The police have made up their minds. And now the party bureaucracy has made up its mind too. Unite, the trade union accused of using underhand means to manipulate Labour's parliamentary selection process in Falkirk, has apparently done nothing wrong.

It was revealed last week that there was no malpractice in the Scottish constituency, contrary to the anonymous briefings of leading shadow cabinet figures over the past few months.

Strange then, says loyal aide turned thorn in Miliband's side Tom Watson, that the Falkirk selection will still be taken out of local members' hands.

"It's not our finest hour," Watson told Radio 4's Today programme, adding that Labour leader Ed Miliband would be "very gracious" if he offered an apology to the Unite and Labour members suspended and accused of wrongdoing.

But the mishandling of the Falkirk incident is hardly without precedent.

As the Labour leadership careers towards a defining annual conference that could make or break the long-term future of the party, one thing is apparent.

Despite platitudes and supposed aspiration towards a "new politics," the party's leadership and central bureaucracy still fail to get what being a true people's party actually means.

The startling ineptitude of party management was seen when members received an email in Miliband's name stating: "Change does not come just from a few people at the top."

This, right after announcing top-down reforms without any consultation of the party's democratic structures.

But it's not just Miliband, or the Labour Party, who cannot fail to envisage change coming from anywhere other than the top.

It's a presumption ingrained into our wider political culture, seen not only in the handling of Falkirk but the way it was reported.

With the news channels talking of "union bosses" manoeuvring to "tighten their grip" on the Labour Party, it became clear that for the media the notion of ordinary working people claiming their place in the political process could only be a takeover.

And if there's no alien force to cast as the taker-overs, like the Trotskyist Militant Tendency in the 1980s, politics can only ever be a clash of titan personalities. Right?

It's a convenient narrative because it's one we're so used to.

In case we've become a little rusty with the major events of Labour's past, Radio 4's Westminster Hour has helpfully put on a series of programmes considering the political giants of decades past.

Tony Benn and Roy Jenkins have both had their turns in recent weeks.

Both figures were key players when Labour's members started to assert control in the late '70s and early '80s in demands for mandatory reselection of MPs and giving members as well as parliamentarians a say in the election of the party leader.

The BBC's Jenkins programme discussed the fate of Dick Taverne, the right-wing Labour MP who broke with the party after local activists, dissatisfied with his support for the Common Market and other centre-right policies, voted to ditch him as their candidate at the 1979 election.

Yet rather than discuss the fact that for the first time, rank-and-file party members were not allowing themselves to be taken for granted, Westminster Hour chose to fatally misrepresent the opposition to Taverne, placing it in the context of the growth of Militant.

As with Unite now, when there is a challenge to the comfort zones of the Establishment it can only be pesky extremists failing to listen to the voices of reason.

Miliband has made reviving the party grass roots a key narrative of his leadership - first with the "Refounding Labour" programme, then drafting in Obama "mentor" Arnie Graf for the task of turning Labour into a "relational" party.

Then at last year's conference he stated that we shouldn't be afraid of having proper debate on the conference floor.

Yet he and others fail to recognise that Labour has had a tradition of grass roots activism for some years - and inspiring stories of ordinary party members self-organising for more of a say in the political process.

The victories at Labour Party conference for more grass-roots involvement and party democracy were not won by ambitious titans or wrecking outsiders.

Activists in the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, which led the charge, were instead committed democratic socialists from a wide range of backgrounds, but all united by a lack of political ambition for themselves.

Isn't that exactly what a mass movement party should be? A healthy politics is surely one whose players are not limited to climbers of the greasy pole.

But rather than building on this tradition the party is on the verge of throwing away the very thing that makes it possible - the union link, without which Labour would not be a movement but just a fan-club like the Lib Dems or the US Democrats.

Last year Labour highlighted the need to promote working-class candidates. But without the support for such candidates from trade unions, parliamentary selections will become even more of a free-for-all where candidates supported by business lobbies such as David Sainsbury's Progress win the day.

In Brighton next week, the platitudes to openness and debate will continue - but the party's command and control operation is still in full swing.

In a final insult two parliamentary whips, Heidi Alexander and Tom Blenkinsop, have been put up for election to the conference arrangements committee, the body that has ruled out so many debates on key issues at recent conferences.

Whether they succeed against the left's Katy Clark and Pete Willsman is another matter.

The party's machine may still be powerful, but rank-and-file activists are fast realising that if there's any chance of a grass-roots revival, it won't come from above.

Conrad Landin is a freelance journalist and associate editor of Left Futures (leftfutures.org)