Labour's Collateral Damage?

Anyone with any doubts about the madness of Ed Miliband's proposal to end the collective affiliation to the Labour Party of almost 3 million trade unionists will surely have had them dispelled by yesterday's Sunday Telegraph report that the Labour Party has secured £2.4 million in loans from the Co-operative Bank 'using future income from union affiliation fees as collateral'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10471476/Labour-Party-cashed-in-on-cheap-loans-from-Co-op.html

According to Steve Richards writing in today's Guardian, the solution to Labour's funding crisis will be the introduction of state funding - so much for the principle of Labour only being funded by individuals who opt in to financially support the party!
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/24/politics-should-be-state-funded

That the vile opportunism of the Liberal Democrats - after 5 years of supporting austerity measures which have ruined millions of lives and attacks on workers' rights - should be rewarded with their much coveted life support machine of state funding by a future Labour led government would be a grotesque perversion of politics. It would mark the end of the labour movement as we know it.

As Labour's special conference on 1 March 2014 draws closer, the economic, moral and political case for dropping Miliband's ill thought out attack on the union labour link has become overwhelming.