EVEN after Crewe, it might not be too late to change course, but the time is slipping away fast.

Like, I imagine, many a Star reader, I had my differences with Gwyneth Dunwoody. But she was recognisably part of Labour, especially on the great issue of public transport, which she championed. And Crewe is quintessentially a Labour town.

So the second May meltdown at the polls on Thursday was truly something to behold. It’s not just the fact and scale of Labour’s defeat, it’s the manner of it too.

The xenophobic campaign run by Labour’s West Midlands election supremo should turn the stomach of every decent socialist and trade unionist. Nothing could capture the gap between the concerns and efforts of trade union activists, often paying money to the Labour Party, and those who are piloting the party to destruction.

There are tens of thousands of working class activists who are preoccupied with winning proper pay and working conditions for migrant workers, attempting to recruit them into the unions, which is the best way to prevent them being used as a cheap reserve army of labour to undercut the existing workforce.

They are joined by large numbers of black and ethnic minority community activists in trying to turn the tide of racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia, whipped up by sections of the media in a dance of death with the most venal politicians and, finally, bearing the ugly fruit of the fascist British National Party making further gains in elections, not least in London.

And what do the poor bloody infantry in the field find?

It’s bad enough that their generals have provided abandoned terrain to the enemy by evacuating the political space of redistribution in favour of working people. To make matters worse, they’ve started shelling their own troops with cluster bombs of bigotry.

The other aspect of Labour’s campaign in Crewe was ostensibly a class-based attack on the privileged Tory candidate. This was already being held up, not least by recrudescent Blairites, as the chief culprit for the defeat, even before it happened.

But the problem with the “Tory toff” line was not that Labour pursued it, but that it did so half-heartedly, in a juvenile style worthy of a minor public school debating society and, crucially, with no sense of authenticity at all.

How could it? New Labour made its name by not only abandoning class politics but by ostentatiously embracing the other side.

For anyone with a reasonable interest in politics, the image of the top-hatted Tory toff brings up one memory above all from recent history - the Tories themselves pointing out the top-drawer background of Shaun Woodward, the defector to new Labour who was handed a plum seat not so far from Crewe, in St Helens.

The conclusions that the Labour hierarchy are likely to draw from Crewe were already being trailed in the pre-mortem. There is going to be a lurch to more authoritarian themes.

But the debate is not delimited by Downing Street - that’s if Brown is still operating from there and has not decamped round the corner to the bunker of the Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms.

There are many on the broad left of the movement who are finding an audience for a radically different set of policies. Some of us are seeking to build primarily outside the Labour Party’s enervated structures, some within.

But we are united in pursuing essentially the same policies.

I support and applaud John McDonnell’s recent 10-point set of demands. It is not a sectarian point, indeed precisely the opposite, to say that all of them are policies of my own party, Respect.

John and I are united in trying to popularise them and, through enlisting the support of socialist economists and other experts, fleshing out the alternatives that we need in the face of recession and the failure of neoliberalism.

The bigger the echo for these policies inside the Labour Party, the better for all of us outside.

But the converse is also true. The more success, at the polls and elsewhere, for those of us pursuing the same policies, but outside the Labour Party, the better for those brave souls inside who are trying to prevent a further lurch right - right over the precipice.

The London elections, while a defeat for the left, did prefigure the kind of co-operation between Respect and dissenting figures in the Labour Party which I, for one, am determined to foster further, including as many others on the left as possible.

It’s going to be vital on every front, but above all in resisting the attempts by the BNP to consolidate on their electoral advances.

In this, there can be no room for sectarian narrow-mindedness. Those who spent almost all their time attacking Ken Livingstone from the left, even with grains of truth exaggerated beyond reason, must, in their heart of hearts, know that the poorest people, the most vulnerable people, immigrant people are worse off with the Tories in power in City Hall.

Livingstone was the one asset that Brown’s Labour Party could point to. Ken’s dilemma was that there was no-one in the party that he could go on a walkabout with in the hope of them lifting his vote rather than the other way round.

It is not the left’s fault if Brown steers the Labour Party to electoral disaster. It will be our fault, however, if we do not seek to co-operate to try to avoid that and, at the same time, draw together a broader left which can rally resistance, whoever is in government.