasn’t turned out to be the man they thought he was. Well, if we’d had a contest, and Brown had been forced to set out his programme, then the Party would have been given a choice. Out of cowardice, foolish shortsightedness and some plain greed the PLP stole that choice from us. We warned them and we shall not let them forget it.

So not a soul in the country has voted for Gordon Brown. Yet he’s the PM of a land of 60 million people. Surely they can’t just knife Brown and install another as PM without the British people being consulted yet again. Such a procedure smells more of the saga of a Viking vendetta than the practice of a modern Parliamentary democracy. That seems to be what the backstabbers believe they can get away with.

Now Brown has inherited the machine and the methods of Blair. The purpose of the PR machine is to suppress dissent within the Parliamentary Labour Party and ruthlessly implement the New Labour programme. But the machine has begun to stutter and malfunction. Why?

Because the New Labour ‘project’ is now irretrievably up a gum tree. It seems whatever they do they are going to lose the next election.

Simon Jenkins, a Tory who writes in the Guardian (06.08.08), feels entitled to have a laugh. “With the equilibrium of cabinet loyalty thus disturbed, Brown's colleagues are liberated to perform patricide in their or her own peculiar way. Once the assassin has broken cover, this customarily takes the form of showering the victim with support that suggests not only that he badly needs it but that he cannot rely on it for long. When a man so recently anointed is described by his three closest colleagues as "unquestionably the best man to lead us into the next election", the questions raised are, why those three, why say it now, and why the silence from the rest? Uneasy indeed lies the head that wears the crown.”

And the reason for this failure and impending disaster is what New Labour and the vast majority of the PLP have been determined to ignore – politics. Political affiliation in this country remains dominated by social class.

New Labour has an ambivalent attitude to the working class. In public they often deny we exist. ‘We’re all middle class now.’ Actually 68% regard themselves as ‘working class and proud of it,’ and the number’s going up. In practice New Labour exploits the working class politically. They rely on working people identifying the Labour Party as ‘ours’ and ignore our interests as much as possible while in office.

New Labour thinks the working class vote is in the bag. What they need to do is hare after the middle class floating voters. These people are described as ‘aspirational’ in New Labour jargon. In fact aspirational seems to be a pseudonym for greedy.

“Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country. Rather than placing a cap on that success, we should be questioning why it is not available to more people...any progressive party worth its name must enthusiastically advocate empowering people to climb without limits, free from any barrier holding them back.” John Hutton, New Labour minister.

Purely in terms of political strategy, this is half-witted. 74% of us think the gap between rich and poor is too wide, and the other 26% will vote Tory next election as they always do anyway.

What the Crewe by-election, and the local elections, and the Glasgow East by-election showed, is that the working class have had enough of New Labour. They are so disgusted they are not prepared to walk down the road and put a cross on a piece of paper for New Labour. And nobody can blame them for that

The working class is aspirational in a different sense from Hutton’s. Public sector workers ‘aspire’ not to have their real wages cut by ‘their’ government’s wage restraint. All working class families ‘aspire’ to be at least as well off next year as they are this – and for millions it looks like that will not be the case.

New Labour has failed. Their claim was to economic competence, not ideology. In fact they have ended up in an economic mess because they lacked the ideological base to understand what was happening. Talk of socialism was just old-fashioned, old Labour ideological baggage, they claimed. Capitalist crisis was a thing of the past. Gordon Brown had ended the cycle of boom and bust.

New Labour is seen to have failed. They are ideologically bankrupt. All the leading candidates are up to their necks in the shipwreck of New Labour. You can’t put a cigarette paper between their politics. And that is why they are fighting like ferrets in a sack.

We couldn’t care less what happens to New Labour, as long as it disappears. It’s our political enemy. We don’t care about the worthless careers of the useless wretches in the PLP who masquerade as tribunes of the working class. But we do care about the future of the working class in this country. We don’t want the Tories back. We care about the tradition of independent political representation for working people built up over a century. We are angry that the Labour Party is in danger of being destroyed by a bunch of hijackers. They have achieved absolutely nothing. They have squandered a most favourable opportunity.

John McDonnell is right when he proposes, “We should impose a time limit on the debate on whether there is to be a leadership election or not. This would involve saying to all these various contenders that by the Labour Party Conference in September you should declare whether you wish to stand for leader of our party. If you wish to stand then say so and publish the policy manifesto upon which you want to invite support from our members. So that there can be no means by which the factions within the Parliamentary Labour Party can block an election we should drop the rule which a candidate must secure a minimum number of MPs' nominations and thus veto an election.”

If there is a contest, and John is ‘allowed’ to stand, Socialist Appeal will support him four square as leader. That’s based on our politics and his record. If there’s no contest but the grumbling goes on, Labour ranks and trade unionist activists will know who to blame – the New Labour bigwigs. And if there’s a contest, we’ll do something New Labour ideologues will find incomprehensible – we’ll decide whether anyone deserves our support on published policy. But, at the moment, all the main candidates look the same and they all have a miserable record of collaboration with New Labour to overcome. So, stop scratching each other’s eyes out, you right wingers, and come up with some policies. Put up or shut up!

Actually Labour could still win the next election. They can win if they reverse the present policy. But they have to do it now. They can win it they enthuse the working class instead of letting them down. Millions are uneasy about the prospect of a Tory victory. But don’t hold your breath for Gordon Brown, or any of the rest of the New Labour crew to suddenly turn policy around. For Labour to win, the trade unions need to reclaim the Labour Party - and they have to do it soon.