Bob Crow was in the Communist Party – as were some of the architects of New Labour. It’s neither here nor there.

What matters is that today Crow is pro-worker and the New Labour elite are not.

I agree with you that accountability is the central issue, and I agree that Blears has lost the plot entirely – but I was focussing not on the essence of the whole discussion but on a particular intervention.

It is very difficult to “make demands of politicians” as they have so many opportunities for avoiding accountability. Where do we start to build real accountability?

As for Bob Crow being a communist, communists were some of the earliest members of the Labour Party…what’s your point? How many thousands of non-sectarian (i.e. affiliated only to Labour) communists will there have to be within the Party before we get some recognition that being a communist is a legitimate political stance?

Seriously, look at some of your political friends on that particular issue!

Bob Crow is not ‘real Labour’, he’s a Communist.

*ducks return flame*

Well, I’m not going to havea go at core voters, but if people are silly enough to vote for people without making demands of them, that’s their responsibility…

Sadly, Crow wasn’t able to give a response to this, but he would have no doubt pointed to the absurdity of what she was saying when the govt is only to happy to nationalise failed banks, retain the bankers who ran them into the ground, and spend billions on clearing up the mess.

What with growing opposition to the plans to sell off Royal Mail to a Dutch company that only delivers twice a week, it’s clear that the lies about public ownership won’t wash with the public, nor with Labour MPs.

Blears recently said there was could be an explanded role for the cooperative sector as the recession bites. All very nice, but she hasn’t considered why cooperative and public forms of ownership are favoured by working people compared to the big banks and multinational corporations that dominate our economy. Or if she has thought about this, it’s occured to her that if she wants to get a cushy non-job at some big company, she’d better keep shtum about the real substance of socialism.

You were saying Monbiot’s complaints may have seemed different had he used a different means of computing how Hazel Blears had voted…I’m saying that even with that different means, Monbiot was being deliberately selective, and it doesn’t reflect on his argument that he was being selective.

He was, after all, making a point about – among other things – the war.

I wasn’t actually trying to defend Hazel Blears – many of the issues that I mentioned which Monbiot and TWFY omitted are ones where I think she is totally wrong (e.g. her votes in favour of restricting immigration or welfare reform are ones which I vehemently disagree with).

Instead, what I was trying to get at was that TWFY offers a very partial way of assessing politicians’ voting records, and that this is a problem when it gets used as the primary or only source of information.

It’s a useful resource for people who think Iraq is the most important thing that the government has done, but not for people who think that crime, immigration, public services or the economy are the most important issues – and it would be a better resource if it gave people a wider range of information.