Labour leader Ed Miliband has tried to play down the rift between his party and the Unite union after a row over the way election candidates were selected in Falkirk.
Writing in the Observer, Mr Miliband said he wanted to "mend ... not end" Labour's relationship with the trade unions as he promised further party reforms to prevent a repeat of a highly-damaging row over candidate selection.
The Labour leader, who is engaged in a bitter dispute with the leader of the party's biggest union donor over claims it sought to rig a ballot, said he wanted to increase the involvement of individual members.
He dismissed earlier suggestions - which allegedly came from Labour sources - that he was looking at ending the historic formal ties with the unions.
Unite general secretary Len McCluskey meanwhile showed no signs of calming the row when he urged Mr Miliband to "step back from the brink of a ruinous division" and stop "playing into the hands" of the Tories.
Mr McCluskey again rejected any suggestions of criminal wrongdoing by Unite after the party called in the police to investigate alleged irregularities in the Falkirk selection.
Len McCluskey remains locked in a row with Ed Miliband The case centres on alleged attempts to swell the Falkirk party with Unite members to ensure the success of its favoured candidate - some apparently signed up for Labour membership without their knowledge.
In the Sunday newspaper article Mr Miliband said events in Falkirk "have betrayed the values of our party" and confirmed the public's worst suspicions that politicians were "in it for themselves".
Reforms to be announced soon would ensure future selections "are always fair, open and transparent", he said, making sure the Falkirk episode "never happens again" and making Labour "more worthy of your trust".
News that Mr Miliband was poised to make a speech addressing those issues had sparked suggestions he would announce major changes to the party's relationship with the unions which helped set it up in 1900.
"Some people will ask whether these changes mean we should break the link with the trade unions," Mr Miliband wrote - citing perceptions that they were increasingly irrelevant, unrepresentative and a "problem" for Labour.
"But the presence of ordinary working people - from shopworkers to nurses, engineers to scientists, construction workers to classroom assistants - in a political party should be its biggest asset.
"To cut these individuals loose would be to make politics more out of touch, not less, more remote from working people.
"What people in both the party and the trade unions understand is that far too few of these working people are actively engaged in our party at the local level as individuals. So we should mend the relationship, not end it."
Unite, Britain's biggest union, donates millions of pounds to Labour The row has plunged Mr Miliband into the most testing challenge of his leadership - with the Conservatives exploiting it to press home claims that he is too "weak" to stand up to the party's significant financial backers.
In a sign of the depth of the breakdown in relations, the two men - who penned separate articles in Sunday newspapers - are said not to have spoken directly since the beginning of June.
Mr Miliband defended the referral to the police and the suspension of two people including Unite's preferred candidate in Falkirk, demanding Unite "accept the results of the inquiry that has taken place and take responsibility for getting its own house in order".
But Mr McCluskey said Mr Miliband's response was a "shambles".
"Labour's attack on Unite is alienating tens of thousands of decent people from the party at a time when we should all be pulling together to take on this rotten Government and its policies causing so much misery," he wrote in the Sunday Mirror.
"So I urge Ed Miliband: step back from the brink of a ruinous division," he said.
Unite was happy to co-operate with any police probe but "reject the idea that any criminal wrongdoing has occurred", Mr McCluskey added, dismissing the internal review - which has not been made public - as a "shoddy fraud".
In the wake of the Falkirk case, Labour axed a scheme that allowed unions to pay the fees of newly-recruited party members for an initial period, conceding that it was open to abuse.
A code of conduct for would-be candidates and seeking selection and restrictions on the sums allowed to be spent on selection campaigns are reported to be among other measures to be announced.
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