THE LABOUR leader, Mr Tony Blair, yesterday swept aside Mr Arthur Scargill's planned breakaway Socialist Labour Party and defended his vision of a "stake holder" economy in the teeth of criticism from the left and derision from Tories.
He used the defection of the miners' leader to argue his case that the party had changed.
Mr Blair was determined to take a relaxed view of Mr Scargill's party even though it plans to challenge his own candidates at the next election.
He also spelled out his plan for a stakeholder economy which has been dismissed by critics as Just another soundbite.
The new slogan - which he used during his visit to Singapore last week - meant tackling unemployment, improving education standards and helping small businesses get started, he said.
But the Tory party chairman, Dr Brian Mawhinney, warned that behind the warm words, Labour was just the same and there had been no purge of the left, despite Mr Scargill's defection.
The only people sure of a stake in a Blair led Britain would be trade unions, vested interests and socialist councils, he insisted.
The radical Labour MP, Mr Ken Livingstone, flatly denied speculation that Mr Scargill's party launch would spark an exodus amongst left wingers unhappy at Mr Blair's modernisation programme.
"No one else is going to go. Arthur didn't have a single MP, single trade union leader or the leader of a Labour council, just a small group of supporters - quite frankly, a small group of nutters as well in many cases," he told GMTV's Sunday Programme.
"Nobody serious in the Labour party is going to opt out."
Dr Mawhinney insisted there had been no purge of the left from Labour just because the NUM leader had gone.
For Mr Scargill, the last straw was Labour's decision to abandon Clause 4 of its constitution, the historic commitment to wholesale nationalisation.
Yesterday he accused Labour of embracing the "devil" of capitalism and said he would be handing back his party membership card, in the next few days.
Meanwhile, Mr Blair was on a mission to dispel the confusion over his "stakeholder" plans.
"It is a unifying theme. A stakeholder economy is not about giving power to unions or women's co operatives or any of the rest of the rubbish that the Conservatives have been saying this week," he said.
"A stakeholder economy is about empowering people and saying that people have got to be given a stake in the country's economic future."