John McDonnell, the left Labour MP who challenged Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership in 2007, has made an appeal for a distinctive left "slate" within the Labour campaign at the coming general election.

Writing in the Guardian, McDonnell declared: "The only responsible act in the long term interests of our movement would be to offer a real change in political direction by mounting a challenge to the political leadership of the party and letting the members of the party decide but this route would almost certainly be blocked again by MPs failing to nominate. Then the only alternative is Labour MPs making it clear at the next election that they stand on a policy platform of real change as 'change candidates'."

"These would be Labour candidates binding together as a slate, committed within Labour, setting out the policy programme they will be advocating as a group and supporting in Parliament if elected. Only in this way can we demonstrate to the supporters that want to come home to Labour that there is the hope and prospect of change".

The appeal is a variant of an effort initiated by forerunners of the AWL in the 1979 general election. We organised a Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory" [1] - with a conference, a policy platform, affiliations from Constituency Labour MPs and union branches, a newspaper of its own. The SCLV produced its own "vote Labour" leaflets in the election, which also criticised the record of the outgoing Labour government and called for a working-class fight against the incoming government, Tory or Labour. Those leaflets were used officially by some CLPs and unofficially by campaigners in many more.

The SCLV was able to go on, after the election, to be the initiating force in the Rank and File Mobilising Committee for Labour Democracy, the organising centre for the big Labour left upsurge of 1979-82.

It is a sign of the weakness of the Labour Party's grass-roots organisation, after years of stifling by the leadership, that McDonnell's initial proposal comes as something "from above", a proposal for a group of MPs to get together.

But if MPs follow through on that - and win active support from unions who back their left policies - then the initiative "from above" may yet spark some mobilisation "from below".