RUM stuff from East Lancashire's Left-wing Euro MP, Michael Hindley...Elect a New Labour government and light the touch paper for a big-bang bust-up that gives birth to a breakaway, truly socialist party for the working class.

Reading Mr Hindley's mind is no easy task - it having gone, in its time, from being charmed by Marxism in action behind the Iron Curtain to positive support now for the elitism of the grammar school system.

But it does seem that this is his extrapolation of things to come if Tony Blair wins.

However, we think it is how else it might be read that will create, if not a storm, then more than a niggle or two among Labour's campaign leaders and the Blairite brethren.

For might not Mr Hindley's message - delivered in an article in a left-wing publication - be interpreted by the disenchanted Tories, the middle-class moderates and all the others whom New Labour has set out to woo with its displays of moderation and ditching of old-style socialist canons as: "Vote Labour for the return of the Left"?

Some boost it is, then, that Mr Hindley's prediction of a red revolt gives to his party's drive to turn its back on the old Left and the ideologies that left it trailing as losers in four successive elections. Intriguingly, the MEP does not say whether this perceived split, stemming from "when (and it is 'when,' not 'if') Blair lets down the aspirations of Labour's natural supporters after the election," will be a good or bad thing or whether it is desirable or otherwise.

But he pledges to work for Labour at the next election and says what happens when it gets in power "will be very interesting."

Nonetheless, his predictions have upset some of the Labour's MPs on his East Lancashire home ground. And if, as we have done with his words, we are to interpret their response, it sounds, we think, mightily like: "With friends like this, who needs enemies?"

Still, perhaps, Mr Hindley's prediction of a Left wing schism in the offing - and the harm that suggestion arguably does to New Labour's bid for votes - need to be looked at from the viewpoint that it has already come true. For has he forgotten the establishment of Mr Arthur Scargill's breakaway Socialist Labour Party?

It is a pity if he has - since, the way he is going, we think that Mr Hindley might be asked to join it...if not by Arthur, then one day by his constituency party and the big-wigs at Walworth Road who may think he is already going beyond the fringe.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.